All posts tagged Arnold Böcklin

The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg (1907)

Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote four ‘chamber’ plays in 1907. To emphasise their affinity with music and that they were a cycle on related themes he gave each one an opus number. The Ghost Sonata is Opus 3. Strindberg later wrote that the four pieces taken together made up ‘his last sonatas’ on the analogy of a composer like Beethoven. Themes and ideas from one play were picked up and modulated in others. Some critics have made direct analogies to sonata form, describing the first of the play’s three scenes as a busy allegro, followed by scene 2 as a largo punctuated by long silences, the third and final scene being an andante, followed by the coda of the Student’s final speech.

The Ghost Sonata and its three cousins were written after another hiatus in Strindberg’s play-writing (the first one 1892 to 1898; this one 1902 to 1906).

Chamber pieces were very much a la mode. Max Reinhardt had just opened the Kammerspiele in Berlin. Strindberg was approached to write smaller pieces by actor and impresario August Falk who created a small theatre seating 161 guests in Stockholm, and named the Intimate Theatre, which for the 3 years of its existence became a centre of theatrical innovation.

Translator and editor of the Oxford University Press edition, Michael Robinson, quotes passages from Strindberg’s letters explaining what a chamber theatre was. The bit that caught my eye says, ‘No predetermined form is to restrict the author, for the motif determines the form. Consequently, freedom in treatment restricted only by the unity of the ideas and the feeling for style’ (quote Introduction page xxxi).

The Ghost Sonata is surprising from the start, the initial surprise being that it’s set outside. If any playwright suited grim claustrophobic interiors it’s Strindberg but this one is set outside a modern (in 1900) block of flats. Also, for the first time it doesn’t have a small cast (The Father: 6, Miss Julie: 3, Dance of Death: 3) but a relatively large one of 16. Mind you, they are all given generic type names (the Old Man, the Student, the Milkmaid and so on).

But all this is trivial compared with what follows. Although it has a realistic enough setting, the relations between all these people are a dreamlike fantasia.

The Ghost Sonata is in three scenes, each of which (rather inevitably) contains a death. Having read 13 plays by Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg I wonder if these Great Playwrights knew how to write a play which doesn’t end in a death of one sort or another (murder, suicide, accident).

Is The Ghost Sonata a modernist version of a fairy tale? The Old Man and the Student both explicitly compare what’s going on to a fairy tale. On this reading a heroic young Student, born on a Sunday and therefore in folklore able to see more clearly than other people, is introduced into an expensive modern house which from the outside he regards as paradise, through the intervention of an all-powerful fairy godfather (the Old Man, also named Hummel) and here encounters the fair damsel he had glimpsed from the street and who languishes in thrall to a vampire-like Cook.

True up to a point but, like the musical analogy, this interpretation leaves out all the weird details and the unaccountable reversals. The young damsel he’s meant to rescue fades away and dies. The fairy godfather who smuggled him in and, at many points of Scene 1 is compared to the Devil or Mephistopheles, half way through Scene 2 his powers desert him and he too is killed.

Or you could summarise The Ghost Sonata as: an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair named Hummel overhears a thirsty Student named Arkenholz asking what appears to be thin air for a drink. (The Student thinks he is asking a Milkmaid for a drink. Why can no one else see her but him?). Anyway, this Hummel enlists the Student to enter a haunted house on a beautiful Sunday morning and rescue a young woman trapped inside…

But the characters are uncanny and unpredictable. Inexplicable things keep happening. At the formal dinner which is the centrepiece of Scene 2 the Old Man unmasks everyone present, pointing out that they’re hypocrites with false identities. And yet somehow it’s he, the unmasker, who meets his death. Not violently. He just shrinks and fades away.

What are we to make of the Mummy who, the first time we’re shown into her room talks and behaves like a parrot and yet slowly gains ascendency over the Old Man until it is he who starts talking parrot style.

There is much talk of this world being a hell or purgatory in which nobody is who they seem, in which nobody is responsible for their actions. The student calls it:

STUDENT: This world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death, this world of endless change, disappointment and pain…

Michael Robinson associates this with Strindberg’s late conversion to the teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg who thought the visible world was a purgatorial preparation for a better one after death. But Strindberg characters talked like this before he’d read Swedenborg (and in fact so do Ibsen’s characters). It seems to have been standard Scandi noir, the same Scandi attitude that inspired Edvard Munch to his cheery paintings.

In any case, none of these ‘rational’ explanations account for the Old Man standing up in his wheelchair addressing a crowd of beggars, for the vampire cook, for the Colonel who is an impostor and only held together by his corset, or for the Mummy who starts out talking like a parrot, who hides herself away from the room which contains a statue of her as a nubile young woman, and who ends up stopping time itself!

At the end of the play the entire room, the ‘hyacinth room’ where the Student meets his admired beloved, disappears – presumably this just means the lights are dimmed right down to darkness – and replaced by a large copy of painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous and super-symbolist painting, The Isle of the Dead.

The Ghost Sonata lacks the relatable angst of ‘The Father’, ‘Miss Julie’ or ‘A Dance of Death’ and yet in many ways, because of the teasing transformations, the general absurdity and uncanny, dreamlike transformations, I think I enjoyed reading it the most.

The Ghost Sonata anticipates surreal plays and writings – the entire dream ethos of surrealism– and foreshadows the theatre of the absurd which was to become a dominant force in mid-twentieth century theatre.

Credit

I read ‘The Ghost Sonata‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

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by Simon on October 21, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Sweden, Theatre, Translation
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Posted by Simon on October 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/the-ghost-sonata-august-strindberg/

Notes on symbolism and decadence

The coincidence of reading some classics of French symbolism and decadence, followed by the complete works of Oscar Wilde, and visiting Tate Modern’s Expressionist exhibition, made me try to sort out my understanding of these different movements, whose overlap confused even their own practitioners at the time. What I’m trying to untangle is the way that symbolism and the decadence frequently overlap, merge, are hard to tell apart, sometimes both occurring in the same stories or paintings.

Symbolism

Symbolist painting flourished in north European countries with a strong tradition of Catholicism which had been traumatised by industrialisation and the rise of a thrusting philistine bourgeoisie (France and Belgium). It speaks to a late-nineteenth century sense of the loss of Catholic faith and values in a newly modernised society. It is nostalgic for those values, for the deep aspects of human existence which  symbolist writers and artists felt had been lost in the hurly-burly of modern urban life.

