Symbolism. Nathalia Brodskaya
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Название: Symbolism
Автор: Nathalia Brodskaya
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Art of Century
isbn: 978-1-78310-398-0
isbn:
Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm.
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Wagner’s strength consisted also in myth-creation that corresponded with the Symbolists’ doctrine. In the middle of the eighties, in collaboration with Mallarmé, there appeared Revue Wagnerienne, around which the poets, artists and musicians of the Symbolism circle united. In 1891, the artist from the Nabis group, Félix Vallotton, made a remarkable portrait of Wagner using the technique of xylography. In 1889, two years earlier, there had been published the first issue of the journal La Revue blanche, to which its publishers, the Natanson brothers, attracted the writers of Symbolism and quite a number of artists close to the movement.
It was not just the populace in general but also adherents of former schools of art, now become classical, who reacted painfully to Symbolism. In the originality of its creators, they saw unnaturalness, a whim, the aspiration to put the self outside of society. Symbolism frightened them especially because it was not current in literature or art, but a philosophical concept, another attitude to reality, a new outlook. It was generated as a result of that grandiose revolution in science which so shook and frightened its contemporaries. It seemed that everything in life found a rational explanation and no mysteries remained in nature. Symbolism opposed society’s ideas of science, aspiring to return to art the priority of the spiritual over the material. Its adherents addressed not scientific logic, but intuition, the subconscious, imagination – the forces inspiring the struggle against the absolute power of matter and laws established by Physics.
Wassily Kandinsky, Moonlit Night, 1907.
Watercolour woodblock print, 20.8 × 18.6 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Kazimir Malevich, Oaks and Dryads, c. 1908.
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 21 × 28 cm.
Private collection.
Odilon Redon, Veiled Woman, c. 1895–1899.
Pastel, 47.5 × 32 cm.
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
As to literature, the main enemy and opponent of Symbolism in it remained realism. In the humdrum of life Symbolism opposed mysticism, the mystery of the “other worldly”, the search for the latent sense in any phenomenon or image. It drew attention to the huge, incomprehensible world surrounding us, asking us to discover the mysterious meaning of being, which is accessible only to a true creator. Instead of mere observation of life, it put forward an unusual imagination, inaccessible to the ordinary artist. Searching for the secrets of this imagination, twentieth-century surrealists turned precisely to Symbolism. In The Manifesto of Surrealism André Breton said that the poet-Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux, going to bed, hung up on his door a note with the request to not disturb him, because “the poet is at work”. However, Symbolists did not mean literally the images coming to the artist in a dream. Sung by them, both in literature and in painting, the dream was a demonstration and even a symbol of their exceptional imagination, capable of transcending reality.
Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890.
Oil on canvas remounted on board, 44 × 36 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
It seemed that with the death of Hugo in 1883, Romanticism, in the atmosphere of which the artists of the middle of the century created, finally left. Analysing Symbolism, Saint-Pol-Roux said: “Romanticism sang only sparkles, and shells, and small insects that come across in sandy thickness. Naturalism has counted every single grain of sand, whereas the future generation of writers, having played long enough with this sand, will blow it away in order to reveal a symbol hidden under it…”.[1] Although the contemporaries of post-Impressionism considered Romanticism obsolete, in reality it was not able to regenerate itself for some time, yielding under the pressure of realism in all its aspects. But Symbolism had become its closest heir. The researchers of Symbolism even sometimes called it “post-Romanticism”. Like the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, Symbolism appeared the brightest and the fullest style in the realm of literature. Nevertheless, it had penetrated the arts.
Alphonse Osbert, Muse at Sunrise, 1918.
Oil on wood panel, 38 × 46 cm.
Private collection.
Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel, 1903.
Oil on canvas, 127 × 154 cm.
Ateneumin taidemuseo, Helsinki.
Symbolism in literature, which Jean Moréas introduced and defined in his manifesto in 1886, was to become a fully-fledged genre. Moréas established that every renewal of a genre met the corresponding decrepitude and atrophy of a previous school. “Romanticism, ringing loudly the alarm bell of riot and surviving the days of battle and glorious victories, lost its strength and attraction…, it surrendered to naturalism…,” he wrote. Consequently, naturalism was subjected to the severest criticism and accusations by the ideologists of Symbolism. Emile Zola remained for them the embodiment of naturalism in literature. Despite his admiration for Zola’s talent, Mallarmé considered his works to be on the lowest level of literature. Moreover, Remy de Gourmont, in the heat of the struggle, called Zola’s writings “culinary art” that merely borrows the ready “pieces of life”,[2] ignoring ideas and symbols. Replying to the question about naturalism, Stéphane Mallarmé found a literary image from the treasury of Symbolists for its definition. “So far, literature imagined quite childlike,” he said, “as if, having gathered precious stones, and then, having written down – albeit even very beautifully – their names on paper, it thus makes precious stones. Nothing of the kind!… Things exist apart from us, and it is not our task to create them; we are required just to capture connections between them…”.[3]
Charles Baudelaire splendidly stated the priority of these connections in the new world perspective in his Correspondances:
Nature’s a temple where down each corridor
of living pillars, darkling whispers roll,
– a symbol-forest every pilgrim soul
must pierce, ‘neath gazing eyes it knew before.
Nature tries to talk to man in its own language, but man is unable to understand it; this language is full of obscure symbols, and it would be vain to look for their solutions. The magnetic force of Symbolism, in contrast with the simplicity and clarity of naturalism, consists precisely in its enigmatic quality, СКАЧАТЬ
Remy de Gourmont,