Symbolabs

French 18th century erotica Revised

2011-05-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

THE FRENCH CONNECTION:
FROM THE ANCIEN REGIME TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Before the censorship of books collapsed in the United States during the mid-1960s, American travelers were accustomed to visit one of the English-language bookshops in Paris to acquire erotic books we could not obtain in our own country. I remember going in 1958 to Brentano’s in the City of Light to buy Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which I then proudly displayed as I sat with my coffee in European cafes. Sometimes people asked if I was a medical student,

Paris was then the capital of underground literature in the English language, and its prince was Maurice Girodias (1919-1990), who headed the Olympia Press.1 Remembered in literary histories for his publication of works not only by Miller but by Beckett (Malone trilogy), Nabokov (Lolita), and Donleavy (The Ginger Man), he also published gay classics such as William Talsman’s The Gaudy Image (1958) and Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch (sic, 1959), translations of Apollinaire’s Les Onze mille verges (of which more in a moment) and Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro (1959), and a reprint of Teleny (1958).

After encountering legal difficulties, Girodias left Paris in 1963, eventually settling in New York City. There he published erotica under various imprints. One of these, The Other Traveller, featured gay-themed books. Between 1967 and 1972 “Traveller’s Companions” included fiction by Richard Amory (his mystery, Frost), Victor J. Banis (The Gay Haunt by “Victor Jay”), John Coriolan (Seven Ways from Sunday), Angelo d’Arcangelo (Sookey), Joseph Hansen as James Colton (The Outward Side and Todd, the last “Colton” novel), Larry Townsend (Run, Little Leather Boy, The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by “J. Watson,” and The Scorpius Equation), and Dirk Vanden (All Is Well and a reprint of All or Nothing).

Girodias published a hardback edition of Ronald Tavel’s Street of Stairs (1968). Under his Ophelia Press imprint he published d’Arcangelo’s The Homosexual Handbook (1968). It was notorious for outing J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Spellman. The original green cover edition quickly disappeared. When it was reprinted with a bold pink cover, Hoover’s name had disappeared. Olympia covers were uniformly plain. In general their gay line received more respect than that accorded most gay pulps. While Girodias set new standards for such works in terms of editing and printing, he was very casual about paying his authors. Fees were tiny – and they arrived late, it at all.2

In fact, Girodias had taken over the business of his father, the expatriate Englishman Jack Kahane (1919-1939), whose imprint, founded in 1929, was called the Obelisk Press.3 It was Kahane who first published Miller, together with a number of other significant American and British authors. In 1933 he published Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil.

Kahane was in turn preceded by another Englishman, Charles Carrington (1857-1922).4 Born in England as Paul Harry Ferdinando, in 1895 he settled in Paris, where he published and sold erotica. Carrington also issued works of classical literature, including the first complete English translation of Aristophanes, together with books by noted authors such as Oscar Wilde and Anatole France; these served to cloak his erotica in a veil of legitimacy. Carrington, who displayed a particular interest in flagellation (ostensibly the English vice), also published books in French.

All these entrepreneurs of erotic books took advantage of a quirk in French law that exempted books printed in foreign languages from censorship.

Still, some “dirty books.” quite a few in fact, were published in the French language.4 In Carrington’s time the spiritus animator of the erotic field in Paris was the poet and art critic Guillaume Apolliinaire (1880-1918). While not a publisher, Apollinaire was active in several ways, writing two pieces of erotica himself: Les Onze mille verges (1907) and Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan (apparently 1911).

The title of the first novel contains a French pun substituting the word verges (switches or pricks) for the usual vierges (virgins – as in the Eleven Thousand Virgins of St. Ursula). The book relates the adventures of Mony Vibescu, a young Romanian aristocrat who is highly sexed. It is mostly heterosexual, with a good deal of S/M, scat, and necrophilia. However, there are several gay-male episodes. In Bucharest, the adolescent Mony is regularly sodomized by a Serbian diplomat. In due course he sets out for Paris, where he becomes an accomplished rake. At one point, while he is practicing sixty-nine with his valet, a servant enters with the news of his appointment as an officer in the Russian army. The two men celebrate the occasion by sodomizing each other.

In 1953 Olympia Press published The Debauched Hospodar, a translation of Les Onze mille verges by “Oscar Mole” (a pseudonym of the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi). In the 1960s this translation, together with the Olympia version of the second Apollinaire effort, entitled variously as The Amorous Exploits / Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, was pirated several times by U.S. pulp publishers. Somewhat hastily contrived, the second work is a coming-of-age novel recounting the sexual education of an adolescent named Roger who seduces and impregnates several women.6

Conditions were less favorable in England, but nonetheless one erotic publisher managed to survive there for a time. Leonard Smithers (1861-1907) undertook the challenging task of issuing Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Book of the Thousand and One Nights in 1885.7 Later he published books by Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Aleister Crowley, and the 1893 book known as Teleny (often ascribed, though probably wrongly, to Oscar Wilde). Reputedly, his bookshop in Bond Street displayed the slogan: “Smut is cheap today.” This claim was misleading, as Smithers’ books tended to be expensive.

Generally the United States was inhospitable to such activity, at least until the censorship was lifted in the mid-sixties when a number of opportunist pulp publishers sprang up. A notable, though hardly respectable example was Marvin Miller’s Collectors Publications, located in the City of Industry and Covina in California, which began shamelessly pirating the Olympia Press books. Collectors Publications even purloined the characteristic Olympia Press cover design with its layout of nested rectangles enclosing the name of the author and the title.

It seems clear then that this quintet – Girodias, Kahane, Carrington, Apolliinaire, and Smithers--were the godfathers of our pulps. Who then were their godfathers?

LIBERTINE LITERATURE IN FRANCE AND ITS BACKGROUND

Answering that question takes us back to the Old Regime in France, where a lively trade in underground literature had grown up to evade the strict censorship of the Bourbon monarchy.8 For safety, these books were usually printed abroad, generally in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Sometimes the books seem to have been actually printed in France, but bore a false imprint, such as “Freetown” or “Philadelphia.” If they were printed abroad, as most were, they had to be smuggled into France. There they were hawked by itinerant peddlers who supposedly kept them hidden under their coats. Hence this production is sometimes called books distributed “sous le manteau.”

This literature generally goes under the name of libertine. The term stems from the Latin libertinus, a freed slave. In the course of time the meaning morphed into two acceptations. The first means someone who questions established views in religion and philosophy. The second means someone who is licentious, especially as concerns sensual pleasures. The common link is defiance of conventional middle-class norms of thought and behavior.

During the Old Regime in France, some libertine works were nonfiction efforts critiquing political or religious orthodoxy. The more serious works of this kind were aptly termed philosophical. Yet there were also erotic books, subversive in a different way. Many were only mildly sexual. Others, though, were downright pornographic. Perhaps the best-known examples, slightly later, are the novels of the Marquis de Sade. Since the trade was usually clandestine, book sellers found it expedient to classify all the books under the honorific rubric of “philosophy.”

This body of writing may be termed the sub-basement of the Enlightenment. Yes, the conventional wisdom of politics and religion must be questioned. But it is also true that sex sells.

The story actually takes us back to the sixteenth century. While the works of François Rabelais offer a precedent in terms of sexual explicitness, the new crop of works lacked the fantastic, carnivalesque emphasis of the earlier French writer. In fact, the beginnings of the “dirty book” genre derive from Rabelais’ Italian contemporary, Pietro Aretino (1492-1556). In 1524 Aretino brought out his sixteen Sonetti lussuriosi, sex sonnets describing different positions for copulation. These texts elicited illustrations by Giulio Romano, which were turned into prints by Marcantonio Raimondi. The resulting marriage of text and image ranks as the first illustrated porno book.

Also influential was a prose work by Aretino, the Ragionamenti (1534-36). Over the course of sex days, a seasoned prostitute explains the secrets of the trade to a novice.

Directly inspired by the Ragionamenti was L’Escole des Filles ou la Philosophie des dames, first issued in 1655. While the work is anonymous, Michel Millot and Jean L’Ange have been suggested as authors. In this story the experienced Suzanne explains the facts of life to her naive 16-year old cousin Fanchon. The English diarist Samuel Pepys notes that he bought a copy for solitary perusal. Afterwards, he burned the book so that his wife would not discover it. During the heyday of the American pulps. purchasers would also commonly destroy their gay erotic books to keep them from falling into the hands of relatives and associates. For that reason some titles have become scarce.

In 1660 this first French effort was succeeded by a more elaborate production with a complicated history. Nicolas Chorier (1612-1682), who worked as a lawyer and government official in Grenoble. Because of his position, Chorier took great pains to protect his identity – as did many American pulp authors. For one thing he composed his erotic work in Latin. The first edition of 1660 bears the sonorous title of Aloisiæ Sigeæ, Toletanæ, Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et Veneris, Aloisia hispanice scripsit, latinitate donavit Joannes Meursius V. C. The reader is supposed to believe that the text was originally written by one Aloysia or Luisa Sigea, a court lady and poet of Spanish origin residing in Lisbon. The text was then translated into Latin by a certain Joannes Meursius, a Dutch humanist. Both these writers are fictional.

Chorier’s work consists of seven dialogues between an Italian lady Tullia and her younger cousin Ottavia. While the main concern is with the various positions of heterosexual copulation, two of the dialogues deal with lesbian relations. Ottavia also includes a list of famous male homosexuals, one of the earliest such compilations that is known.

Subsequently, Chorier’s book was translated into French under the title of L’Académie des dames (1680). There were also English and Italian renderings of this very popular work.

While there were some publications in the interval, the production of such works achieved an apogee in France in the period between 1740 and 1755. We turn now to the two most important such works.

HISTOIRE DE DOM BOUGRE

The book entitled Histoire de Dom B*** portier des Chartreux, écrite par lui-même (1741) is ascribed to the lawyer Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche (1715-1782). The novel is cast in the form of the memoirs of “Brother Bugger,” looking back over his life from his position as a gatekeeper in a Carthusian monastery. In addition to its sexual connotations, the French word “bougre” (easily detectable under the disguise of the asterisks) retained the meaning of heretic. Much of the story takes place in or near monasteries. The book is thus a direct challenge to the Church.

Brother Bugger’s real name is Saturnin, and the account mainly concerns his sexual education. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, Saturnin chances to espy his foster mother indulging in sexual congress with a man who is not her husband. Inspired to emulation, the adolescent almost succeeds with a young woman named Suzon, whom he believes to be his sister. After the failure of that attempt, Saturnin is actually initiated, the full nine yards, by her horny godmother. While the older woman is not attractive, she proves an apt instructress. After a number of other adventures, Saturnin goes to live in a Celestine monastery where sexual license, both heterosexual and homosexual, is rife. The sodomitically inclined Father Casimir arranges a threesome; the young man fucks his niece, while Casimir is penetrating him from behind. At the monastery Saturnin meets his real mother, a nun named Gabrielle, who has offered her favors to so many monks that no one can discover who the real father is.

Eventually, Saturnin reunites with Suzon – now revealed as not his sister after all – and he successfully copulates with her. But she gives him syphilis. As a remedy he is castrated. His tombstone reads: “Hic situs est Dom Bougre, fututus, futuit” (Here lies Dom Bougre; he fucked and was fucked).

In addition to the explicit sex scenes, “Brother Bugger’s Story” is notably for providing a matter-of-fact description of masturbation and a realistic approach to the danger of venereal disease. Since the novel is intended for a heterosexual audience, same-sex action is sparse, but in addition to the threesome described above, there is a lesbian scene. In the convents nuns make common use of dildoes.

The novel’s message is clear. The quest for human happiness is the only thing worth seeking. Despite the undeniable risks, one must proceed on this basis, otherwise one will feel regret afterwards. Even the brothers of the monastic orders, those supposed guardians of the strictest morality, acknowledge this imperative in their personal lives. Absent the hypocrisy so must we.

Brother Bugger’s book enjoyed great popularity in the eighteenth century, when it was reprinted at least five times (the last apparently in 1770).

THÉRÈSE PHILOSOPHE

Thérèse Philosophe is a 1748 novel ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens, that contains explicit sexual descriptions.9 The narrative starts with Thérèse, from solid bourgeois stock, who loses her sexual innocence through voyeurism, when she is invited to witness a demonstration arranged by her friend Mlle Eradice, who submits herself to the erotic ministrations of Father Dirrag. After first flagellating his companion, Dirrag brings out a kind of holy relic, the stiffened end of the “cord of St. Francis,” which is of course his erect male member with which he penetrates her. The two experience a sublime mixture of sensual and spiritual joys, The episode is based on reality, for “Father Dirrag” and “Mlle. Eradice” are anagrams stemming from the names of Father Jean-Baptiste Girard and Catherine Cadière, implicated in a highly publicized trial in 1730.

Relegated to a convent, Thérèse languishes because of the lack of opportunities for erotic expression, throwing her body into disorder. Rescue comes in the guise of Mme. C and Abbe T. , who provide both instruction and sexual relief. Thérèse’s sexual education continues with her connection with Mme. Bois-Laurier, an experienced prostitute. This section of the novel is a variation on the whore dialogues, a convention that derived, as we have seen, from Aretino.

Finally, Thérèse meets a certain Count who wants her for his mistress. Because of her fear of dying in childbirth, she refuses his advances. So the Count makes the following promise: if she can spend two weeks in a room full of erotic books and paintings without yielding to the temptation of masturbation, he will refrain from demanding intercourse. Of course, Thérèse loses the wager and becomes the Count’s permanent mistress.

For all of its explicit debauchery, the novel can claim some intellectual merit. Between the more graphic sections of the novel, the characters discuss philosophical issues, including materialism, hedonism and atheism. In keeping with the materialism of leading thinkers of the time, the phenomena of our world are simply matter in motion; religion is a fraud, though a useful fiction for keeping the lower orders in line. Nonetheless, Thérèse believes in God, to whom she attributes the human capacity for pleasure. Thérèse philosophe stands out among its competitors because if offers a balanced mix of the two main forms of libertinism; religious and philosophical skepticism and sexual license.

The book not only draws attention to the sexual repression of women at the time of the enlightenment, but also to the abuse of ecclesiastical authority for sexual exploitation. This anticlerical element is generally lacking in the Anglophone counterpart to these works, though it currently finds a nonfictional counterpart in the current concern about sexual abuse on the part of members of the Catholic clergy.

The author of Thérèse philosophe does not look favorably on male homosexuality. In fairness, however, he includes a brief summary of the arguments that were circulating among adepts of Greek love in his day (recounted by Mme. Bois-Laurier). Our goal is pleasure, says the anonymous spokesperson. It is this quest that guides us, just as with our [heterosexual] adversaries. In so many words, the anonymous defender of gay rights says that this orientation is not a matter of choice. He rejects the argument that same-sex behavior is unnatural; this cannot be, for it is nature itself that has given us this propensity. Finally, there is the argument that such acts do not lead to procreation. That is not why anyone seeks the pleasure of sex, he tartly avows. These arguments were to recur at the end of the century in the pamphlet known as Les petits bougres au manège (1790).

Dom Bougre and Thérèse philosophe have several characteristics in common. Both are told in the first person in a narrative in which the protagonist goes from naïveté to a new awareness of self, so that the person can live an independent life that disregards the constraints of conventional social norms. In her account, Thérèse reflects from the standpoint of her status as a mature, but not yet elderly woman, while Brother Bugger is written looking back from near the end of his life. Nonetheless, both are examples of a type of fiction known as the Bildungsoman or “formation novel.” This genre traces the psychological and moral (sometimes immoral) growth of the protagonist from callow youth to mature adulthood. In Brother Bugger’s case we go even beyond – to old age.

In all likelihood the Bildungsroman emerged from folk tales featuring a dunce or youngest son who goes out in the world to seek his fortune. The familiar story of Dick Whittington and his Cat, rising from humble beginning to become a wealthy merchant and finally Lord Mayor of London, is a good example. In the Bildungsroman the beginning of the journey is usually triggered by a setback or an emotional conflict. The ensuing process of maturation is long, strenuous, and sometimes perilous, with repeated clashes between the protagonist’s personal needs and the norms enforced by a powerful social order that is hostile to self-actualization. In some works, the protagonist is impelled to tell his or her story in order to assist others embarking on a similar journey. This is the case with Thérèse.

This pattern recurs in twentieth-century gay novels. Probably the best-known example is Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), where the protagonist Jim Willard travels from his provincial milieu to various cosmopolitan locales to the culminating episode in New York City. Vidal’s novel is actually a variation on the genre, as indeed many examples are. The author seems to be saying that Willard’s education is incomplete, for in the end he seeks, disastrously, to return to the teenage fixation he had begun with. The pulps provide many straightforward examples. In Larry Townsend’s Run Little Leather Boy (1971), a teenager obtains his first sexual experience from an older man who picks him up as a teenager. After this the protagonist embarks on a complicated journey to become a full-fledged adept of the leather subculture.

SAME-SEX WORKS: AN EARLY EXAMPLE

As we have seen, same-sex behavior is generally secondary in these erotic works, if it appears at all. Works focusing exclusively on same-sex relations become common only after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.

There are a few exceptions to this generalization.

The earliest landmark is the Anecdotes pour servir à l’histoire secrète des Ebugors (Medoso [Sodom], 1733), now a very rare book. Despite its playful tone, this work ranks as an early plea for gay rights. The term Ebugor is an anagram for “bougre.” The anonymous author begins with an account of the war between the Ebugors (gays) and the Cythereans, who are encroaching on the territory of the former. As the domain of Aphrodite, Cythera was a code word in France of the Old Regime for heterosexuality. (Note the early version of the gay-straight contrast, so often claimed to be unknown before the latter years of the nineteenth century.)

War breaks out, with the Ebugors being led by their general Kulisher (break-arse), who had earlier distinguished himself in alliance with the Coginiens (Ignatiens, that is Jesuits). His soldiers are generally brave (“tops” in contemporary terms), except for the Chadabers (Bardaches), who are bottoms.

At length it is decided that the two groups will live together in peace. While the Ebugors should recognize the paramount status of the Cythereans, they nonetheless must assert their right to live according to their own laws and customs.

DENIS DIDEROT

Another work, a celebrated one, concerns lesbianism, It is La religieuse (The Nun) by Denis Diderot (1713-1784).10 The Enlightenment writer began the novel in 1760 and then set it aside, until resuming it in 1780. The full text only appeared posthumously in 1796, during the freer publishing conditions of the French Revolution.

In the form of letters, the nun Suzanne Simonin relates the story of her life. Her parents forced her to enter a convent, ostensibly for financial reasons, but actually because she is illegitimate. Through this fate, Diderot explicitly attacks the biblical doctrine that the children must pay for the sins of the parents. Diderot’s novel is based on a real story of a Longchamp nun named Marguerite Delamarre.

At the community of the Poor Claires at Longchamp Suzanne is at first fortunate to encounter an ethical mother superior who was a mystic with strong ethical principles. Upon the death of this protector, she is replaced by a new, less kindly mother superior. When Suzanne indicates her wish to leave the convent, the abbess unleashes a torrent of cruel mental and physical punishments. Losing the law suit that she starts in order to free herself, Suzanne is required to remain a nun. In this state she passes successively through three convents. At the convent of Saint-Eutrope she undergoes prolonged attempts at seduction on the part of a Sapphic mother superior. Suzanne escapes with her virtue intact, but only just.

These salacious descriptions seem clearly intended to appeal to the voyeuristic interests of heterosexual male readers. Despite its literary merits, Diderot’s novel qualifies as an early example of a genre that flourished in America in the 1940s and 1950s, when it came to be called “lesbian trash.” Such works were not in fact sympathetic accounts of lesbianism, as they might at first appear, but cruel caricatures calculated to stimulate male readers.

Earlier, in 1748, Diderot had published anonymously a somewhat strained satire on erotic themes entitled Les bijoux indiscrets, in which the word bijou (jewel) is a euphemism for vagina. As he indicates in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1772), Diderot was not a friend of sexual expression for its own sake. Using a Tahitian sage as his mouthpiece, he suggests that copulation should only be permitted when conception is possible. For this reason, even older heterosexual women should abstain after menopause. Sterile women must never have sexual relations. To be sure, the customs of the South Seas may not be transferable to France, but Diderot invests the idea with an aura of approval.

The whole matter is reviewed in general terms by Diderot in his philosophical contribution entitled Le Rêve de d’Alembert of 1769. In the closing sections of this work, an enlightened physician, Dr. Bordeu, undertakes to instruct a somewhat conventional young woman, Mlle. de l’Espinasse. Dr. Bordeu is evidently the author’s mouthpiece, but using this device allows Diderot to establish some distance from views that would surely have displeased the authorities of his time. (The text was not actually published until 1830.)

Here is the key passage: “Nothing that exists can be against nature or outside nature, and I don’t even exclude chastity and voluntary continence which, if it were possible to sin against nature, would be the greatest of crimes against her as well as being the most serious offenses against the social laws of any country in which acts were weighted in scales other than those of fanaticism and prejudice.”11

Enjoined by the Church, chastity and continence are to be deplored, even though they are not against nature, for that is a logical impossibility. Dr. Bordeu feels similarly about male homosexual conduct (not of course approved of by the Church). When Mlle. de l’Espinasse asks about “abominable tastes,” he offers an environmental explanation. These stem “everywhere from a weakness of he organism among young people and the mental corruption of the old: in Athens, from the attraction of beauty; in Rome, from the scarcity of women; and in Paris, from fear of the pox.”

THE MARQUIS DE SADE

Except for Diderot, who is not mainly known as an erotic writer, the authors of the above works have remained obscure. In some cases, the authorship is not even certain. It is the works that are famous, to the extent that they are, and not the writers.

That situation is emphatically not the case with the Marquis de Sade, whose works have even given rise to the word “sadism.” As we shall see, however, there is much more to Sade than an exaltation of cruelty as a sexual stimulant.15

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) excelled in carrying the principles of libertinism to their final term. He held that with the triumph of atheism and republicanism the restraints imposed by the church and the monarchy are completely abolished. We are free to engage in any conduct we choose; such choices can include sexual license. blasphemy, violence, and criminality. In a pithy statement of his religious and philosophical views, the “Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond” (1782), the priest who arrives to take a deathbed confession is shocked to find that the dying man regrets only his restraint in satisfying his urges. Desire, the dying man argues, stems from nature and must be satisfied; all codes of restraint, social and religious, are man-made and can be dispensed with.

The personal activity of the Marquis de Sade was mainly heterosexual. However, his literary program was pansexual, and homosexual activity ranks an important feature in his program of revolutionary sexual freedom.

His views about same-sex behavior emerge most clearly in the scintillating dialogue La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795). The two leading characters maintain that the only moral system that is compatible with the recent political Revolution is libertinism. Should the people of France fail to adopt this philosophy, France will be doomed to return to monarchy.

There are six characters. Eugénie is a fifteen year old girl. At the beginning of the dialogue she is a virgin, brought up by her mother to be well-mannered, modest and obedient. Madame de Saint-Ange, a 26-year-old libertine woman, is the owner of the house and bedroom in which the dialogue is set. She has invited Eugénie to participate in a kind of two-day immersion course on how to be libertine. The name Saint-Ange is clearly ironic. The Chevalier de Mirval is Madame de Saint-Ange’s 20-year-old brother. He aids his sister and Dolmancé in the task of educating Eugénie. Dolmancé is a 36-year-old atheist and homosexual, a friend of the Chevalier’s. He is Eugénie’s foremost instructor. Appearing towards the end of the dialogue, Madame de Mistival is Eugénie’s provincial, self-righteous mother. Finally, the young gardener Augustin provides a token representation of the working class.

In the introduction, the Marquis de Sade exhorts his readers to indulge in the various activities described in the dialogue. The work is dedicated to “voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex.” “Lewd women,” he writes, “let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure’s divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.” He then urges “young maidens” to copy Eugénie; “be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents.” Finally, he urges male readers to “study the cynical Dolmancé,” following his example of selfishness and consideration for nothing but his own enjoyment.

In fact Dolmancé, the gay man, is the dominant character. He dismisses morality, compassion, religion, and modesty as absurd encumbrances that stand in the way of the proper goal of human existence: pleasure.