Primordial truths

The spokesman for the symbolists, Jean Moréas, wrote that symbolists selected and depicted symbols in order to evoke ‘esoteric primordial truths’ which the contemporary movements of realism, naturalism, impressionism and so on could not reach, truths (about ‘the Ideal’, the esoteric, the occult, about ‘archetypal meanings’) which cannot, in fact, be uttered or expressed using normal language or traditional art.

But although symbolist writers and artists spoke about these symbols as if there was a wide range of them and some symbolists did create image systems which were personal, private, obscure and pregnant with meaning – in practice these ‘deep meanings’ tended to gravitate around one subject – death.

The Death of the Grave Digger by Carlos Schwabe (1895)

Death

Death is the most commonly depicted subject in symbolist paintings, closely followed by related subjects such as the devil, sin, heaven and hell – Christian themes reversioned. Two classic symbolist plays – Axël by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1890) and Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande (1892) – are on the classic subject of Doomed Love, a classic subject of much literature but given a particularly funereal, static and morbid treatment.

Sex

And, of course, sex. It was the era of the femme fatale, tempting men to their doom etc, as painted by artists such as Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Stuck, Gustave Moreau. This mixture of sexual allure and mortal menace was epitomised by the ubiquitous figure of Salomé (story by Gustave Flaubert [1877], play by Wilde [1891], opera by Richard Strauss [1905]) – both Eve and Salomé, of course, being Biblical-Christian figures.

Sin by Franz von Stuck (1893) The Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Anyway, maybe the central marker of the symbolist movement is that it accepts nature, but selects from nature aspects, images, objects which it then supercharges with significance. Symbolism uses natural imagery but instead of trying to depict it as you see it (as the impressionists did) use it ‘as a means to elevate the viewer to a plane higher than the banal reality of nature itself.’

In style, symbolist paintings are (generally) realistic, often using the highly finished techniques of academic Salon art but to depict symbolic i.e. non-naturalistic situations. OK, you can immediately think of lots of painters this is not true of, such as the archetypal symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, but nonetheless you can see that he is totally figurative in intention and a lot of the symbolists were very traditional in technique, sometimes impressively so.

Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1880)

The Decadence

The decadence is superficially very similar to symbolism and can be difficult to disentangle, with its parallel interest in sensual excess and death but, for a start, it is older than symbolism. French poet Charles Baudelaire referred to himself as decadent in the 1857 edition of his influential poetry collection, ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, whereas the symbolists weren’t given their name till Jean Moréas wrote an article about them 30 years later, in 1886 – an article expressly designed to do what I’m trying to do now, clear up the confusion between symbolism and decadence.

(In fact it was only around the same time that the Decadent movement really became a movement –only in 1884 that Joris-Karl Huysmans published what came to be thought of as the ultimate decadent text, his novel Against Nature, in which he lists contemporary poets who he considered ‘decadents’. In the same year critic Maurice Barrès referred to a particular group of writers as Decadents. And it was only in 1886 – same years as Moréas’s article – that Anatole Baju founded the magazine ‘Le Décadent’ in an effort to organize the Decadent movement in a formal way.)

To start with I thought the fundamental difference between the two movements is that whereas symbolism accepts nature in order to select aspects of it to be regarded as ‘symbols’ of higher meanings, decadence rejects nature in preference for the artificial.

The protagonist of Huysmans’s decadent novel, Jean Des Esseintes, locks himself away from the world and embarks on a series of experiments to create completely artificial sounds, smells and sensations. Several times Des Esseintes is given speeches declaring that nature is clapped out, exhausted, and man’s unique gift is to be able to go beyond nature and create artificial objects which are more beautiful than anything in nature.

Artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes…with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.
(À rebours, chapter 2, Penguin Classics translation by Robert Baldick)

This (amusingly ironic) approach was lifted wholesale by Oscar Wilde who, in essays and in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, repeats the basic premise that the highest aim of the human imagination (well, the imaginations of the kind of sensitive exquisites he is concerned with championing) is to create an art which transcends a nature which is stale and boring. As in this famous passage from his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying:

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.

Higher meanings (symbolism) or no meaning (decadence)

Actually, as I’ve been researching and writing this note, I’ve realised there’s another key distinction between the two movements, maybe a deeper one than their attitude to nature (accept but supersede versus completely reject): and this is that symbolism believes there are higher or deeper meanings, the decadence thinks there aren’t.

Both movements believe the special, the chosen, the elect, the aesthetes etc are capable of subtler feelings, more complex emotions and finer perceptions than the ghastly herd, which is why their rhetorics so often overlap on this subject, in their descriptions of the psychology of aesthetic pleasure.

Both movements also share, as the previous sentence suggests, the assumption of elitism, that these secrets and meanings (symbolism) and finer sensations and perceptions (decadence) are limited to The Few and completely invisible to the vulgar herd and especially the ghastly philistines of the bourgeoisie.

But whereas the symbolists believe these finer perceptions point to deeper meanings and ‘truths  inherent in the universe (God and heaven and so on), the decadents believe there are no ‘truths’ at all, except the ones which artists and writers create.

For symbolists the symbol and the work are tools or channels towards deeper meanings (although, as noted at the start, these truths have a disappointing habit of turning out to be a kind of watered-down Catholicism, stock stereotyped subjects taken from conventional religion – God, transcendence, sin, redemption and so on. But for decadents, the work is an end in itself. ‘ If there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment.’

In A rebours Des Esseintes revels in the new scents and mixtures of liqueurs, in new combinations of precious jewels, for their own sake. They don’t point towards any deeper values shimmering behind veil or hidden aspects of ‘the Ideal’. The aesthetic experience is an end in itself, needing no justification. Exquisiteness is its own reward.

And this is very much the attitude you meet in Oscar Wilde. In essays like The Soul of Man Under Socialism (which is really a hymn of praise to Wildean individualism) he depicts the true artist as creating art out of his own personality, regardless of the world in front of him. And in The Critic as Artist, he goes one step further by provocatively asserting the independence of The Critic to write works which can draw their inspiration from the second rate art, or from beyond art altogether, or from nothing at all, just the expression of his own highly developed sensibility.

The highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.

Catholicism

Catholic Christianity is always hovering in the background – Catholic because it is the full-blooded, gold and incense and ritual wing of Christianity, as opposed to the bloodless, colourless moralising of Protestantism.

Both symbolism and the Decadence are based on a kind of disappointed Catholic faith, so angry with its disillusion that it turns to childish debaucheries and blasphemies in order to spite its disappointing parent, but permanently unable to escape its parent’s apron strings.

Catholicism colours the classic symbolist play, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël whose first act is set in a convent. Huysmans’ classic decadent novel, Against Nature, contains a whole chapter reviewing Catholic literature, as well as references to Catholic paintings and music, the book ends, unexpectedly, with its protagonist’s unironic prayer to God. In the novels Huysmans wrote after ‘Against Nature’, the lead character, Durtal, embarks on a long pilgrimage back to orthodox Catholic belief, reflecting Huysmans’ own journey back to the mothership.

Aubrey Beardsley, the classic illustrator of the decadence in England, converted to Catholicism in March 1897 whereupon he asked his publisher to destroy his trangressive and erotic prints (which his publisher, happily for us, refused to do) before dying of tuberculosis in March 1898.

On his release from prison (19 May 1897) Oscar Wilde wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat (which was turned down) and didn’t stop trying to convert until he was finally accepted into the Catholic church on his deathbed (30 November 1900).

Summary

Similarities

Both movements overlapped in being aristocratic and elitist, the symbolists creating secret movements of initiatives and adepts, the decadents more literally depicting society’s elites – aristocrats – as, for example, in all of Oscar Wilde’s plays and his novel.

Both movements gravitated towards the same subjects, namely death and transgressive depictions of sex and sensuality – although the decadents tended to be more literal-mindedly sensual whereas much symbolist art is static and contemplative, a medieval knight contemplating a gravestone etc.

In their fondness for images of death, decay or depraved sexuality, both movements partook of what came to be called the fin-de-siecle mood of ennui, cynicism and pessimism, a tendency towards dark and morbid subjects.

Differences

As to the differences between the movements:

The symbolists 1) depicted nature but in order to make aspects of it symbolical i.e. pointing towards the occult, the Ideal. 2) For them, symbols were channels to deeper meanings which could only be depicted obliquely.

The decadents 1) rejected nature and pursued the artificial, just as 2) they rejected the notion of deeper or higher meanings, the Ideal etc.

The symbolists emphasised dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated precious, ornamented or hermetic styles, which explains why they sometimes invoke the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’, a separate movement from earlier in the century.

References

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by Simon on September 13, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/13/symbolism-and-decadence/

The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard (1966)

It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown…
(The Crystal World, page 169)

This is a novel of staggering, visionary brilliance, whose otherworldly vividness is matched only by the eerily detached and psychological flatness of all the human characters.

Ballard’s third canonical novel (he suppressed his first effort, The Wind From Nowhere) is another disaster scenario which slowly unfolds, creating an ’emergency zone’ where ordinary or rational notions of time and order and comprehensible behaviour slowly collapse.

The protagonist is another fictional doctor (Dr Kerans in The Drowned World, Dr Ransom in The Drought, Dr Edward Sanders in this one) who finds himself drawn towards the danger zone, becoming briefly entangled with an eligible young woman, but far more attracted to the area of collapse because he subconsciously knows it will release him from reason, from social relations, from his past.

And so he becomes another Ballard protagonist on a journey towards the area of decay, to an abandoned city strewn with derelict cars, empty hotels, eerie shopwindow mannequins and always, everywhere, the drained swimming pools and dried-up fountains.

And it’s another Ballard novel which references a haunting painting which in many ways seems to have been its inspiration – Isle of the Dead by the Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin for this novel, as Yves Tanguy’s painting Jours de Lenteur (1937) was a visual spur for The Drought.

Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1880)

Part one: The Equinox

Dr Edward Sanders is 40. For fifteen years he has been working in Africa, for the past ten at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital in the Cameroon. He has been having an affair with the wife of one of his colleagues, a microbiologist named Max Clair, the wife’s name being Suzanne Clair.

Three months ago the Clairs had, without explanation, abruptly quit the leper hospital, and gone to the town of Mont Royal, close to some jewel-mining operations. Mont Royal is upriver of the coastal town of Port Matarre. Then Sanders receives a letter from Suzanne telling him the forest is ‘full of jewels’. For obscure reasons, uncertain (like most Ballard protagonists) of his own motivation, Sanders takes a month’s leave from the hospital to go and see the Clairs.

The novel opens as the steamer Sanders is travelling on from Libreville (the modern-day capital city of Gabon) arrives at Port Matarre. On board he has struck up relations with two typically queer, aloof and puzzling characters, the Catholic priest Father Balthus, and a short intense man he is forced to share a cabin with, Ventress. He steps ashore on the day of the spring equinox – darkness and light are perfectly balanced.

Sanders quickly discovers something strange is going on. There are no river steamers up to Mont Royal. The railway is closed. The roads are closed. The telegraph is down. He visits the military chief of the area who tells him that news is being… rationed.

He notices the sky is eerily dark and the jungle across the river and surrounding the town has a sombre, colourless feel about it.

Then Sanders gets caught up in a James Bond-style shootout down at the native harbour. At the centre of it is Ventress carrying a suitcase he’s at great pains to protect from a gang of machete- and gun-toting thugs seemingly under the command of a tall blonde-haired man who directs operations from a cruiser which steers up into the docks. Ventress escapes, a dazed Sanders staggers back to his hotel.

After just a few days in town Sanders has picked up a characteristically featureless Ballardian woman, the journalist Louise Peret, who has got wind of something happening up-country and knows there’s a story in it. Down at the docks, before the fight kicked off, she had identified a body the locals were just pulling from the river. It was the assistant to an American journalist who’d gone up country before her.

The thing is – the dead man’s arm was encased in a crystalline sheath which glittered and emitted a strange light. Earlier in the day, in the local market, Sanders had come across a trader who opened a secret cache of flowers, each of which was encased in a brilliant, multi-faceted crystal, freezing cold to the touch.

The night before Sanders had looked up into the sky and seen an extraordinarily bright white object moving over the night sky. He realised it is the telecoms satellite Echo but…shining with an eerie efflorescence as if… encased in jewels...

And so, the secret of the novel leaks out. Somewhere close to Mont Royal the jungle is turning to crystal. As the story progresses, other characters tell him the same process is being reported in the Florida Everglades and the Pripet Marshes of Russia. I.e. across the world.

Sanders strikes a deal with a local, one Captain Aragon, who takes him in his river cruiser up the African river into the heart of… crystals. The comparisons with Conrad’s most famous novel are too obvious to make. After a few days’ vividly described chuntering up the jungley river they come to a pontoon blocking their way and a busy army base. Aragon docks the ship and Sanders makes himself known to the officer in charge, one Captain Radek, himself a doctor (p.63).

Sanders is surprised to see none other than Ventress coming ashore from another boat which has docked at the military base. What’s he doing here? Radek allows Sanders to join an ‘inspection party’ which is proceeding up the river towards Mont Royal. As you might expect, they soon come to stretches where the forest has been turned into crystals whose facets flash light.