Eugénie is instructed on the pleasures of various sexual practices and she proves to be a fast learner. Anal intercourse is favored, with the approval of all concerned, especially Dolmancé, who prefers male sexual partners and refuses to have anything other than anal intercourse with females. Madame de Saint-Ange and her younger brother Le Chevalier also have sex with one another, and boast of doing so on a regular basis. Dolmancé justifies their incest – together with all manner of other sexual activity and taboo breaking, such as buggery, cunnilingus, anilingus, adultery, and homosexuality. His voluble arguments ultimately reduce to one precept: if it feels good, do it. There is only one caveat: sex should be nonprocreative. “A beautiful girl must only be concerned with fucking, never with conceiving.”

It turns out that the corruption of Eugénie is actually at the request of her father, who has sent her to Madame de Saint-Ange so that his daughter may be stripped of the conventional morality inculcated by her virtuous mother. In the midst of their erotic explorations, the characters pause to listen to the reading of a pamphlet calling for the abolition of Christianity as the ultimate enemy of republican institutions.

In the concluding episode, Eugénie’s censorious mother, Madame de Mistival, arrives to rescue her daughter from the “monsters” who are seeking to corrupt her. Eugénie’s father has warned his daughter and friends in advance, urging them to thwart and punish his shrewish wife. Madame de Mistival is horrified to find that not only did her husband arrange for their daughter’s corruption, but the plan has succeeded: Eugénie has discarded any moral standards she previously possessed, together with any respect for her mother’s wishes. She refuses to leave, and Madame de Mistival is soon stripped, beaten, whipped, and raped, with her daughter taking an active part in this brutalization, even declaring her wish to kill her mother. Dolmancé eventually summons a syphilitic servant to rape the unfortunate woman, infecting her.

Lacking the relentless catalogues of transgressions that suffuse Sade’s longer works, The Philosophy in the Bedroom is suffused with a light-hearted spirit of play. This may seem paradoxical, but such is the general effect on readers. Despite all that we have learned in recent decades about the dangers of careless sexual indulgence, one is tempted to yield to Sade’s special version of the truism that it is better to live than merely to exist.

At all events one must be careful not to confuse the writings with the man. As far as we know, the Marquis de Sade never killed anyone. The elaborate fantasies contained in his books were a product of the deprivation of experience during three decades of confinement.

The fantasies are particularly prominent in Les 120 Jours de Sodome. While this vast work is pansexual, it contains a number of homosexual episodes.

In his writings Sade shows himself a master of language. One of his contributions is to deploy pejorative expressions in a way that detoxifies them. For example, he turns the disparagement of masturbation as “pollution,” a common usage at the time, into a word of praise. Like some other writers of the time, he refers to homosexual behavior as “antiphysique,” against nature. Yet he does not mean this as a term of disparagement. Nature is not uniformly benign. Sometimes she is our implacable enemy; it is only fair to return the favor. In a more general way, corruption and perversion are regarded as good. This upending of words foreshadows the current effort to redeem such terms as “queer.” There are also inventions, such as “socratiser,” Sade’s term for finger-fucking of the anus.

Sade innovated in another way. He declined to be bound by the gentility principle that had usually been observed by earlier writers in their descriptions of sexual organs and acts. He freely used street terms, such as con, cunt; vit, prick; foutre, fuck; and chier, to shit.

For a long time the original texts of the Marquis de Sade, unexpurgated, remained largely inaccessible to the general public. Their recovery after World War II is chiefly due to the dogged efforts of the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Efforts at comprehensive English translations began in 1954 with a 575-page Olympia Press edition in Paris with a rendering by “Pierallessandro Casavini” (Austin Wainhouse) of The 120 Days of Sodom. During the 1960s the major works of Sade crossed the Atlantic when this translation and a number of others were issued in three stout volumes by the Grove Press in New York. In their pulp paperback editions these books reached many American readers.

SAME-SEX PAMPHLETS OF THE TIME OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The first topic to be considered is a cluster of five pamphlets concerning lesbianism. All rely on a celebrated section of the gossip compilations (chroniques scandaleuses) published by the prolific Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert (1707-1779). The item of specific interest is the “Confession de Mademoiselle Sapho” in his L’Espion anglais, ou Correspondance secrète entre milord All’Eye et milord All’Ear, vol. X, (London: John Adamson, 1784), pages 179-208.

The “Confession de Mademoiselle Sapho” recounts the education of a young woman in lesbianism (then known as tribadism) at the hands of an older instructress. The young woman is particularly suited for this role because of her large clitoris – evidently a subject of fascination on the part of curious men at the time. At the center of this text is what purports to be an address by the actress Françoise Raucourt of 1778 to a secret society of French tribades known as the Anandrynes. (The term means “women without men.”)

Pidansat’s account drew the attention of many at the time, including the young Napoleon Bonaparte. The text became of broader interest with the outbreak of the French Revolution, with its somewhat ambiguous promise of sexual liberty. At that time, the five pamphlets appeared, reprinting and sometimes recasting the material.

The pamphlets are as follows: Anandria ou Confessions de Mlle Sapho (“En Grèce,” 1789); Histoire de la secte anandryne (Paris, 1791); La Liberté ou Mlle Raucourt à toute la secte anandrine assemblée au foyer de la Comédie-Française (“A Lèche-Con,” 1791); La Nouvelle Sapho ou Histoire de la secte anandryne par la C. [citoyenne] R. [Raucourt] (Paris, 1793 or 1794); and La Jolie Tribade, ou Confessions d’une jeune fille (Paris, 1797].

Four of these pieces are cannibalized versions of the material found in Pidansat de Mairobert. However, the work entitled La Liberté ou Mlle Raucourt à toute la secte anandrine assemblée au foyer de la Comédie-Française is different. It seems to be an original composition. Not without ironic overtones, it is nonetheless a plea for lesbian independence. This will be assured. “Raucourt” thinks, in alliance with a the gay-male faction headed by the Marquis de la Villette. In this way (though this claim is perhaps a bit of a stretch) the text anticipates the modern alliance of lesbians and gay men.

The Anandryne sect seems to have been a real sapphic group, one headed by Françoise Raucourt [stage name of Francoise-Marie-Antoinette-Joseph Saucerotte (1756-1815)].12 According to contemporary reports, Raucourt was president of the group, which had been founded in 1770 by Thérèse de Fleury. The votaries met in the Rue des Boucheries-Saint-Honoré, where novices were stripped and examined for the seven marks of beauty required for membership. Eventually, a quarrel arose over the admissions policy: some insisted on women exclusively, while others wanted to admit as voyeurs men who practiced women’s ways.

The last two pamphlets to be considered here concern male homosexuality.13 The first is Les enfans de Sodome à l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1790). This work, sometimes tongue in cheek, alludes to the homosexual circle of Charles, Marquis de Villette (1736-1793), who played a role for men comparable to that of Raucourt for women. It was even alleged that for a time Villette and Raucourt were “an item.” His reputation as a rake involved with both sexes caused the marquis to suffer six months imprisonment in 1764. Attaching himself to Voltaire, Villette sought to make a literary career for himself, though with scant success. Villette was thought to have headed a homosexual association known as Les Gens de la Manchette or L’Ordre de la Manchette,

The keynote of Les enfans de Sodome is sounded by the motto on the title page: “[l]es goûts sont dans la nature; [l]e meilleur est celui qu’on a” (preferences are part of nature; the best one is one’s own). In eighteenth-century French, the word goûts. tastes, was sometimes used to describe sexual inclinations – what we would term orientations. Thus the preferences of the Marquis de Villette and his friends lay within the order of nature, not outside it. The precept is ascribed to the writer Jean-Pierre Claris, Chevalier de Florian (1755-1794).

Here is the gist of the pamphlet itself. Following the example of the Greeks and Romans, all sorts of groups – from tailors and house servants to cuckolds and prostitutes – have come forward to make their case before the newly formed National Assembly. At first, the members of the Ordre de la Manchette [that is, the gays and lesbians] have hung back, choosing simply to gather in nocturnal conventicles at the Tuileries Gardens and other cruising spots.

On the present occasion, the adepts of the Order follow tradition by meeting under the chestnut trees of the Tuileries. Several speakers hold forth, including a prominent Tribade (lesbian), showing that an alliance between the men and women was being implemented.

The main speech is by the leader, the Duc de Noailles, who salutes the work of the philosophers of the Enlightenment.. Thanks to their intervention, times have definitely changed, so that the Sodomites and Tribades can now come forward to make their case. With these remarks meeting general approval, the assembly elects officers, with the Duc de Noailles at the head. By-laws, consisting of seven articles, are adopted.

The pamphlet concludes with a roster of leading adherents of the group, some 120 men and 41 women. It is hard to know what to make of this list. Were these people genuinely prepared to come forward to press for gay rights, or was the list simply a way of outing them? In favor of the first hypothesis is the fact that in the following year, 1791, the National Assembly did in fact decriminalize sodomy – for the first time in the Western world – by simply declining to include it in the new Penal Code. While there is probably no causal relationship between the pamphlets --this one and the next one – and the decriminalization, the two phenomena clearly reflect the atmosphere of the times.

While it too has its satirical aspects, the last pamphlet, Les petits bougres en manège (The Little Buggers on Parade; Paris, 1790?), is a striking profession of progay ideas. To this end, the speaker, evidently the celebrated Marquis de Villette, sets forth a proto-libertarian philosophy. The principle of individual liberty makes my body and all its parts my property, he indicates. Since my cock and balls belong to me, I can put them in a stew or broth if I chose, or insert them in an asshole or a cunt. The writer saves his greatest enthusiasm for the joys of anal sex. “Fame is but a passing fancy, while pleasure is the only reality; to acquire as much as I can is my sole aim. In short, to sodomize in the morning, sodomize at noon, and to sodomize in the evening – that is all that I am seeking.” A modest aspiration!

Villette also provides a novel explanation for the burning of Sodom. It seems that a cook was roasting meats for a great feast, when his eye chanced upon a gorgeous teenage boy, whom he immediately sodomized. Entranced by this pleasure, the cook failed to notice that flames were spreading, soon to engulf the entire city. There is even an illustration of this event. Thus Sodom was destroyed not because of the mere prevalence of same-sex love, but through an injudicious indulgence in this pleasure.

The pamphlet concludes with a poem warning of the dangers of the Pox. Women’s cunts are the reservoirs of this venereal infection, and are to be avoided.

NATURE AS CRITERION

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, conformity with nature had been upheld as the ultimate touchstone of human conduct, including sexual matters.14 In a late work, The Laws, Plato had suggested that same-sex acts are against nature. This stricture was reinforced by the condemnation that the Apostle Paul included in his Epistle to the Romans (1:26-27). The last passage was responsible for the legislation, found in many jurisdictions of Christian Europe, stigmatizing the “crime against nature,” that is, homosexual conduct.

During the French enlightenment, however, some writers questioned whether any sort of behavior could actually stand outside nature. This argument could be turned in favor of same-sex love, which was commonly stigmatized as “antiphysical.” In Thérèse philosophe, the pro-Sodomite arguments reported by Mlle. Bois-Laurier include the following point: “It is false that the antiphysical is against nature.” Bois-:Laurier makes it clear that she hates Sodomites because they are misogynist. Nonetheless, after this disquisition the woman proceeds to have sex with In Thérèse, showing that she agrees in practice with the precept, despite its origin.

As was noted above, Diderot revisited the issue in his Rêve de d’Alembert of 1769, where he indicated that “[n]othing that exists can be against nature or outside nature.” Yet even though sodomy lies within the all-encompassing bounds of nature, we may nonetheless seek to discourage it through social policy. Diderot was not as much an advocate of sexual freedom as is commonly assumed.

This implication of this principle is that any given society make take its own view of same-sex love. The criterion for the policy chosen lies in the realm of culture, not nature. Accordingly, one may disagree with Diderot’s judgmentalism (not to speak of that of the Catholic church), and cease to forbid it. So the National Assembly decided in 1791.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

Given the differences of time and culture that separate eighteenth-century France from twentieth-century America, it would be idle to expect a perfect congruence between the two bodies of writing, the French underground literature and the American pulps. Still, some major similarities emerge. Both represent a spirit of revolt against the forces of repression in their respective host societies. Moreover, both observe, implicitly or explicitly, two guiding principles regarding human action and destiny:

1) We must strive will all our might to be true to our own selves, rejecting the social programming that society applies to keep us in fetters. To this principle, there is a corollary.

2) The purpose of life is pleasure (hedonism), above all sexual pleasure. We have but one life to live, and whether sex is given to us by nature or God, it a faculty that we should – that we must – give free exercise.

Like the so-called Tijuana Bibles in the US, the French books were for the most part produced and marketed clandestinely. They were often shipped in the original sheets, and doubtless many purchasers did not take the trouble to have them bound – it may not have been wise to do so. A good many were as small as thirty-six pages. Because of these circumstances, the books survive in relatively small numbers. After the relaxation of the censorship in 1789, the French books began to appear more openly in the marketplace – just as ours did during the 1960s.

There are some other, less fundamental similarities.

In terms of plot, both traditions provide a good many examples of the type known as the Bildungsoman or “formation novel.” Following this expository scheme, the hero or heroine passes from a state of relative innocence to a full understanding of his or her nature and place in the world. These are sometimes known as coming-of-age novels, an appropriate term – except where the experiential record extends into later life, as with Brother Bugger.

The French books are much concerned with religion, and the way in which it restricts adhesion to principles 1 and 2. While this feature is less notable in the American novels, it does sometimes occur. For example, in Dirk Vanden’s All trilogy (1969-71), the hero must seek to overcome the repressive elements of his Mormon heritage. The earlier sexual bonding of the hero of Song of the Loon (Richard Amory; 1966) was blighted by the religiously based bigotry of his former partner. Also relevant is a novel by Dick Dale called (probably by the publisher, Greenleaf Classics) The Fag End (1968), where one of the main characters is a hypocritical and closeted minister, the Reverend Mr. Smith. He abuses teenage boys mentally and wants to sexually. To its credit, the book makes a real attempt to understand and explain how our hypocritical and puritan culture has created such a monster

While the French books provided a considerable amount of sex, it was generally less explicit than in the general run of the American books. A major exception is the work of the Marquis de Sade. His One-Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom equals or outdoes any of the later American works in the sheer profusion and variety of sex acts.

The American pulps generally lacked the intellectual content that some of the French works offered. The latter-day novels could scarcely be marketed as “philosophical.” Oftentimes, though, the publishers sought to provide an air of authority by placing an introduction by some purported psychiatrist or other authority at the start. This matter, appearing at the very start of the book, served – or so the publishers hoped – as a kind of protective talisman to prevent the book from being suppressed.

F O O T N O T E S

1 For Girodias’ own account (perhaps not always reliable), see his The Frog Prince: An Autobiogaphy (New York: Crown, 1980). A full bibliography of the publications of the press appears in Patrick John Kearney and Angus Carroll, The Paris Olympia Press (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
2 An Olympia editor, Frances Green, wrote a letter Aug. 13, 2011, to Lambda Literary in which she recalled: “Such bright dreams when we started that gay series at Olympia Press, dragged down by the money problems. The embarrassment of trying to wheedle the money contractually owed – “You can have $200 for your authors this month.” Send it to one or split it among four – cringe at the memory! And still we had to ask for graphic sex, because that’s what Olympia did.” See http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/08/10/dirk-vanden-pioneer-of-gay-literature/#more-5374
3 See Neal Pearson, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
4 See the short biography in The Erotica Bibliophile: http://www.eroticabibliophile.com/publishers_carrington_about.php.
5 Most of these appear in the alphabetical listing to be found in Pascal Pia, Les livres de l’Enfer du XVIème siècle à nos jours (Paris: C. Coulet and A. Faure, 1978).
6 There is a new translation of the first work by Alexis Lykiard, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Washington, DC: Solar Books, 2007).
7 James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
8 The major study is Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995). See also Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 1993); and Michel Feher, The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Zone Books, 1997), which contains translations of nine specimens by Diderot, Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, and others.
9 As far as I know, this important novel (like the previous one) has not been fully translated into English. However, there is a useful abridged version in Robert Darnton, op. cit,, pp. 249-99.
10 The Diderot bibliography is vast. For orientation regarding works and themes, see Roland Mortier and Raymond Trousson, eds. Dictionnaire de Diderot (Paris: Champion, 1999).
11 Translation by Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1974).
12 The fullest account of the life and works of Sade is Maurice Lever, Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (Paris: Fayard, 1991). For a stimulating essay, see Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
13 A recent account of this much-discussed individual and her circle appears in Jeffrey Merrick, “The Marquis de Villette and Mademoiselle Raucourt: Representations of Male and Female Sexual Deviance in Late-Eighteenth Century France,” in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryan T. Ragan, Jr., eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 30-53.
14 Together with one of the Raucourt items, English renderings of these two pamphlets (heavily abridged) appear in Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, eds., We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39-47.
15 Still helpful as an introduction to this protean theme is Arthur O. Lovejoy, “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 69-77.

Early Medieval Triad (bonus piece)

2010-08-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

THE EARLY MEDIEVAL TRIAD W. R. Dynes 23/02/03

As a rule triadic schemes are subtler and more revealing than dichotomies (“binaries”), a methodological principle brilliantly theorized by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Yet C. R. Morey’s scheme trichotomizing the sources of medieval art requires much adaptation and updating; as it is, it will not serve.

Clearly the racial explanation fails. If, in pharaonic Egypt, the collective DNA (so to speak) dictated the convention of fractional representation (in which heads appear in profile), how could a very similar DNA pool generate the opposite practice: heads presented frontally? In a different part of the world, scholarly attempts (e.g. by N. Pevsner) to stipulate regularities governing the volatile record of English art (“Englishness”) have failed, even though the population pool has changed very little.

Setting aside improbable theories of racial constants, we are on firmer ground with language and religion. In the ancient Middle East most of the dominant languages were Afro-Asiatic, as distinct from the Indo-European tongues of Greece and Rome. This difference tended to set those speakers apart from the Greco-Roman ruling circles. In the Early Christian period another contrast emerged, as the Syrians became Nestorians and the Egyptian Copts Monophysite, while Greek and Roman speakers remained orthodox Catholics. Yet what is the connection between these three elements—language, religion, and art? Taking a leaf from the study of modern ethnic groups, some contemporary historians have posited that these elements fused synergetically to make up a pattern of resistance. “Deviant” cultural expression served as a marker for group solidarity. Compare the role of hip-hop in today’s African American culture. Of course such phenomena are always subject to coopting, but that propensity helps to explain the spread of Middle Eastern artistic conventions through the whole panoply of medieval lands.

In examining our data, the form of the objects demands the closest scrutiny. We must dust off that often disparaged tool of study—style analysis. A side glance at modern youth, with its preferences for distinctive clothing and music, shows that for the participants style does indeed matter. It is style that sets “our crowd” off from the others, whether they be “lames” or “the man.”

In our situation, style analysis requires a constantly available fund of mental images—what is termed visual literacy. Thus a reference to the Junius Bassus sarcophagus or the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna should conjure up a reliable image. Without this store of visual knowledge, one cannot travel very far.

FIRST COMPONENT: CLASSICISM

At first glance it would seem that the adoption of Christianity obliterated Classicism for a thousand years. The Middle Ages was the anticlassical age par excellence, and Classicism, so long suppressed, revived only with the coming of the Italian Renaissance. This stereotype is much too simple

A closer look at representative monuments of the Late Antique period shows that Classicism was indeed menaced in the later 3d century and the early 4th (reliefs of the Arch of Constantine; 315). In ensuing decades, though, it revived, showing a vigorous, but somewhat coarse exuberance in the Junius Bassus sarcophagus, followed by a kind of dreamy elegance during the Theodosian period. There were of course many periods where a countertrend surged, latterly in the major works of Justinian’s maturity, such as the mosaics of San Vitale of ca. 547.

What are the grounds for this ebb and flow? Some have thought that the alternation might correlate with war and peace: the anticlassical trend comes to the fore in eras of turbulence, and the calmer classical mode resurge in peacetime. Be that as it may, what was the source of the countercurrent that challenged Classical hegemony? Undoubtedly it was mainly Middle Eastern, though that factor had become generalized, even cropping up in Roman Britain in what Ernst Kitzinger has termed the “subantique.” In the case of the Arch of Constantine reliefs some argue (especially R. Bianchi Bandinelli) that it drew upon a background of Plebeian Art in Roman Italy, a kind of “primitive” counterpoint to the idealistic official art. In this explanation class trumps ethnicity.

Resurgent classicism found a literary counterpart in the Latin writings of the pagan Claudian and the Christian Ausonius, among others.

With the age of Justinian (527-65) the first cycle, the continuing evolution of Late-Antique Classicism, characterized by a systole and diastole of prominence and recession, concluded. But that was not the end of the story. Scholars typically handle recurrences by positing a series of “renascences”: those of the Heraclian, Carolingian, 12th-century, Gothic, and trecento periods. (See Panofsky’s monograph on this topic.

The Middle Byzantine period (after the resolution of the iconoclastic controversy in 843) became a major reservoir of revived Classicism, bequeathing much to the West (see Demus monograph).

What are the major episodes of Classicism in Western Europe after 1000?
1) Reiner of Huy and the ensuing Mosan art, seen especially in manuscript illuminations;
2) Early Gothic sculpture as seen at Chartres and Paris, probably stimulated by Byzantine ivories.
3) The somewhat isolated case of the Reims Visitation.
4) Nicola Pisano and his nude Hercules; possible Giotto’s frescoes.

SECOND COMPONENT: MIDDLE EASTERN

The geographical definition of the expression Middle Eastern is somewhat fluid. The core consists of Western Asia plus Egypt. Many though would annex the Maghreb (western North Africa). Older books use “Near Eastern,” and older ones still simply call it the Orient—hence the Orientalism castigated by Edward Said.

Major foci of development during the later Roman Empire and the late antique period were the “caravan cities,” border towns in the Syrian desert such as Hatra, Palmyra, and especially Dura, with its harvest of religious monuments. Some would extend the purview into Sassanian Persia. Coptic Egypt (the source of monasticism) was certainly a prime contributor. The Roman army, attracting many followers of Mithra, seems to have extended this manner to far-flung areas, such as Roman Britain (which witnessed bonding with native Celtic and Pictish trends).

In a nutshell, frontality, free manipulation of proportions, “stacking” instead of perspectival recession, erosion of the figure-ground contrast, and a tendency towards overall pattern characterize the Middle Eastern trend. Idealization and illusionism (a la Grec) went out. “In” were pattern, stylization, expressivity, and symbolism. These features have struck many observers as proto-medieval. Was there, though, a direct causal link, or simply a similarity of ethos based on a worldview centering on religion? Various salvational religious competed with Christianity in the Middle East, including Judaism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheanism, and their followers sought a distinctive art as the vehicle of their faith.

Eventually this Middle Eastern current struck up a certain coexistence with Classicism, as seen in the Mary Icon of Mt. Sinai, with its two illusionistic angels hovering in the background. The inherent capacity for blending and hybridization—metissage as some term it—was crucial for the creatively impure art of the later Middle Ages.

THIRD COMPONENT: “BARBARIAN” (MIGRATIONS) ART’

Concordant analysis by a number of specialists suggests a vast fund of art originating in the Eurasian steppes; this enormous zone stretches from the Ordos at China’s Mongolian frontier across the Urals to Ukraine with the Scythians and Sarmatians. Sometimes this art of nomads is termed the “Animal Style.” It is not so much a style as a preference—human figures are rare and animals (generally stylized in intricate patterns) are supreme. This art first came onto the radar screen with the Siberian treasury assembled by Peter the Great almost 300 years ago. This art and others like it stem from a nomadic (or “Migrations”) lifestyle, preferring small, precious objects because of their portability.

In this light, the Germanic, Viking, and Hiberno-Saxon arts (more familiar to us than the ones mentioned) represent offshoots of the great cauldron of creativity whose locus is in Inner Asia and Eastern Europe. Be that as it may, much scholarship has been devoted to deciphering characteristic motifs, such as the interlace, the lacertine, and the spiral-and- trumpet. Originally at home in pagan milieus, these Northern style components make their way into Christian art through Hiberno-Saxon manuscript illustration (the famous Books of Durrow and Kells), and then, especially on the continent, through metalwork (as in the lower cover of the Lindau gospels in the Morgan Library). Hiberno-Saxon art has engaged the attention of such scholars as Francoise Henry, and R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford. Continental Migrations art has been the province of Scandinavian (E. Salin) and German researchers.