Then they arrive at the abandoned city of Mont Royal (like the abandoned London of The Drowned World, the abandoned Mount Royal in The Drought). They dock and the inspection party splits up into groups of soldiers, each led by an NCO. Sanders wanders through the characteristic Ballardian landscape of the abandoned city, cars strewn around the roads, shops eerily deserted and drained swimming pools and empty fountains.

They arrive right at the edge of the crystal zone, and watch an army helicopter trying to fly over it, whose rotors suddenly start crystallising, causing it to crash.

Sanders watches fascinated as an eddy of light passes out of the forest and towards him, crystallising the vegetation all around him, including a nearby car, while his own clothes begin to grow frostings and rimes of crystal, and suddenly a man is yelling at him from the window of a nearby mansion.

The ‘scientific’ explanation

Part two opens with a pretty crude bit of explication. Ballard includes an excerpt from a letter supposedly written by Sanders to the head of the leper hospital, Dr Paul Derain, which gives a comprehensive explanation for the crystallising phenomenon (rather as the ‘scientific’ explanation for both the drought and the drowned world are delayed until we’re well into the story).

It doesn’t make complete sense but the crucial fact is the explanation is based on TIME.

The discovery of anti-matter posits the existence of anti-time. We suspect that anti-matter and matter destroy each other continuously throughout the universe. Well, in the same way, time must be meeting anti-time and annihilating itself. And as time is destroyed, the universe’s total quotient of time decreases so that – like a super-saturated solution – the remaining atoms and molecules are crystallising out ‘in an attempt to secure their foot-hold upon existence’ (p.85).

In the letter Sanders explains that the weird effects he sees around him are connected to events in distant star systems, which astronomers have been observing, of entire systems like the island galaxy M31 becoming crystal, appearing to double in size and brilliancy. Events here in the forests of Africa are intimately linked with disturbances around the universe. (In fact the letter includes a reference to the Everglades in Florida which have, by the time he writes the letter, become almost entirely crystallised with the result that some three million Americans have had to flee their homes.)

Part two: The Illuminated Man

Then the narrative reverts the ‘present’ – in fact right back to the cliffhanger moment which part one ended on – Sanders on the verge of the crystallising zone when he hears someone shout his name from a nearby mansion. He runs across the crystallising grass to find Ventress with a shotgun, hiding behind a window. The reason becomes clear when someone takes a shot at them through the window and then Sanders, venturing downstairs is attacked by the same mulatto and crew of thugs who he’d saved Ventress from back in the fight at the native docks in part one.

Ventress appears to be locked in a feud with the mine-owner Thorensen. Why? He doesn’t explain, continuing to speak in what Sanders describes as ‘his ambiguous and disjointed way’ – so Sanders can’t guess why they appear to be ready to kill each other. (All this reminds me of the inexplicable feud between Whitman and Jonas in The Drought – as if there are people who just want to kill each other, sometimes for reasons they can’t even remember.)

After the shootout in the mansion, Ventress and Sanders venture out into the open and make their way along the half-crystallised river. Then they come across the wreckage of the crashed helicopter, ‘the four twisted blades veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly’ (p.96). Under the wreckage is an almost entirely crystallised body, it is Radek, the army doctor who greeted Sanders. The latter tears him free from his crystal sheaths and then ties his body to a handy broken tree trunk with his belt and gently pushes it into the river to send downstream and hopefully out of harm’s way.

Then Sanders and Ventress come to an isolated summer house, covered in crystals like a frosted wedding cake. As they approach there are shots, confusion, Ventress is trapped in a net by Thorensen’s men, and a huge Negro approaches with a panga to finish him off, but the surface of the frozen river cracks and gives way under his weight and while he’s extricating himself, Ventress wriggles free and escapes.

Now Sanders is with Thorensen who slowly realises who he is and reluctantly takes him through into the summer house where he is introduced to Serena. Now we learn that Serena is the hapless young who Ventress bullied her poor colonialist parents into letting him marry, then took off to a remote cabin in the forest. Ventress treated her appallingly and Thorensen stole her away whereupon Ventress went mad and has spent six months in an asylum. Now he has returned to take his revenge and steal back his child bride.

So that’s the basis of Ventress and Thorensen’s endless feud. Sanders looks down at Serena lying pale and frail in bed. She’s obviously very ill. Thorensen gives her some of the gems he picked up after the fight at the white mansion. Now Sanders witnesses something amazing which is that the jewels retard the crystallising effects. It is as if concealed in their hears they have the concentrated time which can reverse the time sickness which is causing the crystallisation.

Sanders says he must get back to Port Matarre. Thorensen says he’ll send him there with two of his African trackers. So off they set but after a while, Sanders realises they’re going round in circles. In fact Thorensen is using him as bait to lure Ventress out of hiding just as Ventress used him as bait at the mansion.

The guides disappear leaving Sanders on his own but moments later he hears a firefight in the jungle and goes back to find one of the blacks dying of gunshot wounds. Terrified by all this, Sanders takes off back in the direction of the river. it is heavily crystallised but he hopes to walk along the hard surface back towards the town.

Suddenly he sees a man carrying a wooden burden and hopes it is a soldier foraging for wood but on getting closer is horrified to see that it is Radek who he tried to save. Now most of the crystals have melted in the fast-flowing river Sanders realises that when he tore Radek from from the crystallised ground he ripped half his chest and face off! The man is a bleeding wreck of a man who can’t see and can barely talk but he has just enough energy to bed Sanders – Take me… back. Take me back!’ Sanders dodges the weaving figure and runs for the river, diving into its now free-flowing shallows.

A few hours later he emerges from the river where the road leads to a white building, the Bourbon Hotel. He is back in civilisation. Soldiers greet him and radio base. Captain Aragon turns up and tells him Louise Peret is waiting for him. Not only that but Mr and Mrs Clair – his friend and the friend’s wife who he was having an affair with – are at the hotel, too.

Sanders is greeted by Max, has a shower, changes into new clothes (admittedly the washed clothes of a man who died in the crystal forest) and has civilised drinks with Max and Suzanne. When they discuss Sanders’s adventures in the forest it becomes clear that Suzanne is entranced by the forest and its world of brilliantly-coloured jewelled facets.

Max tactfully beats a retreat (by implication, knowing his wife and best friend have had an affair) and it is only when he’s let alone with her that Sanders realises that Suzanne is showing the first symptoms of leprosy! So that’s why she and Max made such a sudden exit from the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. And there was he thinking it was him and their affair. Wrong again.

Next morning Sanders is bewildered to see that, although Max and Suzanne are overseeing a fairly modern hospital with plenty of resources, the trees and undergrowth are populated by shadowy groups of native lepers. They are refugees from a Catholic leprosie where the priest did little more than pray for them, and are too frightened to come into the modern hospital.

Then Sanders ‘girlfriend’, the beautiful slender journalist Mlle Louise Peret turns up, a breath of fresh air compared to a) the complicated psychodrama playing out around Suzanne and b) the macabre figures of the black lepers hiding in the undergrowth. He takes her to the bungalow the Clairs have lent him, and they make love.

Afterwards, Sanders expands on the ideas of darkness and light, speculating that these polar opposites are coming into sharper relief as time drains away from the world and Louise and he play spot the archetype: she (Louise) is light to Suzanne the dark lady. Thorense and Ventress’s endless feud is somehow binary. Father Balthus, is he darkness and who is his opposite? Sanders? Louise reveals that an army launch is going back up the river and she wants to be on it.

That evening he goes for dinner with Max and Suzanne but instead of discreetly absenting himself afterwards, Max insists on getting out a chessboard and playing a game, while Suzanne retires. An hour or so later the game ends and Sanders walks round the grounds. He sees the outline of the white hotel in the moonlight. He catches a glimpse of Suzanne and makes his way there. He catches up with her and she takes him into the ruined corridors of the abandoned building and up to a second floor room which she has made a kind if refuge.

Here on the bed Sanders makes love to his leprous mistress. The binary black and white imagery is laid on with a trowel. In the afternoon the chalet room was filled with blazing sunlight so he and Louise had to pull down a blind to make love. Now here in the ruined white hotel in the black night he makes love to his dark lady by wan moonlight. They talk. She is suddenly super-sensitive about her disease. She pulls her nightgown around her and before he can stop her runs out the room and down the abandoned corridors

Later that night, back in his chalet, Sanders is awoken by cars being loaded up and searchlights. Max bangs on his door asking if Suzanne is with him. Sanders disclaims all knowledge. Max is almost crying: Suzanne has run off, presumably into the forest. He goes off in search. Sanders takes a group of black servants with him to the Bourbon Hotel but they quickly settle down for a smoke.

Leaving them, Sanders walks back along the road into the abandoned Mont Royal. The crystallising process is much further advanced, the crystals hang from streetlights an overhead wires. Sanders comes across a smashed-in jewellers shop and realises that where the jewels lie on the pavement, the crystals don’t work. It is as if deep within them the jewels contain concentrated time, as well as light, which fights off the time disease of the crystals. Tired, Sanders sits down in the little patch of crystal-free pavement with his back to the wall and fills his pocket with gems.

When he awakes much of the jewels’ power has worn off and he is horrified to find his entire arm up to the shoulder encased in crystals. It is very heavy and very cold. He has been woken by Ventress tugging him. At that moment there is a shot and the window above them shatters. Thorensen and his crew of blacks are upon them. Again. Round and round this feud goes with the pointless circularity of a mad obsession.

Ventress stuffs some of the remaining jewels into Sanders’s pockets and tells him to run, run for his life, keeping in motion is the only thing that will prevent the crystals progressing from his shoulder to neck and thence to his head. And so for hours and hours Sanders runs through the crystallising jungle, The Illuminated Man, windmilling his crystallised arm round and round, gaining a slight relief from the process.

Finally he comes to the crystallised summer house and hears a voice hissing his name. It is Ventress. Again. Hiding in the underside of the summer house, peeking out over the surface of the ground and between pillars at Thorensen’s riverboat which is moored in the river a hundred yards or so away. The black crew load the ship’s cannon and fire repeated volleys at the summer house, the idea being not to destroy it but to shatter the crystals enough for the boar to approach really close. But in the event, after an hour or more of firing, the boat rams hard into the crystals but rears up on its hull and becomes landlocked, the crystals slowly starting to form over it.

This leads to one of the most contrived but strangest moments which is when a vast fifteen-foot crocodile, festooned with crystals lumbers heavily towards the house. Only when it is almost upon them does Sanders realise he can see a gun barrel sticking out of its mouth and realise it is an elaborate costume. He fires point blank into the crocodile which rears up on its hind legs revealing the mulatto who has been a repeated assailant of Ventress’s and Sanders, rearing up, keeling over and dying.

Ventress tells Sanders to go, go now: now all the blacks are dead and it is just him against Thorensen. Go!

And so Sanders staggers through the all-the-time more heavily crystallising jungle until he stumbles across a clearing and discovers the Catholic church of Father Balthus. He stumbles up the aisle and holds his arm up to the enormous jewel-encrusted crucifix and, of course, his arm is freed from its crystals. All the while Father Balthus watches from the organ where he is playing baroque organ music.

For three days Sanders stays with him in their church refuge, eating frugal meals, pumping the bellows for the organ, as his arm slowly heals and Father Balthus gives him his Christina interpretation of the crystallising, namely that the risen Christ is all around them in the new light of the forest. Eventually, the jewel’s power fades and the crystals invade the church and start advancing up the aisle. Balthus pushes the enormous crucifix into Sanders’s hands and tells him to escape. Sanders’s last sight of the priest is of him standing on the verandah of the church, arms outspread in the posture of crucifixion and the crystals move in to embalm him.

through the crystal forest Sanders staggers, using the jewels’ power to melt a path through the by-now almost solid walls in each direction.

1. He comes upon the lepers he’d seen hiding in the undergrowth near the hospital. Now they are dancing in the forest, weaving a strange saraband, old and young, men and woman, children. They dance up to him then away, eerily. And Sanders realises they are led by a tall figure in a black hood and only as it turns away does he realise it is Suzanne, now thoroughly incorporated into her leprous avatar.

2. He stumbles upon the damn summer house, again, now entirely immured in crystals and goes into the bedroom where he sees the corpse of Thorensen, the feud finally over, the bloody hole in his chest from a shotgun wound turned to ornate crystal, lying beside the embalmed Serena, her chest barely moving in its carapace of light. And then sees a figure running past the building, shedding fragments of crystal as it runs, crying out over and over Serena Serena. It is mad Ventress.

Finally, Sanders blunders out of the jungle and into the arms of the troops waiting at the perimeter. Ironically, he is charged with looting the enormous crucifix, until Max and Louise intervene with the authorities.