Medievalism and Modernism: course prospectus

2007-06-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I noticed that the work of advanced artists of the nineteenth century, including Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, and some members of the William Morris circle made selective use of medieval themes and stylistic forms. In addition, there were important paintings of medieval churches by Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Delaunay. Architectural historians have long recognized parallel themes. In fact, I recently published an article on “Le Corbusier and Medievalism.” What is interesting about these examples is the medieval allusions are not merely citational. Rather the artists used the medieval touchstones as devices to aid creative innovation. This innovation was not merely individual, but central to the establishment of a new aesthetic in the visual arts.

The new aesthetic sought to escape from the bonds of the Renaissance tradition with its reliance on perspective, chiaroscuro and cast shadows, features reflecting an overall commitment to idealistic illusionism. For this tyranny of illusionism and fictive depth the pioneering modernists substituted a new primacy of design, the conscious arrangement of forms and colors on a two-dimensional surface.

To the best of my knowledge there is no overall study of this great theme of the midwifery of medievalism in the birth of modernism. Yet there has been considerable attention to two tangential themes: the Gothic revival and Primitivism.

From the mid-15th to the mid-18th century Gothic architecture and the minor arts attendant on it were generally disparaged. Then, in the second half of the 18th century both England and Germany witnessed a reexamination of the matter. This led to a full-scale revival in the following century. For some, such as A.W.N. Pugin, who gave the Houses of Parliament in Westminster their neo-Gothic stamp, the revival of the Middle Ages was not simply a stylistic matter but a question of recapturing a lost--and valuable--ethos, one that had once united Europe. Thus the Gothic was the Cinderella of the visual arts. Long banished to the scullery, its cogency and beauty were finally realized.

The other subject that has been well canvased is the “taste for the primitives.” Long before this concept found application with regard to the art of tribal peoples, it was used for the pre-Renaissance art of Europe, Italian, French, and Flemish. A series of pioneering collectors found in these works a sincerity and sense of design absent, in their view, from the more polished examples of Renaissance idealism.

Another aspect has to do with nationalism. The barbarian invasions of the early middle ages established the basic outlines of future European states. The names of England (from the Angles) and France (from the Franks) attest to this fact. When, centuries later, the medieval revival appeared, it took different forms in various countries. The English and Germans disputed the honor of inventing the Gothic style. Eventually, though, scholars established that it was French. Gothic forms also took root in Catalonia and North America (among other places) with specific valences of their own. Here in New York City, we may take note of the different connotations of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building (the “Cathedral of Commerce”).

The course also involves a reconsideration of changing currents in medieval scholarship, and of the conceptualization of modernism.

The discussion can be extended into other arts. For example, medieval exemplars play a role in major works by Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire. There are also musical derivations, as seen in Richard Wagner, Hugo Ball, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messaien, Bernjamin Britten, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener.

Finally, there is a curious congruence of the medieval and the modern in the treatment of sexual love. This has both “high” and “low” aspects. The concept of courtly love anticipates modern ideas of this bittersweet experience. At the low end, such motifs as the Sheela-na-gig anticipate today’s erotic art.

The course is dedicated to the memory of Meyer Schapiro, whose work exemplified the marriage of the medieval and the modern.

Three Symbolist cities: Bruges, Ravenna, Toledo

2007-01-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the archetypal 1892 novel by Georges Rodenbach, Bruges has long enjoyed the status of the ultimate Symbolist city. Its stillness and desertion created an atmosphere of melancholy and muted expectation. Below I have copied portions of an interesting essay that has just appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

Bruges declined because its port lost its link to the sea. A similar fate befell Ravenna, its Italian counterpart almost a millennium before. During the fifth and sixth centuries, as the city of Rome was increasingly revealed as unsafe, Ravenna became the capital of the Roman Empire. Protected by canals it was linked with its port of Classe. Gradually, though, the soil brought down by the Po River accumulated on the Adriatic shore, severing the city’s connection with the East and its security from invasion.

In 1877 Oscar Wilde was attending Magdalen College, Oxford. That year he chose to spend his vacation in Greece, stopping off at Ravenna. The city engendered a long poem, “Ravenna,” which garnered the Newdigate Prize in the following year. Trenchantly, the Irish writer captures the city’s situation, “Discrowned by Man, deserted by the sea./Thou sleepest, rocked in lonely misery. A special place in the poem is accorded to Dante Alighieri, who died in exile in Ravenna in 1321. Wilde does not seem to have responded to the mosaics, as they were in a style to which he was not yet attuned.

Wilde approached the city on horseback. For others, though, the city was conveniently reachable by train. It is not always realized that the spread of Europe’s railway network opened up various places, hitherto little visited. The mosaics of S. Vitale and the two churches of S. Apollinare clearly struck some visitors. Arguably the faceted treatment the technique requires influenced the emergence of the Divisionist variant of Neo-Impressionism.

For some observers, especially those of Decadent leanings, Ravenna was tied up with Byzantium. In San Vitale, of course, it housed the only notable portrait of the Empress Theodora, a historical femme fatale. In 1884 the French dramatist Victorien Sardou brought Théodora before the Parisian public. Conceived as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, this play crossed the personality of the empress with that of Salome.

In 1907 William Butler Yeats visited Ravenna, where the mosaics especially impressed him. Recollections of this visit formed the basis for his two later poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium.”

Appreciation of the third city, Toledo, was bound up with the rediscovery of El Greco. Long ignored the Cretan-Spanish artist was rediscovered in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Arsène Alexandre (1859-1937) was a French art critic who wrote for Le Figaro. Together with Félix Fénéon he introduced the term Neo-Impressionism in 1886. Later, recalling the cultural climate of the 1880s, Alexandre noted that at that time there were only a dozen persons in Paris who were capable of appreciating El Greco. Edgar Degas owned one significant canvas. The influential critic Théodore Duret urged a visit to see his works in Spain. Joris-Karl Huysmans placed one in the imaginary collection of his decadent hero Des Esseintes in his 1884 novel Against Nature. (Some may miss the allusion, as the artist appears under his birth name of Theotocopuli.)

The connection was consolidated by a short book El Greco, et le secret de Tolède (1911), by the then-popular novelist Maurice Barrès (1862-1923). The French writer evoked the loss to the city of its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants. In 1561 it also forfeited its status as capital to Madrid.

Geographically, the situation of Toledo, ensconced high on a hill, differs from that of Bruges and Ravenna. Yet the Spanish city also became silent and mysterious, owing to a combination of factors that deprived it of its original significance.

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“Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism”
Patrick McGuinness

. . .

The central figure in the dead-city cult was the Belgian poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach, and the totemic city was Bruges, or, to give it its full fin-de-siècle name, Bruges-la-Morte, the title of Rodenbach’s novel of 1892. Rodenbach may not have invented the “dead city” genre, but he became its most influential practitioner. He was the archetypal Symbolist: spectrally complexioned, delicately Nordic and stricken with all the right lung problems, he also produced books with titles such as Le Règne du silence and Les Vies encloses, and poems that display the Symbolist aesthetic at its most mystical and oneiric. His subjects are the deserted beguines and quaysides of “la Flandre insolite”, correlatives of a poetic voice that is reflective, monotonous and introspective. There are poems with titles like “Aquarium mental” and “L’Âme sous-marine” through which the Symbolist keywords – lassitude, exil, sanglot [sobbing] – parade like unclaimed luggage on an airport conveyor.

But it was Rodenbach’s novel that made him famous, and gained him something like a mass audience (the only other Symbolist to achieve this was his fellow Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck). Bruges-la-Morte generated poems and plays, films and operas, and made its author, for a time, as influential as Mallarmé, though far more easily imitated. Mallarmé famously wrote of the “double état de la parole,” the double state of the word, by which he meant language in its brute and in its ideal forms. For the Belgians, caught between French and Flemish, north and south, Symbolist theory was simply an intellectualization of their own cultural, linguistic and psychological duality. The Symbolist moment was also the moment when Belgian literature emerged internationally as a distinct phenomenon, but that distinctness was always invested in paradox and ambiguity, artistic sublimations of Belgium’s linguistic and cultural conflicts: between French, the language of the bourgeoisie, and the then second-class Flemish; between the Latin and the Germanic; and between the north and the south. Belgium was and still is the “double état”: doubleness nationalized, where, as Jacques Brel put it, “les rues pissent dans les deux langues”.

Rodenbach wrote about Belgium for the French paper Le Figaro, where Bruges-la-Morte was serialized, and about France for the Journal de Bruxelles. His first contribution to Le Figaro was a series of essays on “Agonies de villes” (“the death throes of towns”), atmospheric meditations on the urban decrepitude of Bruges, Saint-Malo and Ghent. In his piece on Bruges, Rodenbach describes the city as a sort of coastal Miss Haversham: “Bruges aujourd’hui oubliée, pauvre, seule dans ses palais vides, fut vraiment une reine dans l’Europe d’autrefois, une reine avec le faste d’un train de cour légendaire, au bord des vagues, une reine que Venise saluait comme une soeur plus heureuse et jalousait d’au-delà les horizons.” (Bruges, now forgotten, impoverished, all alone with her empty palaces, was truly a queen in Europe in another age, queen to a sumptuous court of legend, beside the waves, a queen that Venice, envious beyond the far horizon, bowed down to like a less fortunate sister.)

He has also been at the fin-de-siècle medicine cabinet for his metaphors of the city’s economic decline: Bruges is “consumptive,” “spits out her stones as from her lungs” and has the “pallor” and “lethargy” of the terminally sick. For all this dramatic imagery, Rodenbach had a point: Bruges had once been a great port connected to the sea by the Zwijn. One day in 1475, the North Sea retreated, and the Zwijn dried up, cutting the city off from the water that had sustained it. In the words of Ernest Reynaud, one of many who tried their hands at writing a Bruges poem, the place became an “estuaire inutile oublié par la mer,” a useless estuary abandoned by the sea. Baudelaire’s ports are buzzing with colours, smells and sounds, they are gateways to other worlds; Rodenbach’s Bruges is both relic and reliquary, tomb and stricken corpse. In his last novel, Le Carillonneur (1897), the hero wants to preserve the old Bruges, Bruges as museum-cum-mausoleum, against the civic authorities’ hope to bring the water back to the city and create a new port. Today’s Zeebrugge, a complex of duty-free hangars and late-night bars, is the result of their wishes, and in Le Carillonneur Rodenbach allows himself a degree of attention to contemporary social reality that is almost absent from Bruges-la-Morte.

Despite its melodrama and symbolism, Le Carillonneur touches on Flemish nationalism and cultural resistance, industry and commerce, tourism and engineering, and is Rodenbach’s most complex and textured work of fiction. It was not a big success – his readers wanted their Bruges shimmering with torpor, shrouded in crepuscular murk and lost in self-contemplation. Construction of the port of Zeebrugge began in 1897, five years after Bruges-la-Morte, and the year Le Carillonneur appeared. (It was completed 100 years ago this year.)

Rodenbach gave the French an exoticized Bruges, an epilogue-city that could function as an other to bustling Paris, city of Heracleitan flow. The cult of Bruges comes from a fixation with stalling time in an era of frenetic change and movement: Rodenbach’s Bruges is a stagnant pool, its water stilled or slowed to a trickle. The novel’s extraordinary popularity in France is due in part to the fact that his Belgium is made for export, like those luxury products one never sees in their country of origin. For Rodenbach, Belgium becomes more itself the further one gets from it:

“Paris donne du recul, crée la nostalgie . . . . Or on peut dire de tout art qu’il provient d’une nostalgie, du désir de vaincre l’absence, de faire se survivre et se conserver pour soi, ce qui bientôt sera loin ou ne sera plus.” (Paris gives you distance, creates nostalgia . . . . We could say that all art comes from nostalgia, from the need to conquer absence, to help survive and to keep for oneself what will soon be far away or not be at all.)

The suggestion is that exile from Belgium is the best position from which to write about Belgium, and that literal exile may well be a correlative, or a double, of the Belgian writer’s internal exile. Belgium is more Belgian when one – or it – is not there.

Bruges-la-Morte came out in the same year as Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and both works have come to represent the high points of Symbolism. They are as redolent of their period as Mallarmé’s poems, Debussy’s music and Khnopff’s paintings. Maeterlinck specialized in a theatre of inaction – “static theatre”, he called it – and it is interesting to think of his plays, like Rodenbach’s novels and poems, as islands of stasis and reflection in an age of tumult: the early to mid-1890s was a period of anarchist bombing campaigns, state paranoia and financial crisis. The social and political contexts from which Symbolism averted its gaze were busy ones. In an age saturated with spectacle, Maeterlinck’s theatre was the only place you could go and be able to rely on nothing happening. By the same logic, Rodenbach’s Bruges promised an antidote to the flux of Parisian life, and Paris was where the cult of Bruges really took hold. “Bruges-la-Morte” is really a Symbolist anti-Paris, the static, inverted double of the French capital, and the majority of tourists who visited Bruges for its deadness were Parisians. Dead-city tourism took off. Swarms of weekend city-break necrophiles descended on Bruges, and found more or less what they were looking for.

What they were looking for can be seen in the famous portrait of the Belgian Symbolist painted by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer in 1895, three years after the publication of Bruges-la-Morte, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It depicts Rodenbach in an open-necked white shirt, with a stylized Bruges behind him. There are gabled housefronts and a beguinhof on his left, a cathedral tower on his right, and, below it, a low stone bridge. His shoulders seem to merge with the canal at his back, and he looks thin and ghostly (he died three years later, in the same year as his friend and master, Mallarmé). Rodenbach appears as the city’s emanation, a pale flower from its watery depths; at the same time, Bruges is like a crepuscular think-bubble, existing only as the writer’s projection. The persistence of that image, or its persistent vagueness, is attested to by the fact that in the Pisan Cantos, meditating on the lost world of European Symbolism, Pound remembers, or half-remembers, “somebody’s portrait of Rodenbach.”

. . .

That Pound cannot quite remember the painter or the location seems in keeping with the Symbolist aesthetic of the lacuna, and with the book’s paradoxical status as, on the one hand, the ultimate novel of place and, on the other, French literature’s finest example of place evacuated and dematerialized. Mallarmé’s poem “Remémoration d’amis belges” imagines Flanders as an ideal Symbolist region, a place on the border between presence and absence, reality and imagination, concreteness and immateriality. One of the recurrent images in Rodenbach’s prose and poetry is lace, “dentelle”: the ubiquitous nuns are in lace shawls, the windows are shivering with lace curtains, the surf of the sea resembles Brugian dentelle. It is also one of Mallarmé’s favourite images, and he compared Rodenbach’s novel to a piece of Flemish lace: a delicate knit of matter and void, emptiness coalescing into form, form composing itself around emptiness.

The premiss of Bruges-la-Morte is simple: Hugues Viane, a young widower, settles in the city because it is a propitious place to mourn his wife. The novel is not without its suspense, and Rodenbach is able to draw the thin plot out as far as it will go before the ending brings everything crashing into Gothic melodrama. For all his delicate poeticism, he could tell a tale, and he had always been interested in the unconscious, in medical disorders and in aberrant psychology: among his short stories (collected in Le Rouet des brumes and still untranslated) are small masterpieces of fin-de-siècle fiction about mesmerism, murder, suicide, narcissism and automatism. It is significant that Hugues has left Paris – where, the novel tells us, he had led a happy and eventful life – and is looking for somewhere whose every stone and curtained window endorses his grief. The novel is an experiment in decadent psychogeography, where everything submits to the poetic, and to the poetics of reflection: the canals are “analogies” to Viane’s sorrow, the winding streets map his own convoluted inwardness, the city rhymes with his bereavement. We might think of Bruges-la-Morte as an attempt to transfer into prose the period’s poetic fascination with rhyme: Hugues looks in mirrors, he watches the trees and houses reflected in the still waters, sees versions of himself in the darkened windows which are described as being like eyes clouded over before death. In the original edition, Rodenbach included sepiatone photographs of Bruges, and it was these that Lévy-Dhurmer worked from, having never himself set foot in the city. Subsequent editions left them out, but the original photographs, like the haunted Bruges cityscapes painted by Fernand Khnopff, had fixed on the canals reflecting the quays and streets back at themselves in such stillness and detail that it was hard to tell which was the reflection and which the original. Upside down, the images would look no different: they were more than visual rhymes, they were visual palindromes, and nicely suggested both the novel’s concern with reflection and inversion and its atmosphere of entrapment and claustration. (Mallarmé asked Rodenbach whether Bruges-la-Morte was the tale of a hero who projected his inner world onto the city, or of a city whose human inhabitants were just figments of its own imagination.)

The book’s central rhyme is between the dead wife and Bruges, and just in case the reader was going to miss this, Rodenbach helps out:

. . .

Viane meets an actress and dresses and grooms her to resemble the dead woman, getting drawn further and further into an erotic relationship that, while being more “real” than the ritualistic mourning, is also a vulgar copy of the original love. This is the fausse rime on which the novel depends. The whole of Bruges-la-Morte is a tesselation of doublings and pairings, reflections and inversions. The only element of the story that is unpaired is Viane himself, and Rodenbach has him muse on his widowhood: “Veuf! Etre veuf! . . . Mot irrémédiable et bref, sans écho. Mot impair et qui désigne bien l’être dépareillé”. That word “impair” reverberates in French prosody too: famously, in the imparisyllabic line of the master of regretful decadence, Paul Verlaine, who in “Art poétique” celebrates the beauty of the uneven and the asymmetrical: “De la musique avant toute chose, / Et pour cela préfère l’Impair . . .”. That is Hugues Viane: a lost syllable in a world of rhyming, scanning pairs. His lament is untranslatable, not just because the French measure their poems in syllables and not feet (perhaps in English an odd sock might carry the same weight of personal loss and prosodic awkwardness), but because “widower” and “widowed” have too many syllables.

The lure of what the French called la Flandre insolite has worked on a number of English-language writers. One of the few pieces of writing about Bruges that injects life into the place, and breaks free of Rodenbach’s compelling though simplified version, is Henry Miller’s “Impressions of Bruges”, in which Bruges contrasts happily with the “rectilinear nightmare” of American cities. It is precisely because he is coming at it from the American city and not from Paris that he makes out its secret life. For Miller, Bruges is not dead; it isn’t even sleeping. It is living and breathing, its winding streets and circular walks offer a challenge to the dull straight lines of “Progress”, a different way of thinking about time and movement, and a more organic rhythm of urban life. Most recently, Alan Hollinghurst, in his novel The Folding Star, has drawn on the mix of eroticism, occultism, and psychosexual geography that characterizes Belgian fin-de-siècle art and literature. His novel is a glittering updating of the genre: set in a Flemish city that may or may not be Antwerp (with elements of Bruges), it involves a modern story of love and sexual obsession intertwined with an investigation into the dark world of the late-nineteenth-century artist Edgard Orst, who may or may not be James Ensor or Fernand Khnopff. As in Rodenbach, so in Hollinghurst: what makes a dead city so attractive is that it pulses with a darker shade of life.

There was always something of the stage Belgian to Rodenbach, and his detractors accused him of producing a kind of literary camelote, a kitsch Flanders that bore no relation to the reality of the place. More locally, the upstanding burghers of Bruges were dismayed to have their city given the epithet of morte, and be depicted as a place of economic stagnation, religious superstition and twisted eroticism. Today’s visitor to Bruges will look in vain for a memorial to Rodenbach. A statue in his honour, offered by no less a sculptor than Rodin, was refused by the authorities, and even now there is only a small plaque to his memory. The Rodenbach you see on menus in Bruges’s cafés is a dark fruity beer and has nothing to do with the man who thought that Belgium was always at its best when viewed from elsewhere. It is also available by the crate in Zeebrugge’s “Mr Booze” duty-free supermarket.

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Patrick McGuinness's translations of Québecois poetry will be published next year.

The human head as such

2006-12-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

The theme of this presentation [at Hunter College in November 2006] is the special power of the human head even when unconnected to or detached from the body. The subtext of this talk is the current Metropolitan Museum exhibition and the related symposium. However, the ideas presented are ones that I have been meditating on for some time.

A. ALEXANDER RELIQUARY [and STAVELOT TRIPTYCH]

Both these superb examples of Mosan art come from the Imperial Abbey of Stavelot in Belgium during the time of Abbot Wibald (r. 1130-1158). A close confidant of three Ottonian Emperors, he traveled to Italy. Later he twice went to Constantinople. On the first trip he presumably acquired the Alexander relic, and probably others, while the two tiny Byzantine cross relics, enshrined in the triptych must come from the East. Alexander, the fifth pope after St. Peter, died in the early second century CE.

Together with the lost retable of St. Remacle, the two pieces are thought to come from the same workshop.

The Alexander head is in silver repoussé. That is, the artist first carved the likeness of a human head from wood, a material that is both malleable and robust, allowing for precise rendering of the hollows and protuberances of the head. Then a silver plate was hammered onto the matrix. Chasing was employed to remove joints and minor imperfections.

Before the head was attached to the base, a cavity was carved within. When it was acquired by the Musées Royaux d’art et d’histoire in Brussels in 1860, the interior was opened. Therein was found a papyrus indicating that the relics were placed within it at the time of dedication, on Good Friday of 1145. In addition the papyrus gives a remarkable inventory of the relics housed by the head: a fragment of the skull of St. Alexander, a blood-stained piece of the garment he was wearing at the time of his death; a bit of the stone on which Jesus stood at the time of his baptism, some hairs from the beard of St. Peter, portions of the body of SS. Agapitus and Crispin (both martyrs), a fragment of the table that figured in the Last Supper, a bit of the sponge used at the Crucifixion, a fragment of the Holy Sepulcher, a fragment of the rock on which Jesus stood before his Ascension, and bits of the skeletons of the martyrs of the Theban Legion and of some of the eleven thousand Virgins who accompanied St. Ursula.

This list is almost beyond belief. It covers all bases, animal, vegetable, and mineral. One has to ask how could a mere life-style head contain so much material. The account doesn’t say so, but presumably some items were lodged in the coffin-shaped base.

As is usually the case, the worshipper could not see the items lodged within. There is no room for a doubting Thomas here. These items were not souvenirs. Instead, each one had a particular potency—it was radioactive, as it were.

This belief rests upon two stages of the cult of relics. First, it was thought that the martyrs, especially those that had perished in the city of Rome, were so charismatic that special effulgences proceded from their remains. It was not always possible to gain access to the body. For Jesus and Mary, there was no body. In such instances it was thought that something that had come into intimate contact with these holy persons would have the same effect. Hence the interest in acquiring the crown of thorns (kept in the St. Chapelle), the Holy Cross (fragments kept all over), and the Virgin’s tunic (the proud possession of the Cathedral of Chartres).

By the sixth century it was recognized that the city of Rome had almost a monopoly on these remains, at least in the West. In transalpine Europe a clamor arose for the papacy to share the wealth. Naturally, they were reluctant to part with whole bodies, seeking to satisfy the petitioners with a brandeum, a strip of cloth that had touched the martyrs’ remains and therefore acquired its beneficent radioactivity. Such gifts were not enough to supply the demand, and an illicit trade in stolen bodies (the Furta Sacra) developed.

Eventually the authorities hit upon an ingenious solution. Since the charisma of the martyred saint inhered in the entire body, why not offer a fragment—a finger, a hand, or in exceptional cases a cranium, or some portion thereof. This is how Wibald acquired his bit of St. Alexander’s skull, together with the fragments of the bodies of other martyrs. The other items were presumably acquired in the Greek East during the Abbot’s two visits there.

Very odd, or is it? Yet there are many contemporary parallels, as seen in the incident a half-century ago when Bobby Soxers tore off the tee-shirt of singer Fabian, almost injuring him in the process. From time to time we hear of sales of celebrity memorabilia. Sometimes these are acquired as investments. In other instances the purchaser may caress or wear the object in the belief that somehow contact is being made with the departed.

Returning to the Middle Ages, let us draw the inevitable conclusion. After death the physical head of St. Alexander, separated from its body by the executioner’s sword, would have had great potency. How much greater potency then the artificial head, since it joined to the two Alexander elements, various other potent items, four of them bearing the special residues of being touched by Christ himself. This reliquary was not an atomic bomb, but a hydrogen bomb—in a good way, of course.