Now, it is two months later in Port Matarre and he winds up his letter to the director of his leprosie, Dr Paul Derain. He casually mentions that he thinks he has seen an efflorescence of the sun and its surface crossed by a distinctive lattice-work, a vast portcullis which may one day reach out and crystallise the planets themselves, stopping them in their tracks.

Louise has looked after him but he has not really been there, his heart is in the crystal forest and so she has grown away from him. Max asks him to come and work at the new hospital, but Sanders isn’t interested. He finishes writing the letter and leaves it to be posted, settles his bill and walks down to the quayside. Captain Aragon and his launch putters by, the two men nodding to each other. They reach an understanding. Half an hour later the launch turns and heads upriver, taking Sanders back into the heart of the crystal forest and his destiny.

He is coolly watched by Max and Louise from the quayside, but what do they understand of what he and Suzanne discovered, that

the only resolution of the imbalance within their minds, their inclination towards the dark side of the equinox, could be found within that crystal world. (p.173)

Credit

‘The Crystal World’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1966. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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by Simon on January 23, 2020  •  Permalink
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Symbolist Art by Edward Lucie-Smith (1972)

Symbolist art does not depict nature as it actually exists, but brings together various impressions received by the mind of the artist, to create a new and different world, governed by its own subjective mood. (Symbolist Art, page 151)

Although this book is 45 years-old, I picked it out in a second-hand bookshop deliberately to compare and contrast with Michael Gibson’s more recent account of Symbolism (1995). Gibson’s massive book is packed with brilliant full-colour reproductions but, as I read it, I did increasingly find myself wondering where ‘Symbolism’ ended and where the simply fantastic or morbid or sensationalist began. So I read this book to further explore whether Symbolism was really a movement in a narrow definable way or is just the word given to a kind of mood or feeling of other-worldliness apparent in a huge range of artists between about 1880 and 1910.

The World of Art series

Symbolist Art is a typical product of Thames and Hudson’s renowned ‘World of Art series’ in that, although there are 185 illustrations, only 24 of them are in colour. So you’re not buying it for the pictures, which can be better seen, in full colour, in numerous other books (or online); you’re buying it for the text.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 and is still alive (aged 84). Public school, Oxford, the RAF during the war, then freelance poet, art critic, essayist, author and curator, he has written over 100 books. His book comes over as significantly more learned and informative than Gibson’s.

Symbolism in Renaissance painting

He starts with a history of symbols in art starting way back in the Renaissance. Renaissance art is packed with symbols – classical gods and goddesses are accompanied by their attributes, kings and queens are shown in allegorical paintings accompanied by war or peace or the triumph of the arts and so on.

To get the most out of Renaissance art you have to have a good eye for its religious, political and cultural symbolism. For example, spot the symbolism in this masterpiece by Rubens.

(In this picture the portrait of Marie de’ Medici – daughter of the Grandduke of Tuscany – is being presented to Henry IV, the king of France, and her future husband. The gods of marriage and love – Hymen and Amor (Cupid), to the left and right – hover in mid-air. From up in heaven the king and queen of the gods, Jupiter and Juno, look down in approval. Jupiter’s symbol, the eagle of war, clutching lightning bolts in his talons, is literally being squeezed out of the picture, to the left, while Juno’s symbols, the peacocks of love and peace strut (the male) and look down at the scene of love (the female). A pink ribbon symbolising their marriage binds them together. The chariot the peahen sits in bears a gold relief on the front showing Cupid standing on/triumphing over (another) eagle, and holding a garland (symbol of marriage). Behind Henry stands the personification of France, wearing French blue silk embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys (the coat of arms of the French monarchy). She is reassuring Henry that it is a good match for the nation. The burning town in the distance and the dark clouds to the left of the picture, beneath the eagle, symbolise War, as do the helmet and shield at the foot of the painting. These must all be abandoned so that Henry can concentrate on the lighter, feminine arts of peace, subtly emphasised by the light source for the whole scene coming from the right, the side of the Future, peace and harmony.)

Lucie-Smith makes a useful distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ symbolism.

Open symbolism

The use of publicly available and traditional imagery. All of the symbolism in the Rubens picture is ‘open’ in the sense that any educated person could spot it.

Closed symbolism

Refers to ‘secret’ knowledge, available only to ‘initiates’. Renaissance and post-Renaissance art features numerous painters who included closed symbolism in their works: some has been investigated and explicated by later scholars; some remains obscure to this day.

Watteau

In other words, symbolism in its broadest sense, as a strategy or technique, is absolutely intrinsic to the Western artistic tradition. What Lucie-Smith brings out is the strand of artists over the past few hundred years who brought something extra to the idea: who incorporated open symbolism or straightforward allegory (where x stands for y; where, for example, an hourglass stands for ‘Time’), but something else as well.

He takes an example from the wonderful Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 to 1721). On the face of it Watteau was painting fashionable fête galantes for the French aristocracy, scenes of dressing up and carefree flirtations in an idealised classical setting, thus:

Yet (apart from the fabulous rhythmic compositions, the draughtsmanship of the figures, the wonderful use of colour) what makes Watteau ‘magical’ is the sense he achieves of a deeper meaning which somehow diffuses a mysterious influence around itself. According to Lucie-Smith, Watteau:

had already abandoned conventional allegory in favour of a use of symbolism which was more pervasive, more powerful and more mysterious. (p.21)

Something else is conveyed above and beyond the ostensible subject and its overt symbolism. Somehow it achieves a sense of mystery.

The Romantic roots of Symbolism

There follows a chapter about Romanticism, a movement which I, personally, find boring, maybe because I’ve read too much about it and seen too many times the same old paintings by Fuseli (The Nightmare), Goya (The sleep of reason produces monsters) or Caspar David Friedrich (The Cross in the mountains).

Lucie-Smith’s purpose is to show that ‘Romanticism’ is (quite obviously) the godfather to modern Symbolism: in its use of obscure but meaningful images, nightmares and dreams, scary women and looming monsters; in its use of pseudo-religious imagery which has lost its literal meaning but acquired a spooky, Gothic, purely imaginative resonance.

Victorian symbolists

The next chapter looks at symbolist currents in British art during the 19th century, starting with the self-taught mythomane, William Blake. It then moves on to consider the group of artists who claimed to be his followers and called themselves ‘the Ancients’, including Edward Calvert and the wonderful Samuel Palmer, with his strange visionary depictions of rural Kent (Coming from Evening Church).

Then we arrive at the Pre-Raphaelites. Lucie-Smith identifies Dante Gabriel Rossetti as the most ‘symbolist’ of these young idealistic painters, not least because his technique was quite limited. Rossetti wasn’t very good at perspective or realistic settings and so his mature paintings often have a vague, misty background which helps to emphasise the ‘timeless other-worldliness’ of the main subject (generally cupid-lipped, horse-necked ‘stunners’ [as the lads used to call them] as in Astarte Syriaca).

Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1877)

Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1877)

Burne-Jones and Watts

Lucie-Smith credits Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898) with developing the medieval and dream-like elements of Pre-Raphaelitism to their fullest extent and in so doing creating a stream of late works devoted to expressionless women moving through heavily meaningful landscapes.

The Golden Stairs by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1880)

Burne-Jones exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889, where he won a first-class medal. (Intriguing to think the Impressionists were almost entirely excluded from this show and forced to mount an exhibition at the nearby Café Volpini – as described in in Belinda Thompson’s book about the Post-Impressionists.)

French symbolist artists were well aware of Burne-Jones’s work. But the most overtly ‘symbolist’ of the late Victorian artists was George Frederick Watts. He was quite clear about his intentions and his own words give quite a good summary of the symbolist impulse:

I paint ideas, not things. I paint primarily because I have something to say, and since the gift of eloquent language has been denied me, I use painting; my intention is not so much to paint pictures which shall please the eye, as to suggest great thoughts which shall speak to the imagination and to the heart and arouse all that is best and noblest in humanity. (quoted page 47)

His many contemporary fans and supporters considered Watts a ‘seer’ and suggested his work be hung in a temple not a gallery (an ambition which sort of came true with the dedication of his final home and studio in the village of Compton, Surrey, to his work, a venue you can now visit – the Watts Gallery).

The dweller of the innermost by Watts (1886)

The dweller of the innermost by Watts (1886)

‘The dweller of the innermost’ is obviously someone important, and something very meaningful is going on in this painting – but who? and what?

Symbolism

All this background is covered in the first 50 pages of this 220-page book in order to get us to the Symbolist movement proper.

Symbolism in the narrow sense was a literary movement, embodied in the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé in the 1870s and 1880s. They used real-world images but set in shimmering, vague and allusive contexts. By the late 1880s this kind of literary worldview overlapped strongly with a revival of a so-called ‘decadent’ style, in both writing and painting. It was largely to distinguish between the two outlooks that the minor poet Jean Moréas in 1886 wrote the essay which introduced the term ‘symbolist’ and ‘symbolism’.

According to Moréas, both symbolism and decadence turned away from the oppressive mundaneness of the everyday bourgeois world, but whereas the symbolists emphasized dreams and ideals, the Decadents cultivated heavily ornamented or hermetic styles and morbid subject matter.

Lucie-Smith asserts that the first phase of symbolism lasted from Moréas’s 1886 essay until he himself rejected the name in 1891. Its central figure was the poet Mallarmé. Lucie-Smith lists the qualities of Mallarmé’s poetry, and points out how they can also be found in the symbolist painters of the day:

  • deliberate ambiguity
  • hermeticism (i.e. the poems are closed to easy interpretation)
  • use of the symbol as catalyst i.e. to prompt a reaction in the soul of the beholder
  • the idea that art exists in a world separate and apart from the everyday one
  • synthesis not analysis i.e. while the Impressionists analysed light and its effects, the symbolists brought together elements of the real world – from tradition, myth and legends – into strange and new combinations or syntheses

An important element of synthesis was not only the unexpected combination of real-world elements, but the notion that all the arts could and should borrow from each other. Symbolism always hovered around the idea of a ‘total work of art’ which combines music, dance, art, even smells and touches. Everyone in the 1880s was entranced by Wagner’s massive operas which aspired to just this condition of being Gesamtkunstwerks or ‘total works of art’. The idea was very powerful and lingered through to the First World War – the Russian composer Scriabin composed works deliberately designed to evoke colourful visual fantasias and artists like Wassily Kandinsky in the 1900s developed theories about the closeness of painting and music.

Here’s a Symbolist depiction of the hero of one of Wagner’s massive operas, the pure and holy knight Parsifal.

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890)

Gustave Moreau (1826 to 1898)

Moreau is the painter most associated with the first phase of Symbolism. He developed an ornate jewel-studded style of treating subjects from the Bible or classical legend.

Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau (1895)

Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau (1895)

Reviewing the Salon of 1880, the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans singled out Moreau’s work for being mysterious and disturbing. Four years later, in his classic novel A Rebours, which describes a decadent aristocrat who retires to his country house to cultivate sensual pleasures and experiences, Huysmans singled out Moreau as the patron painter of his decadent lifestyle, using a lexicon of late-19th century decadent terms: Moreau’s art is ‘disquieting…sinister…sorrowful symbols of superhuman perversities’ and so on.

Of his own painting Jupiter and Semele, Moreau wrote:

‘It is an ascent towards superior spheres, a rising up of superior beings towards the Divine – terrestrial death and apotheosis in Immortality. The great Mystery completes itself, the whole of nature is impregnated with the ideal and the divine, everything is transformed.’ (quoted page 66)

That gives you a strong sense of Symbolist rhetoric.

Odilon Redon (1840 to 1916)

Huysmans also includes Redon in his short list of artists favoured by his decadent hero, Jean des Esseintes. Redon seems to me by far the more symbolist painter of the two, and the polar opposite of Moreau. Whereas Moreau paints relatively conventional mythical subjects in a super-detail-encrusted fashion, Redon strips away all detail to portray the subject in a genuinely mysterious and allusive simplicity.

The Cyclops by Odilon Redon (1914)

Redon wrote of his own work:

The sense of mystery is a matter of being all the time amid the equivocal, in double and triple aspects, and hints of aspects (images within images), forms which are coming to birth according to the state of mind of the observer. (quoted page 76)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 to 1898)

Puvis wanted to revive the academic tradition, and his compositions of figures in landscapes in one way hearken back to the posed landscapes of Nicolas Poussin (1594 to 1661). But he did so in a strange dreamlike way which pointed forward, towards the semi-abstraction of Cézanne. He wrote to a friend that he preferred low skies, solitary plains, bad weather – a temperament which resulted in melancholy and often mysterious paintings.

The Dream by Puvis de Chavannes (1883)

I don’t like Puvis because of what I take to be his rather ropey draughtsmanship – his figures seem angular and uncomfortable, especially the faces.

Eugène Carrière (1849 to 1906)

Lucie-Smith doesn’t like Carrière much because he developed one subject – family members, especially mother and baby – and painted them over and over again, in a very distinctive way, as if seen through a thick brown mist. I can see how this would quickly grow tiresome, but in brief selections Carriere comes over as a powerful element of the symbolist scene.