The Alexander head was made ex novo. As we indicated, body cannibalism had become prevalent as early as Merovingian times. In many cases, though, the head was obligingly severed by the execution. The case of John the Baptist, of whom there were three separate head-findings: Jerusalem, Emesa, and Cumana. After 1204 the Cumana head was transferred to Amiens. The present Cathedral, whose construction (after the fire of 1211) was spurred by the precious head, is a kind of gigantic reliquary. (Slide).

B. The beheading of Saint Denis in Montmartre had a memorable sequel. The saint, dissatisfied with his place of execution, picked up his own severed head and carried it some miles to the West, where in due course the present basilica was erected. In fact there are scores of these cephalophoric (head-bearing) saints.

C. Other beheadings include the case of the column statues in the West front of the Abbey of St. Denis. Six heads have survived, the bodies not. Did this occur (as is often assumed) at the mob attack in 1789? It has recently been suggested that the dismemberment occurred during a “benign” restoration of 1771.

D. The Egyptian substitute heads of the Old Kingdom offer an interesting parallel. Many show signs of mutilation in the form of small holes, perhaps to prevent them from doing harm. It is interesting that the ancient Egyptians invented both the theme of the separate head and the bust (the Ankh-haf in Boston being the earliest suviving example of the latter).

E. My interest in this overall question began a number of years ago when I investigated the iconography of Orpheus. As far as we can tell, Orpheus’ original role seems to be as an inspired singer with magical powers. He could calm the beasts and even, on occasion, cause trees to move. He could enrapture men, causing them to do things they might not otherwise have been. In later antiquity this magical charisma was transformed, making him the founder of a religion known as Orphism. The myth enjoyed a notable revival in the Renaissance, at which time the tragic story of Eurydice becomes central. Note the appropriation by Politian and early opera. In ancient times the Euridice story was part of a diptych. The second phase occurred after he moved to Thrace and began his “Mark Foley” career, seeking to seduce young men, some of whom were married. Hence the murderous anger of the Thracian maenads.

After his lynching and dismemberment, the head floated away, still singing. It was found by the people of Lesbos, who erected a shrine. In antiquity visitors could still hear it faintly singing. Seemingly, these postmortem utterances, transcribed, are the basis for the Orphic hymns..

F. Other speaking heads include the one in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an English poem of the fourteenth century. After Gawain severs the head, the knight promptly picks it up, and the head speaks, reminding Gawain of his promise. The Green Man images may be connected with this. An allegory of nature’s renewal (the Green Man appears at Arthur’s New Year’s festivities).

G. Pope Sylvester II (d. 1003) was supposed to have created a magical head, la Meridiana, which could answer questions—“yes” and “no” only.

H. There is a magical head towards the end of Part II of Cervantes' Don Quijote. Don Antonio Moreno, a wealthy citizen of Barcelona, befriends the knight. He conducts him to a room in his house displaying a bronze bust, in the style of a Roman Emperor, which will answer questions. It never does so on Friday, so they must return the next day. This hoax is carried out through a speaking tube leading to a chamber immediately below. (The motif has been traced to an earlier French romance, Valentin et Orson.)

The head of Medusa was efficacious in a different way—generally a negative one, for seeing her head would turn the unfortunate viewer to stone. Some classical references describe her as one of three Gorgon sisters. Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale were monsters with brass hands, sharp fangs and hair of living, venomous snakes. The Gorgons and their other sisters the Graiae (and possibly the Hesperides), and their brother Ladon were children of Phorcys and Ceto, or sometimes, Typhon and Echidna.

In a late version of the Medusa tale (related by the Roman poet Ovid) Medusa was originally a beautiful woman. She had sex with — or was raped by — Poseidon in Athena's temple. Upon discovery of the desecration of her temple, Athena changed Medusa's form to match that of her sister Gorgons as punishment. Medusa's hair turned into snakes and her glance would turn all living creatures to stone. More ancient Greek writers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form.

While Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon, she was beheaded in her sleep by the hero Perseus who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphus. With help from Athena and Hermes, who supplied him with winged sandals, Hades' cap of invisibility, a sickle, and a mirrored shield, he accomplished his quest. The hero slew Medusa by looking at her reflection in the mirror instead of directly at her to prevent being turned into stone. When the hero severed Medusa's head, from her neck two offspring sprang forth: the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor. Perseus used Medusa's head to rescue Andromeda, kill Polydectes, and, in some versions, petrify the Titan Atlas. When he flew over the Sahara desert, the drops of her blood that fell turned into venomous snakes, and when he placed her head on a riverbank, coral was first made from the seaweed or reeds her head had touched. Then he gave it to Athena, who placed it on her shield Aegis. Some say the goddess gave Medusa's magical blood to the physician Asclepius, some of which was a deadly poison and the other had the power to raise the dead. (there is a monograph by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1936!). Folklore and fairy tale elements are salient in all this material.

Early Greek art offers interesting evidence, such as a Protoattic amphora from Eleusis with blinding of Polyphemus above, and beheading of Medusa below (two spheres attacked). The skeleton of a 10-year old child was found within. The Corfu pediment shows two offspring, but Perseus rendering has not been found. This sculptural monument may stem from from a pro-Medusa faction that believed that she had the offspring without being beheaded.

Later art shows notable examples by Cellini, Caravaggio, and Rubens.

I. The apogee of the head as such occurred in the work of the Symbolist artists, especially Redon and Moreau. Redon’s fascination with spherical forms is well known. (For further information see the material provided in other contributions at this site.)
Late offshoots of this tradition appear in the work of Brancusi.

Lecture FOURTEEN summary

2006-12-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

Think of the following: trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans—-in short all that Nature has to offer. Let us place these in the context of a new sense of awe that emerged some two hundred years ago. This awe relates to a larger complex: nature mysticism, an almost pantheistic sense of oneness with the universe. It is this type of sensation that William James studied in his book The Varieties of the Religious Experience. James found the majority of religious or mystical experiences tended to occur in natural settings, usually in scenes of wildness or grandeur. He concluded that the natural environment has a unique capacity to awaken feelings of transcendence, divine presence

The German theologian Rudolf Otto defined nature mysticism as "the sense of being immersed in the oneness of nature, so that man feels all the individuality, all the peculiarities of natural things in himself. He dances with the motes of dust and radiates with the sun; he rises with the dawn, surges with the wave, is fragrant with the rose, rapt with the nightingale: he knows and is all being, all strength, all joy, all desire, all pain in all things inseparably." While these remarks are somewhat gushing, they capture important features of the sentiment. More succinctly, Aldous Huxley termed mystical oneness with nature "the perennial philosophy."

Oceans

As Alain Corbin has shown in his monograph Lure of the Sea (French original, 1988), European ideas about the sea underwent a crucial change between 1750 and 1840. Once seen as a dark and sinister force, the domain of monsters, the sea was associated with dread and catastrophe and fear. The flotsam and jetsam found at the ocean’s edge were regarded as sinister evidence of the Great Flood that had almost destroyed humanity.

A text from the early eighteenth century by the English critic Joseph Addison shows the beginnings of this shift in attitudes. “Of all the objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. I cannot see the heavings of the prodigious bulk of waters, even in a calm, without a very pleasing astonishment, but when it is worked up in a tempest, so that the horizon on every side is nothing but foaming billows and floating mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable horror that arises from such a prospect. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives the imagination of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness. . . . Such an object naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being, and convinces me of his existence as much as a metaphysical demonstration.”

Gradually, then, attitudes towards the ocean began to shift from the negative to the positive, so that by the mid-nineteenth century our present-day understanding of the seashore as attractive and salubrious had come into being.

Darwinism showed that the sea was the origin of all life. In a more mundane way, ocean bathing came to be seen as therapeutic, and the shore became a locale for self-exploration and reverie. Discovery of the seaside had political, economic, and social effects, too. In Europe the attractions of the shore led to the rapid growth of coastal towns such as Brighton and Scarborough, Dieppe and Cannes.

Ever cautious, ancient mariners had favored the coastline, being reluctant to venture far from the land. With the Age of Discovery, ships did not hesitate to go from continent to continent, eventually even charting the Arctic and Antarctic. As ship technology moved from sail to steam, sea-going vessels were ever more vital in trade, migration, and the sustenance of imperial ambitions.

These changes were mirrored in complex ways in art. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich frequently depicted his local Baltic. Unique in his oeuvre is the brooding “Monk by the Sea” of 1808. While this exemplary work offers many interesting perspectives, one surely is the survival of the idea of the fearfulness of the sea. Turner’s seascapes may serve to delineate the transition, for while some (the Deluge series) are threatening, others reflect a calmer acceptance..

The impressionist painters achieved unforgettable images of a happy Europe at play by the seaside. These paintings are homages to light, color, and the therapeutic benefits of bathing.

Something of the older idea of dread survived in Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” so popular that he created five versions. Other German Symbolists, such as Eugen Bracht and Franz von Stuck, provided their own versions of ominous seas. In their works the sea is shown solo, without an island, boat or other distinctive feature.

It was left to Piet Mondrian to make the transition from the seashore to abstraction. His paintings of dunes show a shifting indeterminacy. In his pier and other plus-and-minus paintings he uses views of the sea as starting points for abstract compositions.

In music one might think of Claude Debussy’s masterpiece “La Mer.” This is not a tone poem in the usual sense, because specific events are not characterized. Debussy’s work is “absolute music,” that is, abstract.

A late manifestation of the attraction and ambiguity of the sea appears in the correspondence between the French novelist Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud. Beginning in 1923, this correspondence evolved on several planes. The central debate, however, revolved about the question of le sentiment océanique. This, Rolland says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he posits as being present in millions of people. It is a feeling he would like to call a sensation of "eternity," an intimation of something limitless, unbounded, indeterminate—in short, "oceanic.” While the novelist failed to convert the atheist Freud, the correspondence stimulated other thinking that has granted the expression a life of its own. See William B. Parsons, Jr., The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York, 1999).

We may reference the oceanic feeling to a series of major contemporary works, the Waterlily paintings of Claude Monet. While these show a pond rather than the sea, they capture the indeterminacy implicit in the surface of a body of water and the plants growing on it. The viewpoint-—head-on or above?-—Is also indeterminate. Some passages are virtually abstract. In short, the message is “go with the flow.”

[The story of Western response to mountains, briefly discussed in Lecture Thirteen, follows a similar trajectory from aversion to active embrace.]

Paths from Symbolism to abstraction

The case of Mondrian has already been considered. Kupka’s early works show an interest in enigmatic subject matter that is certainly Symbolist. His Egyptian paintings are prescient explorations of a theme only later documented by archaeology. Kupka’s ensuing transition to abstraction was somewhat abrupt.

Vassily Kandinsky shows a more organic evolution from the Fauve-ish landscapes of the first decade of the 20th century to the gestural abstraction that sets in towards the end of 1912.

As the linkage between Symbolism and abstraction (toutes proportions reservées) is implicit in much of the course, we may excuse ourselves from further documentation here.

Surrealism, Symbolism’s other offspring

The conventional wisdom is that Dada was the prelude to Surrealism. Since the relevance to our subject is indirect, we can be brief.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art—it was "anti-art". Paradoxically, Dada sought to fight art with art. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning. Interpretation of Dada depends entirely on the viewer, or so it seems. According to Tristan Tzara, "God and my toothbrush are Dada, and New Yorkers can be Dada too, if they are not already."

Central to the Dada worldview was the idea that the catastrophe of World War I was not the betrayal of Western civilization, but the revelation of its ruthless essence. Reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war; the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and the irrational. In another sense, though, it is not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one thinks them to be flawed. As Marcel Janco recalled, “We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

Zürich was the point of origin. In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Henning, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber, and others discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. By some accounts Dada coalesced on October 6 at the cabaret.

The first Dada presentations mounted a cacophonous disruption of “normal” sequences, reflecting (inter alia) a Rimbaldian derangement of all the senses. In practical terms this aim could be achieved through sound-poetry, overlay of sounds, and an overall atmosphere of Hellzapoppin. Hugo Ball’s sound-poetry seems to be the first instance of absolute abstraction in literature. Later, with his Ursonatas, Kurt Schwitters was to offer a more formal model.

Some maintain that the word Dada originated from the writers Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Others believe that, in search of a name for the new movement, someone chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.

The recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art afforded an opportunity to see the emergence of various cities as centers of the Dada phenomenon. Groups in Germany were less strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art was more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, biting satire, large public demonstrations and overt political activities. In February 1918, Richard Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express post-World War I communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, developed the technique of photomontage during this period. The Berlin group saw much in-fighting; Kurt Schwitters and others were excluded from the group. Schwitters moved to Hanover where he developed his individual type of Dada collages, which he dubbed Merz. There he created the Merzbau, a rare example of Dada architecture.

In Cologne, Max Ernst, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, and Hans Arp launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920, which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments.

Like Zürich, New York offered a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Soon after arriving from France in June 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met the American artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. The American Beatrice Wood, who had been studying in France, soon joined them. The New Yorkers did not label themselves Dada, nor did they issue manifestos or organize riotous events. However, they issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor

By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last major incarnation. Inspired by Tristan Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances, and produced a number of journals (the final two editions of Dada, Le Cannibale, and Littérature featured Dada in several editions.). The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921.

Surrealism as such

Surrealist tendencies emerged around 1920, partly as an outgrowth of Dada, with French writer André Breton as its initial principal theorist. In Breton's “Surrealist Manifesto” of 1924 he defines Surrealism as “Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.” He also wrote of the omnipotence of dream and the disinterested play of thought. In his view, this approach “tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Needless to say, these definitions lent themselves to considerable later expansion.

Breton’s personal background was significant. An army doctor in World War I, he was required to deal with soldiers in a state of shell shock. From this experience he came to realize that utterances that were seemingly nonsensical or inconsistent might have a meaning on their own terms. One of Breton’s superiors introduced him to the ideas of Sigmund Freud, for whom he retained a lifetime admiration. Yet Surrealism differed from Freud in attending to the manifest structure of dreams, rather than (as Freud preferred) seeking their deep structure. More generally, Surrealists believed in liberating the Unconscious. By contrast, Freudian psychoanalysis held that repression of the hostility and destructiveness that resided in the Unconscious was essential for the survival of civilization. Later, Herbert Marcuse was to attempt to synthesize the two viewpoints.

Breton regarded automatic writing as the gateway to a vital and liberating substratum of language. Even though this resource was common property, it had been obscured by an overlay of conventional discourse. “Doesn’t the mediocrity of our universe stem essentially from our powers of enunciation?” he asked. Later other techniques were used. The utterances of children and of third-world peoples were honored, as being essentially uncontaminated by the overlay of conventionality that hinders us from unleashing the wellsprings of the Imagination. The quest for the marvelous is central to the Surrealist endeavor.

Like those involved in Dada, adherents of Surrealism thought that the horrors of World War I were the culmination of the Industrial Revolution and the result of the rational mind. Consequently, irrational thought and dream states were seen as the natural antidote to those social problems.

Together with the rest of his original group, Breton regarded visual art as only another stratagem—perhaps a lesser one--for recovering this life-giving primordial substratum. It is ironic that the general public has come to regard objects of Surrealist visual art as the defining tokens of the movement’s essence. By contrast, for Breton and his colleagues writing was primary, at least at the beginning. But Surrealist literature has never been truly popular, at least in the English-speaking world.

While Dada rejected categories and labels and was rooted in negative response to the World War I, Surrealism advocated the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis also enjoyed a privileged status in the development of Surrealist theory. Yet in the literal sense Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis are incompatible. This improbably alliance reflects the general fascination with the idea of Revolution.

By placing a premium on the imagination, Surrealism reverted to the ideals of European romanticism a hundred years before. In this sense Surrealism is old wine in new bottles. In addition to honoring Arthur Rimbaud, the Surrealists rediscovered the work of Isidore Ducasse (a.k.a. Le Comte de Lautréamont), choosing as their talisman his saying: “beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.” Later this technique of juxtaposition became known as defamiliarization.

Through the practice of automatism, dream interpretation, and similar procedures Surrealists believed the wellspring of creativity could be accessed. Surrealism also embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind. Surrealists looked to so-called "primitive art" as an example of expression that is not self-censored.

Not all Surrealists subscribed to all facets of the philosophy. Historically many were not interested in political matters, and this lack of interest created rifts in the Surrealism movement.

As has been noted, André Breton initially harbored doubts that visual arts could play a part in the Surrealist movement, as they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This reluctance was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, decalomania, and Salvador Dali's paranoid-critical methods. As the idea of automatism lost sway as the main vehicle for unlocking the unconscious, the visual arts (including sculpture, painting, and film) became more acceptable.

Giorgio de Chirico was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The mysterious perspectives of Chirico’s cityscapes evoked a sense of enigma that was greatly appealing. Other paintings offer a seemingly random series of objects that anticipate the Surrealist cult of the objet trouvé.

The career of Max Ernst was the most important link between Dada and Surrealism. His “Elephant of the Celebes” draws on third-world inspiration (a granary in the Sudan). His MoMA work, “Two Children Frightened by a Nightingale,” has qualities of folk art and Sunday painting. The Surrealists anticipated the contemporary fascination with Outsider Art (produced by untrained painters, folk artists, and the mentally disturbed). The painting of the Madonna spanking Jesus may be explained by episodes in the apocryphal Infancy Gospels. Perhaps such explanations should be avoided, as they tend to limit the imagination.

Alberto Giacometti and Man Ray extended Surrealism to sculpture.

In my view the work of René Magritte is the most consistently rewarding of all the Surrealist artists. His “Threatening Weather” shows three unrelated objects floating in the air: a female torso, a tuba, and a chair. In fact the weather is fair, not threatening—suggesting that Magritte may be toying with the idea (dear to Freud) that in primordial states of language the same word could have opposite meanings. Magritte’s “Mme. Récamier” is a witty, intertextual variation on a neoclassic portrait by Jacques-Louis David.

Some hold that Surrealism need not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton. Instead it embraces a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination. Significantly, some figures not regarded as specifically Surrealist, the Picasso of the mid-1920s and the films of Jean Cocteau, have had a greater impact than most officially-sanctioned Surrealists. The case of Marcel Duchamp is more complex. As a rule Surrealist images have had more impact than Surrealist writings, which many find hermetic and unrewarding. Exceptions again occur outside the official canon, as with L.F. Céline and William Burroughs.

The following is a balance-sheet of features linking Symbolism with Surrealism:

Admiration for Mallarmé and (more enduringly) for Rimbaud.
Interest in dreams and dream-like states (the oneiric)
Enigmatic qualities
Fascination with the occult
Primitivism
Retention of realistic depiction, as against Cubism or abstraction.

At this point I need to share my own reservations about the flea-market aesthetic of the Surrealist objets trouvés. Defying as it did the imperatives of high culture, this outré accumulation must at one time have seemed daring and innovative. With the passage of time, though, the objects have come to seem dusty, shop-worn, and kitschy. From the overall mass of Surrealist work a good deal that is of value can be rescued. The satisfactions these works afford are real. But this reward can only be attained if one recognizes how much of the production is dated and trivial.

Hegel is supposed to have said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Could Symbolism have been the tragedy, Surrealism the farce? Perhaps this judgment is too harsh.

Surrealism was slow to take root in the United States. In 1937 the Museum of Modern Art stages a major exhibition. The dealer Julien Levy consistently showed and defended Surrealist works. The war brought a number of influential figures to our shores, starting with the irrepressible Salvador Dali. The painters Yves Tanguy and André Masson came, together with the “pope” of Surrealism himself, André Breton.

In their own work Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko show a convergence with Surrealism in their use of mythology (e.g. Rothko’s “Rites of Lilith”), mysterious places(“Gardens at Sochi”) and some formal devices. The connection between Surrealist exiles in World War II and the Abstract Expressionist was not so absolute as some have alleged. Still, André Masson’s automatic writing had an impact. In this way, perhaps, the bifurcation of the two Symbolist heritages—abstraction and Symbolism—was healed.

IN CONCLUSION, let us return to the problem that we noted at the beginning of the course. Symbolist writings and paintings represent a fusion of two elements: the descriptive component and that which can be merely suggested. We might say that the Symbolist formula is as follows (let D stand for description): D + ?. Surrealism retains this duality. Abstraction abolishes it.

The broader development may be regarded as a double diptych. First, the pair Symbolism-abstraction; then Surrealism-abstract expressionism.

An interesting sidelight on the problem comes from the incompleteness paradox of mathematician Kurt Gödel, which stems from 1931. Gödel began as a junior member of the Vienna Circle, a brilliant constellation of philosophers of science and mathematicians that appeared in the Austrian capital in the wake of World War I. They are also known as logical positivists. These thinkers began with the operation of demarcation, separating nonsense from sense. Unfortunately, nonsense includes all works of literature, music, and art, because they do not lend themselves to empirical verification. Once this exclusion is accomplished, though, we are left with a series of propositions that are undeniably true. Moreover, these propositions are linked to form a system. We stand, so they claim, on the verge of a Final Theory sustained by a complete inventory of every potential true statement about the world.

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem is perhaps the most celebrated result in mathematical logic. It states that

For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory can be constructed. That is, any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

Here, "theory" refers to an (infinite) set of statements, some of which are taken as true without proof (these are called axioms), and others (the theorems) that are taken as true because they are implied by the axioms. "Provable in the theory" means "derivable from the axioms and primitive notions of the theory, using standard first order logic". A theory is "consistent" if it never proves a contradiction. "Can be constructed" means that some mechanical procedure exists which can construct the statement, given the axioms, primitives, and first-order logic.

Some technical hypotheses have been omitted here; the most important one is the stipulation that the theory be computably enumerable. That is, for Gödel's theorem to be applicable, it must be possible in principle to write a computer program that, if allowed to run forever, would:
 Prove all theorems of the theory and nothing else;
 Decide whether any statement is a substitution instance of an axiom of the theory.

Gödel's second incompleteness theorem can be stated as follows:
For any formal theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

The result of these contributions was to explode logical positivism, for there can never be any complete theory of reality. Incompleteness will always subsist.

It may seem rash to compare these technical propositions of mathematical logic with Symbolism, even though the date (1931) is suggestive.

Perhaps, though, there is a larger context, one that is perennial. Symbolism, Surrealism, and the incompleteness theorems may share a common ancestry in the tradition of Pyrrhonism. This is the philosophical approach, going back to the ancient Greeks, that counsels skepticism in all things.

Lecture THIRTEEN summary

2006-12-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

[Footnote. A new book has appeared with a different take from mine last week: Ann Friedberg, The Virtual Window. A quick look suggests that this book starts with Alberti’s painting-window simile and comes down to computers, where we all rely on Windows now.].

Circles revisited

An e-mail comment from a member of the class has made me conclude that I gave short shrift to the question of circles in 20th century art. This topic we revisit in selected examples.

We start with two illustrations from the Theosophical Thought-Forms of Besant and Leadbeater. In the designs presented, ostensibly based on observation of actual auras, there seems to be an assumption that circles are inherently peaceful, even when expansive. Ovals are suited to characterize more aggressive feelings.

During the 1930s Fritz Glarner defied his guru Mondrian by imposing rectilinear forms on tondos (Mondrian had banned all circular forms).

Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor who bridged two worlds. He seems to have paid homage to the ensō in his “donut” sculpture.

Meret Oppenheim’s famous fur-lined trio is probably best regarded as a comment (in the wake of Duchamp) on the dubious commonplace that “we know something is art by the fact that it is useless.” The saucer is of course a circle.

In the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland used concentric circles.

In a different way, feminist artists explored the use of central-imagery. The work of Judy Chicago and her collaborators is a case in point.

Alice Aycock and Robert Morris combined a circular scheme with a labyrinth. In his evocative photographs of manhole covers, Mark Feldstein discovered circularity in a commonly observed (and ignored) manufactured object.

Damien Hirst’s brightly colored tondo seems to pay homage to Robert Delaunay.