At about this point in the book it struck me that a quick way of distinguishing between post-Impressionist and Symbolist painters is that the former were experimenting with ways of depicting reality, whereas the latter are experimenting with ways to try and depict what lies behind reality. Of the former, contemporary critics asked, ‘What is it meant to be depicting?’, of the latter they would ask, ‘I can see what it’s depicting – but what does it mean?’

Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school

Gauguin the post-Impressionist is included? Yes, because in the several summers he spent painting at Pont-Aven in Brittany, Gauguin attracted young disciples who both inspired him to become more abstract and ‘primitive’, and who then went back to Paris to spread his influence.

The young Paul Sérusier organised a group of like-minded young artists at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian, which included Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, and christened them the ‘Nabis’ (Hebrew for ‘prophets’). Without really intending to, Gauguin found himself being lauded as a ‘prophet’ to the Symbolists. When he set off for the Pacific he was given a going-away party by the Symbolists, presided over by the symbolist poet par excellence, Mallarmé himself. Here’s a work from Gauguin’s South Sea period.

Contes barbares by Pau Gauguin (1902)

Lucie-Smith says it is symbolist work because it has mystery, ambiguity and is clearly an invitation to seek some deeper meaning lying beneath the surface. Well, yes… I find several works by other Nabis more convincingly symbolist:

Lucie-Smith devotes a chapter to the Salon of the Rose+Cross founded by Joséphin Péladan in 1892, which held a series of six exhibitions from 1892 to 1897 at which they invited Symbolist painters to exhibit. Featured artists included Arnold Böcklin, Fernand Khnopff, Ferdinand Hodler, Jan Toorop, Gaetano Previati, Jean Delville, Carlos Schwabe and Charles Filiger.

The Salon combined rituals and ideas from Medieval Rosicrucianism with elements of Kabbala and other aspects of esoteric lore. Charming and distracting though much of this arcane knowledge may be to devotees, it is also, at bottom, a profoundly useless waste of time and intellect. However, the Salon of the Rose+Cross’s practical impact was to bring together and promote a wide range of painters who shared the symbolist mindset:

More impressive are Soul of the Forest by Edgar Maxence (1898) and:

Orpheus by Jean Delville (1893)

Orpheus by Jean Delville (1893)

Aubrey Beardsley (1872 to 1898)

An illustrator who created line drawings in black ink, Beardley’s big breakthrough came in 1894 when Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, was published in a version with Beardsley’s woodcuts and caused a succès de scandale. Well aware of fashionable taste, Beardsley tackled favourite Symbolist themes like the medieval dreamworld of King Arthur, the femme fatale, Wagner’s operas, and pretty risqué pornography, as in his illustrations to the classic play, Lysistrata. Beardsley’s clarity of line and hard-edged arabesques make him one of the founders of Art Nouveau.

Salome by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)

Symbolists in other countries

This summary only takes us up to half way through the book which starts to risk – like Gibson’s book – turning into simply a list of fairly relevant painters, with a paragraph or so on each.

Part of this is because Symbolism was so thoroughly international a style, with offshoots all across Europe. Lucie-Smith makes the point that it was a little like the Mannerism of the end of the 16th century – the product of a unified and homogenous culture, and of a social and artistic élite determined to emphasise the gap between itself – with all its sensitivity and refinement – and the ghastly mob, with its crude newspapers and penny-dreadful entertainments.

Later chapters describe the Symbolist artists of America, Holland (Jan Toorop, Johan Thorn Prikker), Russia (Diaghilev, Bakst and the World of Art circle), Italy (Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati), Czechoslovakia (Franz Kupka), Germany-Switzerland (Arnold Böckin, Max Klinger, Otto Greiner, Alfred Kubin, Ferdinand Hodler, Franz von Stuck).

The kiss of the Sphinx by Franz von Stuck (1895)

The kiss of the Sphinx by Franz von Stuck (1895)

I particularly liked:

The books ends with extended sections devoted to James Ensor, Edvard Munch (who Lucie-Smith considers the most avant-garde painter working anywhere in the mid-1890s) and Gustav Klimt.

Modernists who had symbolist phases

Like Gibson, Lucie-Smith points out that a number of the great Modernists first passed through identifiable symbolist phases before finding their final styles.

Two great examples are Wassily Kandinsky, whose pre-abstract paintings are admittedly influenced by Fauve and Divisionist techniques as well but also, Lucie-Smith points out, depict undeniably Arthurian and medieval subject matter, and so qualify for the symbolist team.

The other is Piet Mondrian, the Dutchman nowadays known for his black-lined grids of white squares and rectangles, enlivened with the occasional yellow or red exception. But before he perfected the style that made him famous (about 1914), Mondrian had gone through a florid Symbolist period in the 1910s – in fact he was a keen theosophist (member of a spiritual movement akin to Rosicrucianism).

In a final, surprise move, Lucie-Smith makes a claim for Picasso, no less, to have gone through a Symbolist phase, before becoming the father of modern art.

He quotes Evocation, which does look remarkably like something by Odilon Redon (Picasso was only 19 at the time) and whose subject is a characteristically fin-de-siecle one of suicide and death. Or take Life, which uses a handful of meaningful figures to address this rather large topic, not unlike the confessional approach of Edvard Munch just a few years earlier.

Life by Pablo Picasso (1903)

Life by Pablo Picasso (1903)

Finale

As with Michael Gibson’s book, I felt that Lucie-Smith pulled in so many outriders and fringe symbolists that he eventually watered down the core vision and essence of Symbolism.

Beardsley? Gauguin? Whistler? Ye-e-e-s… but no. Beardsley is an illustrator who anticipates Art Nouveau design. Gauguin is a post-Impressionist. Whistler is a type of decadent Impressionist with little or no interest in ‘religion’ or ‘the beyond’…

But that is the difficulty with the Symbolism as an -ism, it is extremely broad and covers themes, topics, ideas which spilled over from earlier movements, spilled over from contemporary movements, which touched artists (and illustrators and designers) of all types and genres. At its broadest, it was the spirit of the age. All we can say with complete certainty is that the Great War utterly destroyed it, and ushered in a new, anti-spiritual age, in literature, poetry, music and the visual arts.

And, turning back to the immense and beautifully illustrated Gibson coffee-table book, I’d say that if you were only going to own one of these books, Gibson’s is the one: Lucie-Smith’s text is scholarly, intelligent and informative but Gibson’s illustrations are to die for.

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by Simon on December 28, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 28, 2017

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