Flowers and plants

Nicolas Poussin’s “Realm of Flora” summarizes idea from classical times about the origins of flowers from the deaths of beautiful young people, including Ajax (who became a carnation), Clytie (who became a sunflower), Narcissus and Hyacinth. Sir James Frazer’s ideas detecting a parallel between the dying-reviving god and the vegetation cycle still seem pertinent. It is possible that Van Gogh’s concern with sunflowers reflects knowledge of the Clytie legend. The association of cypresses with death reflects the story of Cyparissus, though the connection had become generic by the time that Arnold Boecklin used it.

Redon used flowers in a variety of contexts, especially in his later pastels. The image of Pandora seems to suggest that she is the giver of flowers—and by extension the natural world.

Flowers were important in the art nouveau because of the sense that the traditional imagery of ornament (in part based on stylized plant forms) had become sterile and repetitive. These artists rejected the radical abolitionism of Adolf Loos. Guimard’s Métro entrances are a case in point. Otto Wagner’s majolica house seems to be a witty variation on the theme of the floral window box. In his Sezession building, Olbrich used flowers to suggest the idea that renaissance (the new style) = reflorescence. The floral ornament of Gaudí and Louis Sullivan is very individual.

In the 20th century Georgia O’Keeffe made powerful use of flower imagery.

Trees and landscapes

Mondrian’s sustained studies of trees were perhaps the most important bridge in his work from realism to abstraction.

As we noted in an earlier lecture, Puvis de Chavannes’ work became a principal reference-point for the idea of arcadia. This sense was picked up by Signac and above all by Matisse in his “Joy of Life” (Barnes Collection). A different sense of arcadia appears in Kandinsky’s “Garden of Love,” where exotic fulfillment is linked with incipient abstraction (a perhaps-necessary veiling, for personal reasons).

An old theme was renewed in Central Europe in a new concept of the evocative landscape in which scenes became, as it were, mirrors of the soul. This approach began precociously with the northern landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. In his several versions of “The Isle of the Dead” the Swiss Arnold Boecklin shifted the focus of interest to the Mediterranean.

On the whole Symbolists did not seem very interested in mountainous landscapes. Yet attitudes to them reflected an important conceptual evolution. Around 1800 “mountains became ‘temples of Nature built by the Almighty’ and ‘natural cathedrals or natural altars … with their clouds resting on them as the smoke of a continual sacrifice.’ A century and a half earlier, however, they had been ‘Nature’s Shames and Ills’ and ‘Warts, Wens, Blisters, Impostumes; upon the otherwise fair face of Nature. For hundreds of years most men who climbed mountains had climbed them fearfully, grimly, resenting the slightest aesthetic gratification.” (Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Ithaca, 1959, p. 2).

For centuries the conventional wisdom was that, as much as possible, high mountains must be avoided—quite sensibly in the case of Alps in winter. Yet with the emergence of the aesthetics of the Sublime the awesomeness of mountains began to fascinate. And with the related doctrine of the picturesque mountain ranges (though generally low ones) were admired for their pleasing qualities. For some this appreciation of hills and gentle mountains was schooled by the seventeenth-century paintings of Claude Lorrain.

Mountains are prominent in the figural work of Vassily Kandinsky of a hundred years ago. In the last preabstract period of his work, the Russian artist frequently depicted hills and mountains, sometimes showing himself together with his companion Gabriele Münther, both reclining on the grassy sward. Gradually the rippling lines of the mountains became less specific, though sometimes acquiring a crowning feature in the form of idealized Russian city, with domes and bulbous turrets. In Kandinsky’s Improvisations and the early Compositions we can see the natural motifs gradually becoming less and less salient, while the dynamism of the line, originally inspired by mountains, remains.

ADDENDUM. At the intermission, the instructor shared a concern stemming from thinking about Picasso’s “Funeral of Casagemas,” a task fostered by reading the student papers. The issue is this. We customarily regard the ambiguities and enigmas of Symbolist painting as a product of deliberate choice—the story that is told and the story that is not. What if, though, in this ambitious work of a nineteen-year old Spanish painter the ambiguities are a product of immaturity?

It was posited that the unresolved tensions in the painting reflect the artist’s religious evolution--from the unproblematic Catholicism of his childhood to the skepticism that his Barcelona peers confronted him with. In this way one can account for the copresence of the sacred and the blasphemous in the painting. There are psychological issues as well, stemming from Picasso’s economic dependence on the relatively prosperous Carles Casagemas.

Lecture TWELVE summary

2006-11-29T07:19:00.000-08:00

Earlier we examined one major precursor of Symbolism, Caspar David Friedrich. Yet Friedrich began to be forgotten already in the 1830s, during his own lifetime. The affinity with the Symbolists was discovered only much later.

Not so Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). While the great majority of his almost 700 oil paintings have remained in Spain, his prints enjoyed wide circulation. Restrikes were even made after the artist’s death, and copies appeared in periodicals. Goya’s skill in this field was generally admired during the great mid-century revival of French printmaking. Preeminent among them are the 80 in his Caprichos, widely esteemed (and sometimes denounced) by 19th-century French connoisseurs. Their replicability and portability were of course major advantages. (The term capriccio is originally Italian, and serves to designate a genre in which the artist is free to allow his fantasy to roam.)

Modern scholarship has determined that Goya was in close contact with Spanish intellectuals who were influenced by the French Enlightenment. Many of his works, especially the Caprichos, have veiled political meanings.

The signature piece, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos,” lends itself to this reading. The key idea seems to be that if we allow our reason to be lulled into slumber, it will cease to be vigilant against all the chimeras that trouble mankind. However, the word sueño means both “sleep” and “dream.” In fact, the connotation “fantasy, illusion” has a history going back to 17th-century Spanish literature. In this sense the print could be read in a different way, as suggesting that, from time to time, the faculty of reason must suspend itself so as to allow room for the imagination. The imagination may take us into uncharted waters, but that is its nature.

At all events 19th-century perceptions of Goya differed from those held nowadays

The first thing to consider is the image of the Spanish national character, almost entirely created by foreigners. A prominent example is Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, and the opera Georges Bizet derived from it. A different twist appears in Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra. Note also Rimsky-Korsakov, Capriccio Espagnol. Manet executed several paintings on Spanish themes.

During the 19th century Spain was viewed as land apart, firmly separated from the true Europe by the Pyrenees. There is a grain of truth in this stereotype, in that Spain had separated itself, first by the expulsion of the Jews and Moors, which suppressed diversity, and secondly by the combined repression of throne and altar under the Counterref0rmation. Faulty economic policies, relying on the gold and silver from the Americas, prevented the formation of native industry. The result was that Spain was (in contemporary terms a third-world country, a picturesque place to visit but also an object of pity. (Needless to say, these stereotypes have nothing to do with the Spain of today, which is one of the most prosperous and progressive countries on earth. It even has gay marriage!)

In this light foreigners were likely to emphasize the exotic character of the Spanish people, who ostensibly retained quaint customs that had vanished in the rest of Europe. These foreign stereotypes had one point of contact with Spanish literature in the 19th century, and that was the costumbrismo trend. The costumbrista writers paid close attention to regional pecularities of the various parts of Spain, seeking to record them as carefully as possible. An example is Serafín Estebánez Calderón, whose Escenas andaluces (1846) captures the distinctive qualities of southern Spain.

Some confusion stems from overattention to the gypsy element. However, the gypsies (or Roma) have probably made more contributions to Spain than to any other country. This is seen in flamenco performances and, above all, in the paralanguage known as Caló.

Examination of individual caprichos reveals considerable complexity. “Watch Out for the Bogeyman” shows an ambiguous relation between the mother and the mysterious stranger. “Where is Mamma Going?” presents an obese witch and her associates who attempt aerial flight.

Like the costumbristas Goya drew upon a large store of folklore and custom. However, he felt no need to record and present this material objectively. Instead, he freely mixed the themes with his own fantasy. In later terms, he was drawing upon his own subconscious. Mérimée did not think much of the Caprichos, claiming that he was half-mad when he did them. This goes too far, but it does point to the subjective, imaginative element in these enigmatic works. In this way they are pointers to Symbolism, because they acknowledge that in any deep perception there are things we understand and things we do not.

A brief examination of works by Félicien Rops, a minor Belgian Symbolist, suggests one path that understanding (or misunderstanding) of Goya could take. His “Atheist’s Repast” resonates with Huysmans’ quest to understand diabolism in Là-bas, but in an unsubtle way that approximates to soft porn. Rops’ version of “The Temptation of St. Anthony” is particularly lurid, combining misogyny with blasphemy.

As a first approach to the matter of Symbolist themes, we return briefly to the matter of decadence. The primary reference point was the later phase of the Roman Empire, or (as it is now termed) late antiquity. Academic paintings, as by Couture and Gérôme, illustrate the prevailing concept (and were picked up by Hollywood). Yet they show no comprehension of the kind of art produced in late antiquity. Most observes thought that the question was meaningless, as the era in fact produced no art worthy of the name.

Yet connoisseurs and adventurous travelers were to prove this assertion mistaken. A case in point is the wall frieze of the Virgins from Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (ca. 549). This impressive composition shows two types of stylization. One stems from the staccato rhythm of the figures, whose swaying bodies are similar, but not identical. The other pattern is produced by the thousands of tiny cubes in glass and metal (tesserae), which produce a grid-like effect, not unlike the Divisionism of some neo-Impressionists. Another example is the bust of the Emperor Licinius, where the artist employs distortion in order to convey the charisma of the sitter. The effect anticipates Expressionism.

Even more unexpected was the abstract jewelry of the Migration peoples. The splendid technique fibula we examined shows an affinity with art nouveau jewelry. One of the byproducts of the rediscovery of late antique art was a reinforcement of the new standing of the so-called applied arts. The theory of this stylized and abstract art was first expounded in a monograph of 1901 by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl.

As the last in this group we examined a small reliquary of St. Demetrius, an exquisite example of Byzantine cloisonné enamel.

The last piece stems from the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. The new science of comparative religion fostered analysis of difference within religions (though this is still neglected today, as some claim to be the sole representatives of the true version of their religion.

Traditionally, the imagery of religion and mythology was limited to two great repertoires, the classical and the Biblical (or Judeo-Christian). However, the new approaches added Indian, Germanic, and Celtic mythology. Odilon Redon paid homage to the last in his “Druidess,” whom he may have perceived as an avatar of “roots” in the sense of “nos ancêtres les Gaulois.”

Circles and spheres

Research has shown that a particular gesture may have one meaning in one culture, while it possesses a different, perhaps opposite meaning in another culture. In Italy for example the gesture corresponding to the Anglo-American one signifying “come here” (that is, one hand placed in the air with the fingers retreating back to the body) in fact means “good-bye.”

The meaning of gestures may even vary within cultures. Take for example the circle formed by the thumb and forefinger of one hand. This may either mean something like “A-OK,” that isn’t all is well, or it may be a goose egg, an indicator of nullity. Thus when a student emerges after an examination flashing this gesture, the student’s friends can only interpret it by the supplementary information supplied by the examinee's face. Accompanied by a big smile, it means, “I aced it.” Accompanied by a frown, it indicates failure.

During Greek classical times the circle was associated with perfection, as seen in the circular plan of the ideal capital of Plato’s Atlantis. Because of practical problems, cities are rarely laid out this way. Historically, however, a number of Islamic cities, including Baghdad at the time of its founding by al-Mansur, had a circular layout.

While there are a few square haloes, generally for living people, the Western convention is for the halos of saints to be round.

That our associations with the circle are not universal is shown by the Japanese ensō, the product of the stylization of the image of Bodhidharma, the founder of the Zen sect. The ensō is generally slightly irregular, showing the join where the brush began and where it ended, thus preserving a human touch.

During the Renaissance the circle generally connoted ideal perfection. A Renaissance tondo, such as the one comprising Raphael’s "Madonna della Sedia," seems to complement the holiness of the figures. The domes of central plan buildings, as in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, have a similar effect. For centuries, as assumed in the Robert Fludd diagram, it was assumed that the planets must move in circular orbits. It was only Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century who proved that their orbits are parabolic ellipses. (Fludd’s illustrator may be claimed as the first to produce an all-black image, in the first of his Creation series.)

We turn now to the sphere. During the Middle Ages a special sphere, the orb, was an item of imperial regalia, signifying universal domination.

An early enigmatic version of the sphere appears in Dürer’s “Melancholia I“ of 1514 (not shown in class). The image of Lust by Pieter Brueghel the Elder shows a negative image of a circular building. In Jacques De Gheyn’s “Vanitas” (Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, pl. 11), the bubbles rising on the left signify transience. Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s bubbles provide a more playful version.

Ambiguity inheres in the circles and spheres found in Symbolist paintings. In the work of Odilon Redon circles appear in various guises: a well, the sun, a bull’s eye window. Circles, some elongated into ovals, sometimes constitute a kind of simulated opening in the surface out of which enigmatic heads project or peer out. Redon’s spheres are generally mysterious. In some instances he qualifies them to produce eyeballs or balloons. Elongated they form egg-like shapes, and these can be modified with human features so as to produce severed heads.

Two prominent circles, both truncated, dominate the background of the signature work of Fernand Khnopff, “I Lock My Door Upon Myself.”

Turning to abstract work circles, either complete or segments of them, are major features of the Orphic work of Robert Delaunay. A connection with scientific theory is implied by the use of circles in paintings by Kupka.

The art glass from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Coonley Playhouse features a number of circles, as do some paintings in the later, hardedge oeuvre of Vassily Kandinsky. .

The window theme

Windows constitute an essential feature of dwellings and public buildings. Or at least they should. It is to be hoped that the depressing practice of erecting school buildings without windows, common some years ago, has been abandoned. By contrast some modern buildings are sheathed completely in glass, and thus “all windows.” In these structures the glass is usually transparent on the inside and opaque to the outside. Few of us would like to live in a building in which our windows were always open to the prying eyes of others. That, interestingly enough, is the premise of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1919), where the dictator requires that the activities of all the residents of his ideal city be seen at windows at all times (except for brief periods when sexual activity is permitted).

In our culture the idea of the window has taken on significant metaphorical functions. Thus we may speak of the eyes as “windows of the soul” and a “window into the mind of Shakespeare.” The window represents liminality, a passage from one realm to another. We may think of this window as either transparent or opaque.

Roman wall paintings from Pompeii and Boscoreale show an interesting series of variations on the fictive windows. It may be also that the simulated easel paintings in that context were regarded as having a window-like quality.

Caspar David Friedrich used windows in several different contexts.

In actual buildings the stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals are spectacular examples. They host a variety of fascinating colored lights, while barring any detailed access to the outside. They are translucent not transparent, so that only the light tells us that there is something beyond the glassy surface. Instead of views, we get images of Christ, the Virgin, the Apocalypse and the saints. The stained-glass windows thus present immediate renderings of things that spiritually they “open out to.”

This medieval concept of the window has appealed to a number of modern artists. Odilon Redon produced a number of pastels exploiting the rich colorism of the windows, while veiling the subject matter. Together with other followers of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones produced an important series of designs for actual stained-glass windows. The abstract artist František Kupka derived some interesting paintings from his inspection of the stained-glass windows of the Cathedral of Chartres.

Some background will be useful. As noted above, the illusionistic frescoes of Pompeii, whether large architectural vistas or simulated easel paintings, presuppose a notion of the transparency of the wall, which becomes a membrane through which one views figures and landscapes. Unaware of this precedent but knowledgeable about similar practices in his own time, Leon Battista Alberti formulated the equation of the picture with the window in his De pictura of 1435. During the baroque period this idea was expanded to devote whole ceilings to heavenly vistas (as in the church of Il Gesu in Rome).

Some artists of the nineteenth century challenged this concept of the smooth, “invisible” membrane by deliberately enlivening the picture plane with visible brushwork and rough surfaces. In this way they blocked the illusionistic effect. An interesting device, common in the late nineteenth century and continued in the early abstract work of Kandinsky, is to paint the frame. In this way the dichotomy between frame and the illusion it surrounds is elided.

An early poem by Mallarmé is “The Windows” of 1863. This Symbolist writer occasionally evokes them in other works.

During the early ‘teens of the twentieth century one of the major themes of the Orphist Robert Delaunay was the view from his window in Paris. Some show the Eiffel Tower, to which he devoted a number of independent works.

Particularly striking are two examples of windows by Henri Matisse done during his summer vacations at Collioure in the South of France. In the first, from 1905, the large French windows open to reveal a pleasant jangle of Fauve colors. In 1914 he returned to the theme. Now, however, the view from the window is a great block of black pigment. Perhaps significantly, this work was created at the very end of the Belle Epoque, the year of the outbreak of World War I.

Marcel Duchamp created a “real” French door.

Lecture ELEVEN summary

2006-11-21T20:02:00.000-08:00

STEPHANE MALLARME (1842-1898).

As an adolescent, he learned English in order to read Poe, traveling to London to improve his knowledge. This background qualified him for his profession as an English teacher. In his early years there was not enough money, requiring him to supplement his income with publishing tasks. In addition to his standing as the supreme French Symbolist poet, Mallarmé exercised influence through his salons, gatherings of intellectuals on Tuesday evenings. For many years, those in the know regarded the sessions in his apartment on the rue de Rome as the heart of Paris intellectual life, with W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many more in attendance. In this main room, filled with ciagar smoke, Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king.

His earlier work owes much to the example by Charles Baudelaire. Yet Mallarmé’s mature style anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist movements, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored. But whereas much of this latter work was concerned principally with form, Mallarmé's work engaged the interplay of style and content. This is particularly evident in the highly innovative “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard” (A roll of the dice will never abolish chance) of 1897, his last major poem. This work, which opened the way for concrete poetry, displays a kind of figure/ground interplay, in which the blank spaces seem as important as the text.

Unlike Baudelaire, Zola, and Huysmans, Mallarmé declined to write formal Salon critiques, though he was closely engaged with contemporary painting. He and Manet were neighbors, and for ten years the poet visited the artist in his studio almost daily. The poet wrote three pieces defending his friend (the longest appearing in English in a London art monthly). The two friends collaborated on an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Mallarmé also wrote on Whistler and Berthe Morisot (a catalogue for her posthumous exhibition). Artists were welcome at the poet’s Salons.

Coming to terms with Mallarmé is one of the most challenging tasks in the whole history of Western literature. He is a supremely “difficult” poet. Sometimes, in my frustration with him, I have thought that I had rather succumb to a bad case of the ‘flu than to have to confront those darned poems one more time. All the same, he is the indispensable linchpin of the Symbolist Movement. There is no way getting around him.

At first the concision of his corpus seems help. Quantitatively speaking, he was surely the least productive of all major poets. The oeuvre that he approved for collection amounts to a little more than 100 pages. Scholars have augmented this total several times with other poems, published and unpublished, and juvenilia.

As one might expect, a mountain of scholarship has accumulated to decode the work. Some hold that this endeavor goes contrary to Mallarmé’s intention, which was to create “open” works that defy any complete resolution. At all events, it is imperative to look at his work in French (with the helpful crib afforded by the bilingual Oxford volume), for much turns upon relations of sound and sense that are integral to that language. But take heart: someone remarked that it would have been better if Mallarmé had written his poems in German!

As the Blackmores remark, "[f]or him … the vital role of poetry was to purge language of its everyday setting.” In this he indicated one of the main paths of defamiliarization or estrangement, that deliberate departure from everything ordinary, indeed everything that we normally expect, that is characteristic of the most challenging twentieth-century poets, such as Eliot and Pound, George and Rilke. In Mallarmé’s case, the achievement is all the more remarkable in that he keeps to standard verse forms. The subversion of language—which the poet would call a return to its true nature—takes place on the deepest level

All things considered, it must be acknowledged that Mallarmé is one of the French poets most difficult to translate. The conventional wisdom ascribes this difficulty to the inherently vague nature of much of his work, but this explanation is a simplification. Close reading of his work in the original French reveals that the role of sound relationships between the words in the poetry equals, or even surpasses, the standard meanings of the words themselves. This principle may generate new meanings in the spoken text which are not evident on reading the work on the page. It is this aspect of the work that eludes translation (especially when attempting a more literal fidelity to the words as well), since it arises from ambiguities residing in the phonology of the spoken French language. It may be that this “pure sound” aspect of his poetry that has led to its inspiring musical compositions, and to its direct comparison with music. This method also anticipates that of abstract painting in the early 20th century.

A good example of this play of sound appears in Roger Pearson's book Unfolding Mallarmé, in his analysis of the “Sonnet en '-yx'.” The poem opens with the phrase “ses purs ongles” (her pure nails), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words “c'est pur son” (it's pure sound'\). This use of homophony, along with resulting relationships and layers of meanings, is simply impossible to capture accurately through translation.

As the high priest of modern poetry, Mallarmé seems formidable for the reasons stated. However, he had a lighter side. For eleven months he edited a ladies’ fashion magazine, writing the contributions under female pseudonyms. Much of his poetic work is occasional, and therefore more approachable. In the end, though, one comes back the fearsome, hermetic Scriptures of modern poetry-—the core oeuvre.

The Introduction to the Oxford volume provides a useful discussion of the poet’s commitment to suggestion, nuance, and the thing not said. In a famous sentence Mallarmé formulated the 25/75 rule. Mere statement or “naming” affords only one-quarter—25%--of the value of a poem. By contrast, the other 75% provides the true measure of the enjoyment and appreciation of the poem. In that 75%, or so it seems to me, lies the essence of the Symbolist quest. Its exact content, of course, Mallarmé does not divulge. “Those who say, don’t know; those who know, don’t say.”

One should examine the poems for references to decadence (esp. pp.83-85) and nothingness (le néant; cf. p. 20). Mallarmé remarked that “destruction is my Beatrice.”

Mallarmé’s take on the Salome-Herodias theme is very different from that of other writers. For the demonic temptress, the poet substitutes an icon figure—perhaps an icon of the artistic challenge as such.

“The Windows” p. 10-13, offers parallels with Symbolist paintings.

In “The Demon of Analogy” (p. 88ff.) Mallarmé defends “accidental” relations of words. In his view, these links are not accidental at all, but take us into the realm of the essences of words. The poet preferred traditional verse forms, but in his affirmation of the “secret” links of words, he was farseeing. He implicitly posited the concept of the poem as an artifact, not dependent on relations with the outside world. The instructor offered a tentative English-language parallel: the word “word” encloses the word “or,” suggesting the inherent variability of word choices.

Mallarmé's poetry has elicited several musical pieces, notably Claude Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (1894), a free interpretation of Mallarmé's poem “L'après-midi d'un faune” (1876), which creates powerful impressions by the use of striking but isolated phrases. Maurice Ravel set Mallarmé's poetry to music in "Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé" (1913). Other composers to use his poetry in song include Darius Milhaud ("Chansons bas de Stéphane Mallarmé," 1917) and Pierre Boulez ("Pli selon pli," 1957-62).

The contemporary Belgian visual artist Marcel Broodthaers was strongly influenced by Mallarmé, as evidenced by his “Un coup de dés,” based on the typographical layout of Mallarmé, but with the words blacked over by bars.

PROSE WRITERS

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS (1848-1907).

For details of the writer’s biography, see Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, which has just been reissued by Dedalus Press.

Through most of his adult life Joris-Karl Huysmans produced art criticism. In a recent collection this amounts to almost 600 pages. In this way he “discovered” Gustave Moreau four years before assigning him a starring role in Against Nature.

As it happens, though, Huysmans’ most important discovery in art did not concern a contemporary artist, but one who had lived in the 16th century. In an 1888 tour of Germany he was deeply affected by seeing Grünewald’ “Crucifixion” in the Kassel Gallery. “Never before had realism attempted such a subject; never before had a painter explored the divine charnel house so thoroughly, or dipped his brush so brutally in running sores and bleeding wounds. It was outrageous and it was horrifying. Grünewald was the most daring of realists, without a doubt; but as one gazed upon this Redeemer of the doss-house, this God of the morgue, thee was wrought a change. Gleams of light filtered from the ulcerous head; a superhuman radiance illumined the gangrenous flesh and the tortured features.” Later, Huysmans traveled to Colmar, where he saw Grünewald’s masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece. Huysmans is generally credited with reviving interest in this hitherto obscure artist. In their turn, Grunewald’s works have presided over a major trend of 20th century art, Expressionism. They proved to be tragically attuned to the bloodiest of centuries, the 20th.

Grünewald makes an appearance in chapter one of La-bas. Like Against Nature, La-bas is a “bachelor novel.” Yet the hero, Durtal, is much more sociable and reasonable than Des Esseintes. There is a kind of book within the book, because Durtal is writing a study of Gilles de Rais, the 15th-century Bluebeard. His researches lead him to discover a group of Satanists in Paris (the Black Mass scene).

After this Huysmans accomplished his final reinvention as a novelist, one that is imbued with his newfound Catholicism.

AUGUSTE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE ADAM (1838-1889).

The bizarre details of his life seem almost more fascinating than his works. He was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, to a distinguished aristocratic family. His parents, Marquis Joseph-Toussaint and Marie-Françoise were not rich, however, and were financially supported by Marie's aunt, Mademoiselle de Kerinou. His father became obsessed with the idea he could restore the family fortune by finding the lost treasure of the Knights of Malta, reputedly buried near Quintin during the French Revolution. Consequently, he spent large sums of money buying land, excavating it and then selling it at a loss when he failed to find anything of value.

The young Villiers' education was troubled (he attended over half a dozen different schools) but from an early age his family were convinced he was an artistic genius: as a child he composed poetry and music.

In 1860 his aunt gave him enough money to allow him to live in Paris permanently. He had already acquired a reputation in literary circles for his inspired, alcohol-fuelled monologues. Some held that, like Oscar Wilde, he was more talented as a conversationalist than a writer. Villiers began living a Bohemian life, frequenting the Brasserie des Martyrs, where he met his idol Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

His attempts at securing a suitable bride for himself would all end in failure. In 1867, he asked Théophile Gautier for the hand of his daughter Estelle, but Gautier--who had turned his back on the Bohemian world of his youth and would not let his child marry a writer with few prospects--turned him down. His plans for marriage to an English heiress, Anna Eyre Powell, were equally unsuccessful. Villiers finally took to living with Marie Dantine, the illiterate widow of a Belgian coachman. In 1881, she gave birth to Villiers' son, Victor (nicknamed "Totor").

A high point of Villiers' life was his trip to see his hero Richard Wagner at Triebschen in 1869. Villiers read from the manuscript of his play La Révolte and the composer declared that the Frenchman was a "true poet".

Disaster came in 1871 with the death of Villiers' aunt, and the end of her financial support. Though Villiers had many admirers in literary circles (the most important being his close friend Stéphane Mallarmé), mainstream newspapers found his fiction too eccentric to be saleable and few theaters shied away from his plays. Villiers was forced to take odd jobs to support his family: he gave boxing lessons and apparently worked in a funeral parlor and as a mountebank's assistant for a time. Another money-making scheme Villiers considered was reciting his poetry to a paying public in a cage full of tigers, but he later thought better of the idea.

According to his friend Léon Bloy, Villiers was so poor he had to write most of his novel L'Eve future lying on his belly on bare floorboards because the bailiffs had taken away all the furniture. His poverty only increased his sense of aristocratic pride. In 1875, he attempted to sue a playwright he believed had insulted one of his ancestors, Maréchal Jean de Villiers de l'Isle Adam. In 1881, Villiers stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the legitimist party. By the 1880s, there was some change in fortune: Villiers' fame began to grow, but not his finances. The publishers Calmann-Lévy accepted his Contes cruels, but the sum they offered Villiers was negligible. The volume did, however, come to the attention of J.-K. Huysmans, who praised Villiers' work in his highly influential novel A rebours. But by this time, Villiers was dying of stomach cancer.

Villiers' works, which owe a good deal to the Gothick tradition, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror. Important among them are the drama Axel (1890), the novel L'Ève future ("The Eve of the Future,” 1886), and the short-story collection, Contes cruels (1883).

The novel L'Ève future concerns Lord Ewald, a wealthy Englishman, who discovers his ideal beloved during a train journey. There was a problem, though, as her trivial mind does not match her sublime exterior. To solve this problem, he visits his friend Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, who agrees to create an android which will be an exact replica of the woman, with the proper spiritual sensitivity within. Unfortunately, the replica is lost when Lord Ewald returns by sea to England. In this novel Villiers coined the term “android" (andréide in French

Villiers held that the imagination has within it much more beauty than reality itself, existing at a level which nothing real could compare.

Axël was the work Villiers considered his masterpiece, although critical opinion has often been reluctant to agree with him, placing far higher value on his fiction. Villiers began work on the piece around 1869 and had still not put the finishing touches to it when he died. It was first published posthumously in 1890. The play is heavily influenced by the Romantic theatre of Victor Hugo, as well as Goethe's Faust and the music dramas of Richard Wagner. The play's most famous line is Axël's "Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous" ("Living? Our servants will do that for us"). Edmund Wilson used the title Axel's Castle for his study of early Modernist literature.

EDOUARD DUJARDIN (1861–1949)

Despite the fact that he was a minor writer, Dujardin ranks as the inventor of the literary technique known as stream of consciousness.

Dujardin became editor for the journal Revue Indépendente in 1886, and it was here that his first works were published. His participation in this journal resulted in it being recognized as an important voice for the symbolists. Thus Dujardin was a kind of facilitator or manager of Symbolism.

His landmark work is a short novel of 1888, Les lauriers sont coupés. The work traces the movements of the hero Daniel Prince in Paris during one evening, between between 6 PM and 12:30 AM. Dujardin takes us into the mind of the hero, and we see and hear everything as it registers in his awareness. This is the method of the stream of consciousness. James Joyce was a great admirer of this work, and he utilized the method in Ulysses, especially in the thoughts of Leopold Blum and the famous concluding monologue of Molly Bloom. Others who have followed Dujardin in using this device are Virginia Woolf (The Waves), William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, and Carlos Fuentes. One could almost say that modern prose fiction could not exist without Dujardin’s method of the stream of consciousness.

Something of a dandy, Dujardin had expensive tastes in clothing, and was a familiar figure in Parisian nightlife. His many romantic flings were noted and he had had numerous relationships with actresses, models, and other glamorous women.

His literary works are extensive and include numerous plays, poems and novels. In his later years Dujardin dabbled in far-out theories about the origins of Judaism and Christianity

GEORGES RODENBACH (1855-1898).

He was born in Tournai and went to school in Ghent, where he became friends with the poet Emile Verhaeren. Rodenbach worked as a lawyer and journalist. He spent the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the Journal de Bruxelles, and was an intimate of Edmond de Goncourt. He published eight collections of verse and four novels, as well as short stories, stage works and criticism. He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealism of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth.

In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counseling, dissuading from and prompting action. The novel concerns the grief that the hero experiences at the death of his beloved wife Marie. In his rambles through the city he meets another woman, Mariette, who seems just like Marie, but is frivolous and unfaithful. The novel was turned into an opera by Erich Korngold (performed this fall at the City Opera).

MAURICE MAETERLINCK (1862-1949).

While he made his debut as a Symbolist poet, Maeterlinck’s main activity was as a playwright. Of the original group he was the only Symbolist to have won the Nobel Prize in literature (1911). (Yeats received the Prize in 1923.)

Maeterlinck’s masterpiece is the play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892). It is set at an indeterminate place during an indeterminate period. It seems to be somewhere on the border between France and the Dutch-speaking area; it is medieval, or is it Renaissance? We first discover Mélisande weaping by a fountain. Her origins are never explained—a mystery within an enigma. Against these indeterminate features Maeterlinck tells his story of the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters.

The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Nowadays even better known than the play is the opera by Claude Debussy (1902), which builds upon the Symbolist features of the play adding music that is perfectly suited to it, and thereby creating a composite work of art, one of the ultimate aspirations of the period. Earlier, in 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for the play, from which he later extracted a suite. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius also wrote incidental music for it in 1905. The story is also the basis for the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s early symphonic poem "Pelleas und Melisande" of 1902-03.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939).

When Yeats was young, his family moved first from Sandymount, County Dublin, to County Sligo, and then to London, to enable his father John to further his career as an artist. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother, who was homesick for Sligo, entertained them with stories and folktales from her county of birth.

Yeats' early work tended to focus on the Romantic style, based on Irish lore, best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight. During the ‘nineties, coached by his friend Arthur Symonds, he attached himself to Symbolism. In his forties, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style. In this way Yeats was a bridge from Symbolism to Modernism.

Even before he began to write poetry, Yeats had come to associate poetry with religious ideas and thoughts of sentimental elements. Describing his childhood in later years, he described his "one unshakable belief" as "whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone... I thought ... that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world."

Yeats' early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore. His first significant publication was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). The long title poem was based on the poems of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.

His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. The Yeats family had returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 Yeats co-founded the Rhymer's Club with Ernest Rhys. This was a group of like-minded poets who met regularly and published anthologies in 1892 and 1894.

Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, and astrology. He read extensively on these subjects all through his life. In 1885, he and friends formed the Dublin Hermetic Order. This society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats in the chair. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened with the involvement of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee. Yeats attended his first séance the following year.

Throughout his life Yeats' mystical inclinations--informed by the writings of Swedenborg and Hindu religion (Yeats translated The Ten Principal Upanishads, 1938) with Shri Purohit Swami), theosophical beliefs, and the occult--formed much of the basis of late poetry. After his marriage, he and his wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs. Yeats contacting a spirit guide she called "Leo Africanus."

GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946).

Born into a talented German-Jewish family, Gertrude Stein had the good fortune to study with William James at Harvard. After 1903 she lived mainly in Paris, forming a durable partnership with Alice B. Toklas.

Three Lives (1909), Stein’s first published book, was begun in 1905, before she had absorbed the full lesson of Picasso and the Cubists. Easily accessible and full of human interest, Three Lives does not provide an adequate measure of Stein’s capacity for innovation. Written in 1912 and published two years later, Tender Buttons, is a remarkable advance, facilitated by her contacts with the Parisian milieu. This little book is a landmark, since it is one of the first literary works in any language to provide a plausible counterpart for Abstraction.

The first part, on objects shows a remarkable similarity to her friend Picasso’s Cubist still lifes of the same period. Both may have been influenced by the bodegones of the Spanish baroque (e.g. the example seen by Sánchez-Cotán)

In writing the book she said she “needed to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening.” Note the synaesthesia motif. Elaborating on this point Stein noted that it was her “first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense and eliminating rhythm.” The last phrase seems to men that she renounced poetry in all of its forms, as prose was challenging enough.

As a first approach, it is best to read Tender Buttons in small sections. Nonetheless, it has a tripartite structure: objects, food, and room. Together these themes evoke Stein’s coupled, domestic life with Alice B. Toklas. More generally, they pertain to “woman’s sphere,” as conceived of a hundred years ago. (Some have detected sexual themes here and there, with hidden anatomical references.)

Broadly speaking, the book may be said to be about similarity and nonsimilarity, and about causation and noncausation. The first is shown in the unusual juxtapositions, possibly following Lautréamont’s talisman: “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine on an operating table.”

Several stylistic devices put causality into question. The frequent use of the word “and” implies contiguity but not necessarily anything more. And the omission of question marks in sentences that seem to be questions, elides these sentences into a uniform whole. Declarative sentences and questions are all one thing. The suppression of the difference implies the zetematic (questioning) nature of reality.

Lecture TEN Symmary

2006-11-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

THE FOUNDATION: SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURECHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867).

Baudelaire ranks as the protopoet of Symbolism. This designation can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, he is the precursor, the John the Baptist as it were of the movement. On the other hand, he is the first in the series, crystallizing some of the quintessential features of the movement.

The pote's biological father, who was elderly when he was married, died when his son was only five. Throughout his life Baudelaire remained closely attached to his mother.

As he showed no sign of taking up a profession, he mother (who had remarried) sent him on a voyage to India (1841). However, he jumped ship at Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, and returned to France. Then he returned to France. Afterwards he never traveled outside of France and Belgium.

On reaching twenty-one he came into his father’s inheritance, which he proceeded to squander on the proverbial wine, women, and song-—as well as paintings (he was a small-time collector and dealer). His mother, alarmed at his accumulating debts, placed him on a tiny monthly allowance, administered by a strict lawyer. These sums were never enough, and much of Baudelaire’s life was spent in scrounging together an existence. It may be that he would never have written much, except for the need to earn money. That this activity was never sufficient is a commentary on the way in which modern society starves its creative figures.

One should remember that Baudelaire’s first public identity was as an art critic. He debuted with his Salon of 1845, when he was only twenty-four. Painting was his love as a consumer (and for a time as a quasi-dealer), more perhaps than literature. (Offering little private recitals for friends, he was already a closet poet, but this activity was not generally known.) His biological father had been an artist, though a mediocre one, and Baudelaire had practiced drawing as a child.

In this first Salon Baudelaire says he will be impartial, contradicting this assertion the following year with the triple-P declaration: “partial, passionate, and political.”

His reliance on the neologism modernité (Chateaubriand, Balzac) becomes salient in the second Salon (1846).

He views Delacroix as the consummate artist, the most original of all time. By rallying to this great Romantic he hitched his wagon to a star. For Baudelaire Delacroix excelled both in color (the conventional wisdom) but also in drawing. This commitment lead to conflict with his theories, to which the artist’s work only partially conformed. Much of Delacroix’s work is literary and historical, such as the “Barque of Dante” (1822). . Thus there remained a serious problem: how to reconcile Delacroix’s subjects-—ancient, medieval, Orientalist-—with the ideal of modernity. The answer he eventually came up with is that modernity is a sentiment not a straight-jacket. But not everyone will agree that the definition of modernity can be so elastic.

A chance find in a periodical (a translation of the story “The Black Cat”) led to a life-long obsession with Edgar Allan Poe, whom he seems to have regarded as a literary counterpart to Delacroix. Baudelaire spent sixteen years translating the American writer. Poe too was not limited to modern subjects.

Baudelaire’s concern with beauty was matched by his interest in caricature. The yoking together of beauty and ugliness was to become characteristic in his poetry. The intersection of beauty and ugliness is rooted in the modern city, and Baudelaire’s understanding of this inseparability is one of the features that make him THE pioneering modernist in poetry.

This perception of the fusion of beauty and ugliness is not unproblematic. A notorious example is the poem “La Charogne” (The Carcass). Here Baudelaire recalls going out one morning with his mistress on a walk, where they came upon a carcass (apparently of a horse or donkey). The legs of the beast are thrust up into the air like a “lecherous whore.” The effect of the light on the oozing carcass is striking. There is also a sinister synaesthesia—the combination of the odor with the buzzing of the flies. At the end, the poet rudely says to his companion that she too will be like that one day. Several mitigating considerations may be suggested. The last comment might belong to the “world enough and time” category. Let us enjoy each other while we can. But why doesn’t the poet indicate that he too will be that way. After all, the theme of the medieval and Renaissance memento mori is that this fate awaits us all (illustrated with the predella of Masaccio’s Trinity). Also, Rembrandt and others had previously explored the counterintuitive aesthetic interest of the dead carcass of an animal. When all is said, though, this poem remains unpleasantly transgressive. It reveals an almost boundless capacity for disgust, one that the writer has not brought fully under control.

As the two later Salons show, Baudelaire’s praise of originality in art came to be tempered by the acknowledgement that all truly successful works must have both an eternal and a transitory aspect. For this reason his essay on Constantin Guys, who was exclusively present-minded, fails to convince.

Let us turn now to a theme of special interest to this course. The “mystical” Baudelaire is not present in the first two Salons of ’45 and ‘46. That seems to have crystallized ca. 1852. The Salon of 1859 has some indications (the word specialité), and perhaps more generally in the sovereign role ascribed to the imagination (“the queen of the faculties”). The imagination now supersedes imitation of nature—and perhaps modernity as well.

Swedenborg, at first mediated by Balzac, was the principle source of Baudelaire’s mystical ideas of analogy. This is shown by the adoption of the term “correspondence” (poem no. 4 in Les Fleurs). However, Swedenborg himself depended on older ideas, as seen in his striking evocation of the microcosm-macrocosm idea. Here the cosmos is compared to a gigantic human being (a theme already illustrated in Les Tres Riches Heures, ca. 1416). It has been argued that Baudelaire’s interest in mysticism is grounded more generally in the rhetorical theory of analogy, which goes back to Antiquity. At all events, care must be taken not to exaggerate the role of this interest-—even though it was of supreme importance to the Symbolists.

The death of Delacroix in 1863 was a great shock. After his passing we had entered into the decrepitude of art (as he tactlessly remarked to Manet). This historical pessimism is sometimes termed “declinism.” Compare the relationship of Vasari to Michelangelo. Vasari too believed that with the death of his hero art could only decline.

In Les Fleurs du Mal the link with art takes the form of a series of ekphrasis poems, evoking paintings and sculptures, whether real or imaginary. The “real” sources are generally minor works, such as sculptures by Ernest Christophe, suggesting that they were merely pretexts for the poem.

The sixth poem in the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) is entitled “Les Phares” (“The Beacons”). Here he cites eight artists of particular importance, allocating a quatrain to each. The artists are (in the order given) Rubens, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Goya, and Delacroix. As it is not chronological, the sequence seems hard to understand, though perhaps these figures are intended as precursors of Baudelaire’s idol, Delacroix. Otherwise, the octet is admirably balanced. There are two Netherlandish artists, two Italians, one Spaniard, and three Frenchmen. Three media--painting, printmaking, and sculpture--are covered. Three of the artists are “twofers,” active in two media. Michelangelo was both a sculptor and a painter. And while Rembrandt and Goya were major painters, Baudelaire probably owed his acquaintance to them mainly through their prints. Baudelaire recognized the distinction between the linear and painterly modes, which was based ultimately on the contrast between the disegno of Renaissance Florence and the colore of Venice. The eight all adhere to the painterly mode. Significantly, Baudelaire begins with Rubens, the standard-bearer in the ca. 1700 battle over whether Rubens or Poussin was the ideal painter. In 1708 the critic Roger de Piles had hedged; not so Baudelaire. His worthies are all from the Rubéniste camp.

Such lists have a considerable history, of which Baudelaire was only partially aware.

The template stems from the poet Ludovico Ariosto, who formerly enjoyed an almost universal esteem. Cantos 32 and 33 of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (final version, 1532) concern the Castle of Tristan, remarkable for its murals that prophetically illustrate future events. In order to illustrate the power of artists, the poet gives two lists: a somewhat hypothetical ancient Greek one (derived from Pliny the Elder) and a modern Italian one. The latter ranks as the first ”beacon list” I have been able to find. Here it is: Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Bellini, the two Dossi brothers, Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo, Raphael, and Titian. All are Italian.

In a theoretical treatise of 1590 the Milanese artist and writer Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo selected seven top artists, correlated with the seven planets and seven metals. Lomazzo’s supremes are Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Polidoro Caravaggio (these last two are local luminaries), Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, and Titian. Along with Michelangelo, these last four would certainly still command assent.

When Lomazzo’s treatise was published in an English rendering in 1598, the translator added the names of English artists, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. The adaptation and recreation of the lists in Northern Europe shows a process of gradual internationalization, the results of which are fully evident in Baudelaire’s latter-day roster.

Despite the “Correspondences” so beloved of the later Symbolists, critics of the poems tend to ignore Baudelaire’s mystical side. The conventional wisdom is that Baudelaire is the poet of modernity and subjectivity, who works out his destiny in the modern city, with all its grandeur and squalor. As we have seen, the theme of the union of beauty and ugliness is highlighted in “La Charogne.”

What makes Baudelaire most modern, at least in the sense of a precursor, is his incipient challenge to the venerable doctrine of the harmony of levels of style. According to this view there are three literary modes: the elevated, the middling, and the low. Each of these situations calls for a distinctive use of language. (We still have survivals of the idea, as seen in the shock that greeted Cheney’s admonition to Senator Leahy that he perform an act of contortionist sexuality on himself.)

Marked by his immersion in a modern metropolis, Baudelaire attends to the contrasts it affords. Still, in Les Fleurs du Mal, he clings to the constraints of the standard apparatus of French poetry. The aesthetic of his late poems in prose foregrounds more frankly the “somersaults” required by modern urban living.

With the passage of time we can identify several downsides of Baudelaire’s poetry. 1) Embedded in Les Fleurs du Mal are three minicycles, devoted to the women in his life. Even seen in the most charitable light, his relationships with women can only be regarded as neurotic. He sees them as inextricable from the pervasiveness of le Mal. Interestingly, the cycle of poems was originally to be entitled Les Lesbiennes. No one is quite sure why. He ended up with three poems about female same-sex love, but that is hardly enough to establish the theme of the whole. 2) Baudelaire is much taken with a kind of bargain-basement Satanism, le Mal again. He is tormented by a sense of guilt and the horrors that it portends. To be sure, this preoccupation lends drama—as in the last poem of the enlarged edition, where he accepts the abyss, whether “it leads to Heaven or Hell.” This preoccupation is connected with his pervasive depression, his spleen or ennui. Still, most modern readers find this obsession with damnation hard to accept. (Interestingly, in one poem he identifies le Mal with le Néant, nothingness, a term that is to enjoy a considerable fortune.)

By the way, was Baudelaire really the first modern poet in any language? Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass precedes him by two years, and is more innovative metrically. (Baudelaire knew Poe, of course, as well as Emerson and Longfellow, but not Whitman.)

In summary Baudelaire faces in two directions, towards tradition and towards the future. His involvement with the city of Paris is emblematic. He grew up in a still half-medieval city, but he lived to see most of the transformations effected by Haussmann.

PAUL VERLAINE (1844-1896).

Born in Metz, Paul Verlaine was educated at a lycée in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Charles Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1867), though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.

Verlaine's private life spills over into his work, beginning with his love for Mathilde Mauté, who was a disciple of Louise Michel, a radical leader. Mauté became Verlaine's wife. At first Mathilde seemed the more interesting of the two, for her husband came across as a kind of accountant. This perception would soon change.

In September of 1871 Verlaine received the first letter from the stripling Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872 he had lost interest in Mathilde and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover, a situation that had a devastating effect on the insecure and overemotional Verlaine. He now became a heavy drinker, and shot Rimbaud in a jealous rage, wounding him, but not mortally. Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating medico-legal examination, including his intimate correspondence with his lover and the accusations of Verlaine's wife about the nature of their relationship. Jailed for 18 months, Verlaine produced some of his best poetry in confinement. He returned to Catholicism, a change which influenced his work (and earned him the vicious mockery of the inconstant Rimbaud.)

After his release from prison, Verlaine traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher and produced another successful collection, Sagesse, this one heavily religious. He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, became infatuated with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when the boy died of typhus.

Verlaine's last years witnessed a descent into drug-addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. Yet his poetry gained new adherents and was recognized as ground-breaking. The poems served as a source of inspiration to several composers, such as Gabriel Fauré, who set many of his poems to music, including La bonne chanson, and Claude Debussy, who turned the entire Fêtes galantes into a classic mélodie album.

Several artists painted Verlaine's portrait, among them Henri Fantin-Latour, Antonio de la Gándara, Eugène Carrière, Frédéric Cazalis, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

Verlaine’s early lyrics are characterized by delicate evocations of landscapes, some tinged with nostalgia (for the 18th century, above all). Some are correlated with his inner states. As he experienced the whiplash of his attraction to both women and men, his poetry became more personal and intense.

His “The Art of Poetry” (1884) sets forth several themes dear to the Symbolists, including the preeminence of musicality and the importance of the nuance. The sonnet “Languor” (1884) is a wonderful expression of the siting of decadence in the late Roman Empire. Both these poems appear in the collection Jadis et naguère, which must have played a key role in the formulation of the Symbolist aesthetic.

In addition to his loyalty to the “decadent” label, Verlaine coined the expression "poète maudit" (accursed poet) in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or had been ignored by the critics. In the 20th century the idea was extended to the “peintres maudits.”

ARTHUR RIMBAUD (1854-1896).

Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville in the Ardennes in northeastern France. As a boy he was a restless but brilliant student. By the age of fifteen he had won several prizes, composing original verses and dialogues in Latin.

In 1870 his teacher Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's literary mentor and his verses in French began to improve rapidly. He frequently ran away from home and may have briefly joined the Paris Commune of 1871, which he portrayed in his poem “L'orgie parisienne ou Paris se repeuple” (The Parisian Orgy or, Paris Repopulates). He may have been raped by drunken Communard soldiers (his poem "Le cœur supplicié" ["The Tortured Heart"] suggests so). By this time he had become an anarchist, started drinking and amused himself by shocking the local bourgeoisie with his shabby dress and long hair. He returned to Paris in late September 1871 at the invitation of Paul Verlaine (after Rimbaud had sent him a letter containing several samples of his work) and resided briefly in Verlaine's home. Verlaine, who was married, promptly fell in love with the sullen, blue-eyed, overgrown (5 ft 10 in), light-brown-haired young man. They became lovers, leading a wild, vagabond life spiced by absinthe and hashish. They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behavior of Rimbaud, the archetypal enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly innovative, visionary verse.

Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy love affair took them to London in 1872. In Brussels in July 1873 Rimbaud committed himself to journey to Paris with or without Verlaine. In a drunken rage, Verlaine shot at him, one of the two shots striking the 19-year-old in the left wrist.

Rimbaud eventually withdrew the complaint, but the judge sentenced Verlaine to prison. Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing and a reflection of that "drôle de ménage" (odd partnership) life with Verlaine, his "pitoyable frère" ("pitiful brother") and "vierge folle" ("mad virgin") to whom he was "l'époux infernal" ("the infernal husband"). One of the segments bears the enigmatic title “Alchemie du verbe.”

In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germain Nouveau and put together his pathbreaking Illuminations. Alternative titles for these prose poems are “Painted Plates” and “Colored Plates,” suggesting that he may have been influenced by the illuminated manuscripts he saw in the British Museum.

Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875 in Stuttgart, Germany, after Verlaine's release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By then Rimbaud had given up writing and decided on a steady, working life; some speculate he was fed up with his former wild living, while others suggest he sought to become rich and independent to afford living one day as a carefree poet and man of letters. He continued to roam extensively in Europe, mostly on foot. He traveled to Cyprus and in 1880 finally settled in Aden as an employee in the Bardey agency. He had several native women as lovers. In 1884 he quit the job at Bardey's and became a merchant on his own in Harar, Ethiopia. He made a small fortune as a gun-runner, but Rimbaud developed right-knee synovitis which degenerated into a carcinoma. His deteriorating health forced him to return to France in 1891, where his leg was amputated on May 27. Rimbaud died in Marseille on November 10, 1891, at age 37.

Rimbaud’s most celebrated single poem is his sonnet on the vowels, which has invited various esoteric interpretations. Whatever it may ultimately mean, it ranks as a famous set piece on the theme of synaesthesia.

One of Rimbaud’s most challenging statements is “Je est un autre” (I is someone else.) Reflection suggests that he was questioning the age-old Western commitment to the integrity of the personality. This declaration occurs in the outpouring known as the “Seer Letter” of May 1871. As he states: “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains. He undergoes unspeakable tortures that require complete faith and superhuman strength, rendering him the ultimate Invalid among men, the master criminal, the first among the damned--and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown.”

Rimbaud’s influence in modern literature, music, and art has been pervasive. His life in Paris was dramatized in a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio called "Total Eclipse" (1995). Among the creative figures who have felt the influence of Rimbaud are French poets in general, the Surrealists, the Beat Poets, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, William S. Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hugo Pratt, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Sérgio Godinho, Klaus Kinski, Dwid Hellion of Integrity, Jack Kerouac, Philippe Sollers, Patti Smith, Bruce Chatwin, Penny Rimbaud, Jim Morrison, John Hall, Bob Dylan, Richard Hell, Joe Strummer, John Lennon, Rozz Williams, and David Wojnarowicz.

Bob Dylan refers to Rimbaud in his song "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" from Blood on the Tracks: "Situations have ended sad, / Relationships have all been bad. / Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud. / But there's no way I can compare / All them scenes to this affair, / You're gonna make me lonesome when you go."

The composer Benjamin Britten began his scintillating settings of Les Illuminations in Suffolk in March 1939 and completed them a few months later in the USA. The work has been choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton and Richard Alston.

Lecture NINE summary

2006-11-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

[In the exhibition of Americans in Paris currently at the Met, note Sargent’s “Mme. X” and Whistler’s “Symphony in White.” Also, Josef Hoffmann show at the Neue Galerie]

VIENNA

As a leading monument in the Austrian capital, the Karlskirche offers instructive material regarding the complex ways a building may communicate meaning. It resulted from a vow made by Emperor Charles VI in 1713 on the occasion of a plague. This showy church is Christian, imperial Roman, and dynastic (viz. the allusions to the empire of Charles V). Impressive as they are, the accumulation of symbolic devices still does not qualify this monument as an architectural precursor of Symbolism.

For that we may turn to 19th-century buildings that rely on the principle of association. Examples were the Red House at Bexley Heath, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the two parliament houses (London and Budapest). Even so, the concept of architectural Symbolism requires refinement and qualification.

Late 19th century Vienna saw the emergence of serious questions about the role of ornament in architecture. Otto Wagner’s Majolica House offered an ingenious solution by distributing the floral motifs over the building surfaces. Josef Hoffmann offered attenuation, together with richness of materials. It was Adolf Loos, in effect branding ornament as crime, who reached the ultimate radical solution, heralding the austerity of the International Style of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Still, Olbrich’s 1898 Sezession Building (nicknamed “the golden cabbage”) remains the representative monument of the epoch.

These architecture and design themes are part of the status of Vienna as a hothouse of modernity. Through it all the citizens of “Vindobona” (Latin for Vienna) retained a sense of their classical heritage. This is seen in the choice of the word Sezession (from an obscure episode in the Roman Republic) for the organization of avant-garde artists.

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862-1918).

Gustav Klimt was born in Poechlarn, near Vienna, the second of seven children. His father (Ernst Klimt) was an engraver and was married to Anna Klimt (née Finster). He lived in poverty for most of his childhood.

Gustav Klimt was educated at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) in the years 1879–1883 and received training as an architectural decorator. He began his professional career painting interior murals in large public buildings on the Ringstraße. Especially important among these were the decorations for the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In the spandrels of the interior he first experimented in his combination of gold and mosaic with naturalistic forms.

In 1893 Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall in the University of Vienna. His three paintings, Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, came under attack for their radical themes and “pornographic” material resulting in their not being displayed on the ceiling of the great Hall. All three paintings were eventually destroyed by retreating SS forces in May 1945. In assessing Klimt it is necessary to go beyond the easel paintings we see in exhibitions, to include the monumental cycles executed in situ.

Much of his work is distinguished by the elegant, sometimes gaudy gold or colored decoration, often erotically suggestive that conceals the more even more erotic positions of the drawings he based many of his paintings on. This feature can be seen in “Judith I“(1901), and in “The Kiss”(1907–1908).

The provocative frontality of his “Nuda Veritas” (Naked Truth) make this one of his most challenging works. Yet it is based on a traditional concetto going back to the emblem books of the 16th and 17th centuries.

While strikingly modern, his art pays tribute to early forms of art that had only recently become known, as seen in the spirals (relating to Minoan-Mycenean art and early Balkan) and the Greek archaic (whence his Nietzschean “Pallas Athena”). In fact, art historians note an eclectic range of influences contributing to Klimt's distinct style, including Egyptian, Minoan, Classical Greek, and Byzantine motifs. Klimt was also inspired by the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, late medieval European painting, and Japanese Ukiyo-e.

Klimt was one of the founding members of the Wiener Sezession (Viennese variant of Art Nouveau) and of the periodical Ver Sacrum. He left the movement in 1908. He also forged a creative partnership with the fashionista Emilie Flöge, whose elegant dresses were one aspect of the flowering of the decorative arts in Vienna.

The Beethoven Frieze of 1902, originally in the great hall of the Sezession Building in Vienna, is the most important of the in-situ works. The centerpiece was Max Klinger’s theatrical statue of Beethoven. It was inaugurated by a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Klimt’s frieze had three main sections. 1) Longing for Happiness (weak appeal to the strong man); 2) The Hostile Forces; 3) Fulfillment (longing for happiness finds its surcease in poetry).

He died in Vienna on February 6, 1918 of a stroke and was interred at the Hietzing Cemetery, Vienna. Numerous paintings were left unfinished.

Seemingly bagatelles, his landscapes have also evoked great interest. In November of 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000.

Purchased for the Neue Galerie in New York by Ronald Lauder for a reported US $135 million, the 1907 portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for a time deposed Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe" (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million) as the world's most expensive painting (only to be surpassed in turn by the sale of a Pollock).

Raoul Ruiz has directed a biopic, "Klimt," starring John Malkovich in the title role. It has been reported that the film had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 28, 2006

RUSSIA

Going back to the time of Peter the Great are the two orientations: the Westernizers and the Slavophils. This contrast has continued to play itself out almost to the present. The Slavophil heritage consisted of two parts: a vernacular tradition going back to pagan times, and a sophisticated Byzantine overlay. However great the attractions of the West, it proved hard to abandon these native elements.

The Silver Age (ca. 1890-1917) was a period of extraordinary creativity in literature and the arts. The portraits of Valeri Bryusov and Andrei Bely represent the two waves of Symbolism.

The poet Valery Bryusov, who succeeded Konstantin Balmont as the leader of the first generation of Russian Symbolists, wrote on a wide variety of topics, from Cleopatra to mushrooms.

Andrei Bely (“Andrew White”) first published a series of prose “symphonies,” heavily influenced by music. His “The Silver Dove” postulates a Russia unable to unite its Western and Eastern halves. His masterpiece is the kaleidoscopic “Petersburg” (1916), perhaps the first truly modernist novel, anticipating Joyce and Proust. It revolves around the conflict between a deeply conservative father, the high official Ableukhov, and his idealist son, Nikolai, who agrees to bomb his father.

Sergei Diaghilev was the mastermind of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group. He also performed important work in promoting Russian art and music in the West through his Ballet Russes. Bakst, Benois, and Roerich were significant artists in this effort.

MIKHAIL VRUBEL (1856-1910). The son of an officer, his stepmother, a pianist, encouraged his gifts. While at the St. Petersburg Academy he was asked to assist in the restoration of the 12th century church of St. Cyril in Kiev. This experience, which marked him profoundly, would appear to direct him towards a Byzantine-Eastern trajectory. He spent time in Venice and Spain, though, observing how those places transformed their medieval heritage into the Renaissance. Back in Russia, he joined the Abramstevo circle, with its interest in Russian folk art and lore.

His almost obsessive fascination with the poem “The Demon” by Lermontov was expressed in several paintings. The “Demon Downcast” (1902) is the last of these. “The Swan Princess” is based on Russian folklore.

Lecture EIGHT summary

2006-11-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

[For the next class, reread the material on Baudelaire in Dorra. Then in Mallarmé’s Collected Poems, read pp. ix-xxxi (Introduction), 10-14, 20-23, 28-55, 70-71, 136-81 216-25 (and related notes in the back). As a reminder, note that you should have read pp.33-181 in Lucie-Smith.].

Let us briefly return to the achievement and limitations of C.D. Friedrich. How is that Friedrich could have anticipated so presciently the achievements of Symbolism, which emerged a half century after his death? Perhaps the answer lies in the common heritage of German Idealism. This philosophical and literary approach emerged in Germany during Friedrich’s lifetime. But because of the need for translation and cultural resistance there was a timelag before the Idealist contribution arrived in France—and hence the rest of Europe. By exception, it reached Russia in the 1830s, but had little direct consequence (see the current play “The Coast of Utopia”).

After his death in 1840 Friedrich’s work enjoyed little favor, even in Germany. The reason lies largely in his disdain for the formative experience of Italy. As the home of both the Romans and the Renaissance, Italy enjoyed vast prestige. The Grand Tour of the baroque period, and its bourgeois version in the railway era affirmed this cachet.

Apart from this cultural benefit, what other attractions did Italy afford? The image of Italy incorporates a range of contradictory features: land of geniuses, cuisine, fashion, arcadia, nation of slackers (the dolce far niente), and so forth. Thus the attractions of Italy were manifold, with art being only one of them.

In this context Germany enjoyed a special relationship (or some would say that it was burdened by it). The first step, as it were, was Charlemagne’s imperial coronation in Rome in 800. The custom arose that the Holy Roman Emperors must be crowned in Rome. Experiences in the Eternal City were not always happy (cf. Martin Luther). One stereotype was that Italy was a place of sexual license. And of course some sought to enact this notion, as seen for example in Goethe’s amours in Venice. (This might be regarded as an early version of sexual tourism.) To be sure many, like Robert and Elizabeth Browning, continued to cultivate Italy for enlightened cultural reasons. As the Brownings show, the appeal was not limited to Germany (cf. Ibsen, Henry James, Proust, Santayana, and many others). Still, Germans felt a special bond.

There were two types of pilgrims to Italy: the short-stayers and the permanent residents. Preeminent among the latter were the Deutschrömer (German expatriates), with J. J. Winckelmann at the head. Note the Nazarenes, as seen in the painting “Italia and Germania” by Franz Overbeck.

A major influence on the Nazarene current was the writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798), associated with Ludwig Tieck. In his Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar (Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 1796) Wackenroder preached the idea that art had lost its way and must return to its earlier freshness and purity. This idea reflects the broader concept of the Taste for the Primitives. He also is one of the first to advocate aesthetic relativism, as seen in his points about Indian and African art being beautiful in their own right.

The name Nazarene was originally a pejorative label used against the group for their affectation of “biblical” dress and hairstyle. In 1809 six students at the Vienna Academy formed an artistic cooperative called the Brotherhood of St. Luke or Lukasbund, following a common name for medieval gilds of painters. In 1810 four of them, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger, moved to Rome, settling in the abandoned monastery of San Isidoro. Philipp Veit, Peter von Cornelius, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, and others joined them.. They met up with Austrian romantic landscape artist Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839) who became an unofficial tutor to the group.

The Nazarenes reacted against Neoclassicism and the routine art education of the academy system. They hoped to return to art which embodied spiritual values, and sought inspiration in artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, rejecting what they saw as the superficial virtuosity and mendacity of later art.

By 1830 all except Overbeck had returned to Germany and the group had disbanded. Ironically, many Nazareners found employment as instructors in German art academies.

HANS VON MAREES (1837-1887)

This still enigmatic German painter is sometimes classed as an “Idealist” (a term with interesting overtones, reminding us distantly of Aurier’s “ideist”). From 1853 to 1855 he was a student at the Berlin Academy, whereupon he moved to Munich. He was supported financially by the art theorist Konrad Fiedler, with whom he had an intense Platonic relationship, perhaps something more. Reacting against the linear clarity and precisionism of earlier German painting, he immersed himself in the rich colors and deep shadows of the school of Titian. Some have detected homoerotic qualities in his works, but this matter remains moot. The male nude is prominent in his works, and a sense persists that “there is something there” that we cannot name. Perhaps he preferred it that way. His idea of Arcadia is very different from that of Puvis de Chavannes.

After 1864 he lived mainly in Italy. He died in Rome, where he is buried in the Protestant cemetery.

Unlike that of Hans von Marées, the sexuality of the photographer WILHELM VON GLOEDEN (1856-1931) was overt. The collateral attractions of Italy were diverse.

ARNOLD BOECKLIN (1827-1901)

A Swiss-German painter, Arnold Böcklin studied at Düsseldorf where he became a friend of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. Originally a landscape painter, his travels to such places as Brussels, Zurich, Geneva and Rome exposed him to classical and Renaissance art, and the Mediterranean landscape. These new influences brought allegorical and mythological figures into his compositions. In 1866 he resided at Basel, in 1871 in Munich, in 1885 in Hottingen (Switzerland). He completed his life in a lavish villa in Fiesole near Florence.

Influenced by Romanticism his painting today strikes us as eclectic, with classical and baroque affinities, as well as Symbolist ones. His pictures portray mythological, fantastical figures along classical architecture constructions (revealing often an obsession with death) creating a strange, fantasy world. During his day he was regarded by some as the finest painter in the world, but after his death a sharp reaction set in, and his work came to be regarded by many as pretentious and overbearing.

Böcklin is best known for his five versions of The Isle of the Dead (1880ff.), originally created for Marie Berna in memory of her deceased husband. Many prototypes have been sought, but none is uniquely convincing (I believe that I saw the scene on the island of Corfu). The painting partly evokes the myth of Charon crossing the Styx; the island may derive from Celtic mythology. The example in the Metropolitan Museum may not be, strictly speaking, the first.

This painting has enjoyed an extraordinary resonance, yielding many imitations and parodies. Pascal Lecocq, a contemporary French painter, has created a whole site: Toteninsel.net. Rachmaninoff’s tone poem of 1909 is still performed. Strindberg uses the painting in his “Ghost Sonata.” There have been a number of related novels and movies. And there is even a perfume called “Isle of the Dead.”

We turn now to Southern Germany. As the Bavarian baroque shows, this region (which remained Catholic) retained close ties with Italy. In the early 19th century Munich underwent urban improvements designed to recast it as the new Florence. Towards the end of the century the city became the major focus of the form of art nouveau known as Jugendstil.

FRANZ VON STUCK (1863-1928)

Far and away the most influential artist of the fin-de-siècle in Munich, Franz von Stuck lived in a palatial villa overlooking the city. His works are a mixed bag. Some are classical in inspiration, others almost macabre. His misogyny is hard to stomach, even by the standards of the period (though his American wife did not seem to complain).

Paul KLEE was briefly a student of Stuck’s.

S C A N D I N A V I A

EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944)

The Norwegian Munch lost his mother to tuberculosis in 1868, his older and favorite sister Sophie (b. 1862) to the same disease in 1877. Ultimately his father, Dr. Christian Munch, died young, as well, in 1889. After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father, who instilled in his children a deep-rooted fear by repeatedly telling them that if they sinned in any way, they would be doomed to hell without chance of pardon. One of Munch's younger sisters was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Munch himself was also often ill. He would later say, "Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life." His alcoholism did not help. Several early paintings depicting sickrooms reflect the unfortunate circumstances of his family.

In 1881, he enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania (Oslo). During this period he spent much time in louche bohemian circles, and took up their doctrine of free love. This theory did not take account of jealousy, however, and this emotion is one source of his problems with women.

While stylistically influenced by the postimpressionists, Munch's art emphasizes the depiction of a state of mind rather than an external reality (an approach he himself termed “Symbolist”). Interested in portraying not a random slice of reality, but situations brimming with emotional content and expressive energy, Munch carefully calculated his compositions to create a tense atmosphere.

Munch's means of expression evolved throughout his life. In the 1880s, Munch's idiom was both naturalistic, as seen in “Portrait of Hans Jæger” (the theoretician of free love), and impressionistic, as in (“Rue Lafayette"). In 1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original aesthetic, as seen in “Melancholy," in which color is the symbol-laden element. He picked up the concept of angst from the Danish protoexistentialist Kierkegaard. Painted in 1893, “Screams his most famous work (there are several versions). It was based on an earlier work, “Despair,” in which the figure turns away, looking into the distance. Despite its startling originality, the work reflects the ancient theory of the link between the macrocosm (the outside world) and the microcosm. Some art historians believe that the red sky in the background of The Scream reflects the unusually intense sunsets seen throughout the world following the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa.

The painting now known as “The Vampire” was originally entitled “Love and Death.” Once one gets rid of this later title, the relationship between the woman and the man emerges as more sympathetic. “The Kiss” is an unusual take on the Biblically rooted idea “they shall become one flesh.” The melding of the two faces has disturbed many. At least they seem equal in their urge to merge. Strindberg saw the matter differently, as “the fusion of two beings, the smaller of which shaped like a carp, is on the point of devouring the larger, as is the habit of microbes, vermin, vampires, and women.” Strindberg had his own woman problems, possibly more severe than those of his artist friends.

In 1892 the Union of Berlin Artists invited Munch to appear in its November exhibition. His paintings evoked bitter controversy, and after one week the exhibition closed. In Berlin, Munch involved himself in an unconventional international circle of writers, artists, and critics, who gathered at a tavern called the Black Piggie.

While in Berlin in the last years of the century, Munch experimented with a variety of new media (photography, lithography, and woodcuts), in many instances re-working his older imagery.

In the autumn of 1908, Munch's anxiety became acute and he entered the psychiatric clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen. Arguably the therapy Munch received in hospital changed his personality, and after returning to Norway in 1909 he showed more interest in nature subjects, and his work became more colorful and less pessimistic.

Munch built himself a studio and simple house at Ekely, outside of Oslo, and spent the last decades of his life there. He died there on January 23, 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. He left 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings and watercolors, and six sculptures to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen.

AUGUST STRINDBERG (1849-1912)

Playwriting was the chief vehicle of the prolific Swede Strindberg. Yet he was almost demonically energetic, active as a novelist, painter, and (in his own view) scientist.

Munch’s portrait of him, perhaps with malicious overtones (the misspelling of the name, the Medusa hair), goes back to their friendship in the dive known as the Black Piggie in Berlin. Strindberg’s mentoring reinforced a certain mystical strain in Munch.

Strindberg’s career falls into two parts. The first is the realist plays, starting with "Master Olof" in 1872. His life was cleft by the Inferno period, which marked by hallucinations, paranoia, and alchemical experiments (1894-98). Afterwards he wrote plays that depart from naturalism and have been termed protoexpressionist, but might just as well be called Symbolist. In the “Dream Play” the daughter of the Hindu god Indra comes down to earth and enters into a number of relationships with Swedish men. The construction is characterized by sudden shifts of scenes and characters. Strindberg described it as follows, when he says “the author has tied to imitate the disjointed but apparently logical form of a dream. Anything may happen: everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist . . . The characters are split, doubled, and multiplied: they evaporate and are condensed, are diffused and concentrated. But a single consciousness holds sway over them—that of the dreamer. (At the same point in time Freud identified condensation and expansion as qualities of the “dream work.”)

During his Inferno period in the 1890s he gave up playwriting and sought to make a name for himself as a scientist. He made alchemical experiments in transmuting sulphur into carbon—experiments that he believed would lead him on the path to making gold. Drinking heavily he was subject to hallucinations. He had long believed that our lives are regulated by “unseen powers.” There was also his belief in “woodspiritism,” based on the story of the boy walking in the woods who imagined that he had seen a beautiful sprite with emerald green hair, only to find that it was just a tree. This is the principle later exploited in the Rorschach blots.

He called his graphically descriptive writing “painting with words.” Yet at certain points in his life, he turned to painting itself as a creative outlet. In his autobiographical novel, Son of a Servant, he describes how painting made him ‘indescribably happy – as if he’d just taken hashish.’ Certainly, he seems to have immersed himself in painting at moments of crisis: when unable to write, or when going through marital troubles. The plays are mostly seascapes and become less frequent after 1900. Thus they anticipate, but do not really accompany his late plays.

HILMA AF KLINT (1862-1944).

Born to a prominent family in Sweden, Af Klint early revealed intellectual gifts. She entered the Royal Academy in Stockholm in 1882, painting conventional portraits after graduating.

In the 1890s she formed, with four other women, the Friday circle to investigate spiritual phenomena. The friends investigated automatic writing and automatic drawing. At first attracted to Theosophy, Af Klint gravitated to the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner. These beliefs enabled her to become a pioneering abstractionist. Her “hard edge” paintings are almost the diametrical opposite of Strindberg’s.

Lecture SEVEN Summary

2006-10-24T18:41:00.000-07:00

James Sidney ENSOR (1860–1949).

Ensor’s challenging portrayals of grotesque humanity made him an acknowledged precursor of 20th-century expressionism and surrealism. Ensor was born in Ostend on the Belgian coast, and — except for three years spent at the Brussels Academy, from 1877 to 1880 — he lived in Ostend all his life, with the family curio shop as his base. His father, an Englishman, was an alcoholic recluse. Ensor’s brilliant “Self-Portrait” (1886, a pencil drawing) shows him materializing ectoplasmically from a background of antique mouldings, evidently reflecting the décor of the shop.

Ensor’s early works depicted traditional subjects: landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and interiors painted in deep, rich colors and enriched by a subdued but vibrant light. In the mid-1880s, influenced by the bright color of the Impressionists and the grotesque imagery of earlier Dutch-Flemish artists as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Ensor turned toward avant-garde themes and styles. He took much of his subject matter from Ostend's holiday crowds, which filled him with revulsion. But not all was negative, and arguably for him Ostend played the role that Bruges did for Khnopff.

Portraying individuals as clowns or skeletons or replacing their faces with carnival masks, he represented humanity as stupid, smirking, vain, and loathsome (cf. “Skeleton Looking at Chinoiserie,” 1885). In his later work, as he became engulfed with misanthropy, these traits became routine and tiresome.

From the mid-eighties Ensor began to concentrate on a series of images of Christ (e.g. “Dead Christ Watched Over By Angels”). It has been shown that his idea of Jesus was a social-consciousness one, de-emphasizing miracles, deriving from a then-popular biography of David Strauss. In this way he sought to unite religion (Belgium was a Catholic country) and efforts to social change.

“The Cathedral,” a lithograph of 1886, is a personal interpretation of a theme common in those years (cf Monet's views of Rouen Cathedral). Ensor depicts the building as indeed the great exemplar of society, but then in the foreground shows this society to be divided between the strictly regimented groups closest to the building and the more anarchic masses in the foreground.

One of his more ambitious works of this kind was an “Entry into Jerusalem.” This in turn led to his masterpiece, the panoramic canvas entitled Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (1888, now in the J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California). For the workers and common people of earlier works Ensor substituted the bourgeoisie, whom he ruthlessly satirized by making them wear masks. Catchphrases appear at various places. The banner, “Vive la Sociale,” probably referring to the idea of a socialist republic (a notion coined in France in 1848), is sarcastic. Recognizing its subversive character, Ensor did not publicly display the work in Belgium until 30 years after its creation.

Ensor was one of the first European artists to emphasize the theme of masks. In a larger perspective, he draws on the vein of the carnivalesque, as later explored by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

JAN TOOROP (1858-1928) was the major Dutch contributor to Symbolism. A kind of Gauguin in reverse, he was born in Poerworedjo in Java in 1858, dying in The Hague in 1928. When he was 14 years old his family took him to Holland. He studied at the Amsterdam Academy under the direction of Auguste Allebé, from 1880 to 1882, and then in the Brussels Academy, guided by Jean François Portaels.

The stay in Brussels was decisive for Jan Toorop’s development. He made the acquaintance of the writers Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck, gravitating to the avant-garde milieu of Les Vingt. He became a member in 1885 under the sponsorship of Octave Maus.

With his friend James Ensor he traveled to Paris, where he was impressed by the pointillism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He went to London with Verhaeren in 1884 and 1886. There he was struck by the work of James McNeill Whistler.

In 1890 he resettled in the Netherlands, where he developed his "linear idealism," combining features of Symbolism, the Art Nouveau, and a religious orientation. In 1894 Jan Toorop made a celebrated lithograph for the Delftsche Slaolie firm. In the Netherlands this work became a kind of talisman for the art nouveau. In Dutch the Art Nouveau was sometimes termed the Slaolie Style.

In 1902-03 Toorop was occupied with decorating the new Stock Exchange in Amsterdam, the masterwork of the architect H.P. Berlage. Challenging the capitalist ideology, these works emphasized freedom for women and for workers.

By this time Toorop had removed to the coastal town of Domburg in the dunes, where he founded a kind of art colony that attracted Marinus Zwart and Piet Mondrian among others. The artists were not required to adhere to any single style.

He had a kind of wooden pavilion built in the dunes, which was inaugurated with a group exhibition in 1912, showing 82 works by fifteen artists.

The “Three Brides” (1893) is his signature work. Beneficent influences stem from one side and bad ones from the other, carried by the omnipresent strands of hair. The curiously emaciated figures seem to reflect the Javanese shadow play. A similar work is “Fatalism,” also of 1893.

The Domburg experience comes out in the dune painting “The Shell Gatherers" (1891), which is almost abstract. Such works left an imprint on Toorop’s disciple, Piet Mondrian (e.g. “Dunes,” 1910).

BRITAIN

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in John Millais' parents' house on Gower Street, London in 1848. At the initial meeting John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt were present. As an aspiring poet, Rossetti wished to develop the links between Romantic poetry and art. By autumn four more members had also joined to form a seven-strong Brotherhood. These were William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother), Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens.

The endeavor of the PRB echoes, consciously or not, the Nazarene brotherhood, a group of German artists formed in Rome forty years before. The Nazarenes wished to revive the qualities of painting before the Cinquecento, which was taken as the beginning of decline. The Germans also anticipated the narrative emphasis and meticulous realism of the PRB (cf. Peter Cornelius, “Recognition of Joseph by His Brothers” with can be compared with Holman Hunt’s “Finding of the Savior in the Temple,” of 1859-60).

The considerable theorizing of the PRB can be reduced to the following. Attentive study of nature must be practiced in order to express genuine ideas. As an aside, one may note that in many cases the naturalism produced a numbing emphasis on detail

They were particularly fascinated by Medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature. In its early stages the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that the two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. Hunt and Millais led the realist side, while the medievalist side enjoyed the favor of Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.

The Brotherhood enjoyed the support of the critic John Ruskin, who praised their devotion to nature and rejection of conventional methods of composition.

With their emphasis on detailed rendering of nature, J. E. Millais and Holman Hunt fall outside our purview. They could also be dreadfully sentimental and didactic.

Dante Gabriel ROSSETTI (1828-1882) , a maverick, is more interesting. After 1856 Rossetti became an inspiration for the medievalizing strand of the movement. His work influenced his friend William Morris, in whose firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. he became a partner, and with whose wife Jane he may have had an affair. Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones also became partners in the firm.

The bourgeois realism of Rossetti’s “Annunciation” (1849-50) is shocking. It reflects a thorough rethinking of the traditional iconography, anticipating the white symphonies of Whistler.

Many of his later works are tinged with erotic overtones. This is true not only of “Venus Verticordia” (1964-68), but also of “Beata Beatrix (1864-70), ostensibly a Christian sacred work.

Sir Edward Coley BURNE-JONES (1833-1898).

Not a formal member of the PRB, arguably he represents its culmination.

At Oxford he befriended William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry, and was influenced by John Ruskin. At this time he discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which was to be so influential in his life. As an artist he studied under Rossetti, but developed his own style influenced by his travels in Italy with Ruskin and others. He had intended to become a minister in the Church of England, but under Morris's influence decided to become an artist and designer instead. After Oxford, from which he did not take a degree, he became closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in England.

For much of the 1870s Burne-Jones did not exhibit, following a spate of bitterly hostile attacks in the press. In 1877 he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. Exemplifying a kind of “blowback” effect, his often literary work inspired poetry by Swinburne. Swinburne's 1886 Poems & Ballads is dedicated to Burne-Jones

Aparr from painting, he also worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewelery, tapestries, book illustration (the Kelmscott Press Chaucer in 1896), and stage costumes.

“King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid” (1884) relies on an obscure story of the infatuation of an African king for a homeless girl, as told by Richard Johnson and Alfred Tennyson. “She is more beautiful than Day” (Tennyson). In a startling role reversal, the king has placed the girl on his own throne. There are a number of Italian sources, including Carlo Crivelli. The artist had obsessed on the theme for a decade, choosing the high and narrow format early on. Khnopff who saw the work in its triumphant appearance at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889 spent hours before the painting, enraptured. In his account he summed up its message as “all hope is vain for the thing that are no more, for the things that can never be.”

With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the situation reflects Victorian social realities, not just the immense problem of poverty, but the appalling “maiden tribute,” whereby young women were sold into prostitution. Presumably, the beggar maid has avoided this fate, but others were not so lucky.

“The Golden Stairs” (1872-80) may be compared with Blake’s similar conception of “Jacob’s Ladder.” However, Burne-Jones work has no narrative content. It is simply a human chain of 18 young women. In a sense they are all one person, as the folds of the drapery echo one another endlessly. Somewhat bizarrely, it has been suggested that a reproduction of this work may have influenced Marcel Duchamp in his “Nude Descending the Staircase.”

George Frederick WATTS (1817-1904) belonged to no school, but was immensely popular in Victorian England. He produced about 300 portraits of distinguished contemporaries, as well as moral allegories, such as “Love and Death” (1877, 1896), a poignantly beautiful allegory of human mortality. Another lovely work, “Hope” (1885-86) offers a presentation that almost belies its title. Another allegory is “Time, Death, and Judgment,” which Watts reworked over many years (1865-86).

The artist’s concluding masterpiece is “The Sower of the Systems” of 1902. Since this work has darkened over the years, it may seem completely abstract. Yet it is not, for the Creator advances “scattering stars, suns, and planets.” The painting reflects the honest struggle of a Victorian against the forces of doubt which became increasingly insistent.

Aubrey BEARDSLEY (1872-1898),

Beardsley enjoyed a great deal of succès de scandale, both during his short life and afterwards. He was aligned with the Yellow Book coterie of artists and writers. He was art editor for the first four editions and produced many illustrations for the magazine.

Most of his images are done in ink, and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all.
Together with Félicien Rops, Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and the grotesque erotica, which themes he explored in his later work. He began by illustrating the Arthurian legends, and eventually progressed to what might be termed soft-core pornography, including his illustrations for Lysistrata (Aristophanes) and Salomé (Wilde). Major elements of the Art Nouveau have been detected in his works

Beardsley also wrote Under the Hill, an unfinished erotic tale based loosely on the legend of Tannhäuser.

Anticipating today’s media stars, Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." (cf. the photograph of the artist as a gargoyle). Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair."

His “The Artist in Bed” belies the incessant energy that characterized his short life.

Much of his earlier work, like “La Belle Isoud at Joyous Gard” illustrates Arthurian legends. Later, prompted by publishers and promoters, he turned to erotic work. The image of Salome kissing the head of Jaokanaan is one of the most shocking examples.

Beardsley died in Menton, France at the age of 25 on March 16, 1898. It is generally accepted that Beardsley died of tuberculosis, although suicide has also been rumored.

CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH (1868-1928).

Mainly known nowadays as an architect, the Scot Mackintosh was a designer of posters, fabrics, and furniture in the William Morris manner. His poster for the “Scottish Musical Review” (1896) is in a squared-off version of the Art Nouveau he perfected. “Full Moon in September (1893) has a uniquely eerie quality.

G E R M A N Y AND CENTRAL EUROPE

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774-1840).

Born a Swedish citizen on the Baltic, Friedrich studied at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. In addition to being a German, he belongs to the Scandinavian world of Kierkegaard, Strindberg, and Bergman. After the development of sepia drawings and watercolors (mainly naturalistic and topographical), Friedrich took up oil painting after the age of thirty. His paintings are based on his sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden and the River Elbe and in the Saxon Alps.. His first major painting is the controversial "Tetschen Altar" (1807) in which the crucified Christ is seen in profile in the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. His works often feature lonely crosses in a landscape. Friedrich also sketched monuments (a memorial) and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and afterlife.

The painter was influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s romantic views about religion. The theologian held that it is a mistake to think of religion in terms of rules and formal rituals. Instead, religion is about feeling. When we experience a primal sense of awe in the presence of the infinite—then we are religious. Friedrich seems also to have been touched by the controversy that raged in his youth over pantheism, the idea that God is everywhere, but dwells in no specific place. In his landscapes we detect a muted, diffused quality that can almost be termed holy. That “almost” is very important.

Friedrich lived in the time of the upsurge of German romantic thinkers and poets, including the Schlegel brothers, G.W.F. Hegel, Novalis, Wackenroder, and Hölderlin. These figures evolved a number of key concepts, which may be summed up in one precept: striving for the infinite. Friedrich’s approach to nature recalls that of Coleridge and Wordsworth in England, poets whose works he did not know.

Caspar David Friedrich is sometimes simply labeled a Romantic painter; in fact the recent comprehensive exhibition in Essen calls him the “Inventor of Romanticism.” However, his works do not show the impassioned swirls of color of, say, a Delacroix. Nor was he interested in Orientalism. Friedrich was a stay-at-home: the farthest he ever strayed from East Germany was Copenhagen (for his schooling) and the Bohemian mountains. Partly for economic reasons—he grew up during the wars that stemmed from the French Revolution—he seems never to have visited France or Italy.

His “Wanderer Standing Over the Sea of Fog” (ca. 1818) has sometimes been seen as Hamletic—the man is trying to make up his mind. Perhaps, but this does not seem to be the main thing. The wisps of fog both conceal and disclose; they permit an intuition (Ahnung) of the scene. The wanderer is absorbing the scene, and because he has his back to us he is our surrogate. The painting illustrates Friedrich’s precept that the artist must combine the outer (an accurate rendering of the motif) with the inner (the mind’s processes).

His poignant "Mönch am Meer" (Monk by the Sea; 1810) has become a kind of icon of modern alienation. It remains the most “minimalist” of all Friedrich’s works.

Note the medievalism of the “Abbey in the Oak Forest” (1810), a pendant to the Monk. Although Friedrich was a Protestant he was sensitive to the loss of unity that the Reformation had signaled. The “Cromlech in the Snow” (1807) scenes evoke the mysterious world of prehistory.

Despite their marvelous fluency, Friedrich’s works generally rely on a carefully plotted underlying geometry. Unusually, “Woman at the Window” (1822) makes this structure explicit. The mullions of the upper window form a cross, and the shutters are a kind of triptych. Some have seen the room as a kind of prison. This could only be true in an extended sense, in that in life we are all prisoners of our situation.

As the moon-viewing works show, attempts to pin his iconography down to specific messages are generally vain or incomplete.

A late work, “The Stages of Human Life” (1835), seems to violate this principle. Here, however, we find that what is stated explicitly is balanced by what is only suggested.

In summary Friedrich seemed to have succeeded almost perfectly in anticipating the principles of Symbolism, which was recognized only 46 years after his death. How can this be? Perhaps the answer lies in a common reliance on the philosophy of German Idealism, which Friedrich knew first hand.

"The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him." Caspar David Friedrich

Lecture SIX Summary

2006-10-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

[As we have seen the fascination with European “primitives” preceded the attention to their exotic counterparts. As late as 1904 France saw a major exhibition of “Les primitifs français” (essentially Gothic works, with a few specimens of Renaissance painting.) For an insight into the qualities of the Euro-primitives, consult the current show of Cimabue at the Frick Collection.]

GEOGRAPHY OF SYMBOLISM

From France Symbolism, as a literary and artistic movement, spread to other countries. (We have only deferred, not eliminated the matter of literary symbolism.) First it migrated to the Low Countries, primarily Belgium, where it was helped by the Francophone tendency then prevailing among the upper classes. Thence it traveled to Britain, Central Europe, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe--especially Russia, where the flowering of the Silver Age commenced with the Russian Symbolist poets. Generally speaking, southern Europe was not hospitable, though Picasso (Blue Period) and possibly Gaudí constitute exceptions.

Let us put our thinking caps on. Why did Symbolism start in France? After all, one of the abiding characteristics of the French mind is said to be Cartesian rationalism, which strives to attain clear and distinct expression of ideas. As Antoine de Rivarol (1753-1801) chauvinistically put it: “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français: ce qui n’est pas clair est encore anglais, italien, grec, ou latin.” This remarkable piece of chauvinism stems from his essay “De l’universalité de la langue française.” The title says it all.

For this reason the rise of Symbolism in France seems counterintuitive. Was Symbolism really French? There was a sizeable input from German idealism, especially Schopenhauer, whose writings were widely read in translation. In England the Pre-Raphaelites have been claimed as a kind of prequel. When all is said and done, though, France—-ostensibly Cartesian France-—was the indubitable starting point.

We began our consideration of this issue with the assumption that Symbolism was in origin a literary movement. As such it would necessarily have been shaped by the immediate prior history of French literature. To put it bluntly (perhaps too bluntly) French literature is characterized by a sense of enclosure and self-sufficiency, what economists sometimes term autarky. The Greek and Roman classics were read at school as lineal ancestors of the French, creators of the third great literature after those two exemplars. Among the moderns Shakespeare and Goethe were exceptions, but were read in translation only. Baudelaire and the later Symbolists granted Poe a special passport.

The first half of the 19th century was dominated by the vast projects of such literary overachievers as Balzac and Hugo. The aestheticist minimalism of the Parnasse school arose as a reaction. Literary Symbolism was an attempt to retain the seriousness of the first (without the vastness), and the striving of the second for stylistic perfection (without the preciousness). Symbolism also defined itself over against the Naturalism of Emile Zola. The career of Huysmans is emblematic. First he allied himself with Zola, but then he jumped ship with Against Nature.

We turn now to a more general situation, which involves a certain paradox. Retaining some of its 18th century advantages as the language of diplomacy and culture, by the 1870s France had turned into a Hollow Center. The disaster of the Franco-Prussian war disclosed an extraordinary reversal, one in the works for some time. Germany and France exchanged roles. Weakened by political disunion, Germany was a victim of foreign domination, sometimes, as in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), quite destructive. Germany was preeminently the country of Denker und Dichter. Its universities were preeminent. With the 1870 war, France and Germany seemed to have exchanged places. The new Germany of the Gründerzeit was industrially and militarily powerful. France fell behind in those realms. Not without a good deal of denial and resentment, to all intents and purposes it ceased to be a great power. France’s universities could not catch up either. There were few Nobel prizes in the sciences. There were two compensations: the “French Empire,” commonly termed the colonies (one of which formed the ultimate destination of Paul Gauguin) and the arts. How did France become La Mère des Arts? It is a curious fact that culture sometimes flourishes in countries that are declining politically (e.g. Pericles’ Athens, Venice in the 18th century). It is as if energies shifted inwards--from national assertiveness towards cultivation of the polite arts.

There is an old book by the Swiss journalist Herbert Luethy with the revealing title France Against Itself. For decades the key division in the country centered on the French Revolution: for (liberals, socialists) or against (traditional Catholics, nationalists, and the right in general). This issue was not finally settled until the 1960s. Other divisions were between chauvinism and cosmopolitanism, elites vs. populists, academic artists and writers vs. the avant-garde. In addition to being a source of weakness, these divisions yielded an enormous harvest of fruitful dialogue.

The trope of revolution was very productive. Neo-classic artists like David sought to brand their art as the official art of the French Revolution, only to find themselves outflanked by the aesthetic revolution of romanticism (with Géricault and Delacroix). This in turn yielded to realism, and then to impressionism, for long thought to be subversive and a danger to morals. But of course impressionism itself seemed old-hat.

As everyone knows, France was the site of this sequence of advanced art movements, especially in the belle époque. This achievement needs to be set in context, for it unfolded in dynamic tension with the forces of tradition (represented by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the government supported Salons with their artistes pompiers, the Académie Française). Over against this stood the adversary culture of the avant-garde: the Salon des Indépendents, the little magazines, the minicultures of the private gatherings (such as Mallarmé’s Tuesdays) and the cabarets (Le Chat Noir was the first). In the visual arts we need only think of impressionism, symbolism, fauvism, cubism, and so forth. There was a connection with Bohemia (as documented by Murger in 1848). Today this adversarial current represents the mainstream, taught as such in countless art history classes, though at the time it was far from it. In those days educated opinion, and not only in France, assumed that the great artists were men like Bouguereau, Cabanel, Meissonier-—all now stigmatized as pompiers. Significantly, when the authorities of the Boston Public Library wanted a European artist to complement the American John Singer Sargent for their new building, they went for an established figure Puvis de Chavannes. Today most would say: who he?

Such brilliant achievements notwithstanding, outwardly there was a sense of defeat and decline and in the body politic. Catholics claimed that debacle was the inevitable result of France’s desertion of mother church. The expiatory church of Sacré Coeur atop Monmartre was the monumental expression of this belief.

The Third Republic: would it prove as ephemeral as its two predecessors? Actually it lasted for 79 years, despite suffering assault by royalist and Catholic enemies. The turning point was the Boulanger scare of 1889. A military coup was averted, but the suspicion persisted that France was a “banana republic.” In 1889 a corner was rounded, but Symbolism was launched in this first two-decade period
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“Race exhaustion” was widely canvassed (la décadence latine). To many observers it seemed that the “old peoples” in Southern Europe were being outstripped by younger ones: Germanic and Slavic. During the period 1870-1914, the population of Italy increased by 30%, Austria-Hungary 38%, Britain 43%, Germany 58 %. France only 10%. In 1891-95 deaths exceeded births in France. The deficit was made up by immigration, mainly from Italy and Eastern Europe. (Today 1 in 4 in France has a grandparent born abroad.)

Alongside this working-class immigration was a rarified elite current. Van Gogh was of course the supreme example of an artist. Mary Cassatt was esteemed in impressionist circles. Jean Moréas, the creator of the Symbolist manifesto was Greek, Heredia Spanish, and Stuart Merrill American. After the turn of the century the current increased with writers like Apollinaire, Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein (who, however, wrote only in English), and artists (Picasso, Gris, Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Modigliani and many others).

After the Franco-Prussian war it was generally acknowledged that the educational system needed to be reformed. The Germans had won not only by big guns and military strategy, but because they were better educated. 1882 saw the Ferry law stipulating universal free primary education. Girls were major beneficiaries (though they wouldn't be able to vote as adults). Schooling was now obligatory, and this required a big corps of teachers, generally young women, who fanned out to the remotest, most miserable villages. From their training at the Ecole Normale (the archetype of our normal schools) , the teachers were imbued, many of them, with a secular missionary spirit, seeking to slay the three dragons of monarchy, the clergy, and alcoholism.

The teachers had to cope with a problem their training had not been prepared them for, as many of the pupils could not understand them—they spoke “argots.” Even for native speakers (less than half up to WWI), learning to write standard French is an arduous process. Cézanne’s parents did not speak standard French, his mother not at all, his father haltingly with many mistakes (he could read newspapers). He determined that his son would be different. At the lycée the young Cézanne made friends with another boy whose father did not originally speak French: Zola. (In everyday life today “correct French” is challenged by argot). Thus even people born in France had to “immigrate” into the French language. Over the centuries a kind of mandarin language had evolved. The Symbolists both exploited this artificial language, with its echoes of previous centuries, but also sought to subvert it. Moréas' recommendation that writers go back to the vigor of late medieval and Renaissance French. There was also Mallarmé’s attempt at pure poetry, recovering the true nature of words. He made his living as an English teacher; his wife was German. So he was unusually self-conscience about language.

The Dreyfus affair pitted the progressives, defenders of the Republic, against the reactionary nationalists, who tended to be anti-Semitic. The affair highlighted the role of public intellectuals. Zola is often thought to be the first, but in all likelihood it was Victor Hugo, who went into exile because of his opposition to Napoleon III. In the terminology of the 1950s, Hugo and Zola were engagés; or as we said a little later, “activists.” The Symbolists generally stood aside from such concerns, though they may have individually sympathized.

The Catholics were not all the same, for the Catholic revival also showed creative tensions—between Modernism (the original—theological--meaning of the word) and traditionalism. Modernism favored realignment of the church to accord with modern philosophy and social conditions. It urged acceptance (within bounds at least) of the findings of the critical approach to the Bible (largely centered in Germany, but cf. Alfred Loisy). It rejected the doctrinaire emphasis of Neo-Scholasticism in favor of a somewhat vague appeal to life (vitalism). Modernism did give rise to one original philosophy, that of Maurice Blondel (L’Action, 1893, popularized the word action [cf. activist], though Blondel thought that action was ultimately incomplete because it reflected the volition of God. The modernists were opposed by the ultramontanists. Their ideas, in turn, were anticipated by the influential Joseph de Maistre, who regarded the French revolution as a disaster which could only be repaired by a return to Mother Church. The ultramontanists were greatly encouraged when Pius IX declared the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870. In 1907 Pius X denounced modernism in an encyclical, and it faded.

In popular religion there was a wave of “apparitions,” miraculous appearances generally of the Virgin Mary. There were many pilgrimages, of which the Lourdes one was the most celebrated (Bernadette Soubiras). Young intellectuals preferred to trek to Chartres. The American Henry Adams picked up this interest in his once-widely read Mont St.-Michel and Chartres.

There was also a current of Jewish interest, as yet little understood. Here the key figure was perhaps Eliphas Lévi, a Catholic priest who became an occultist. In this context a long-standing interest in the Kabbalah took its place along with other trends such as Hermes Trismegistus and Rosacrucianism. The Sâr Josephin Péladan (who adopted a kind of pseudo-Semitic title) revived the latter. The name of the Nabis artists derives from a Hebrew word for prophet. Sarah Bernhardt ruled the world of acting. Among operas “La Juive” and “Samson and Delilah” were popular, the latter shading off into a vague Orientalism. Something of the same is true of the Jewish princess Salomé. This leads to a speculative issue. To what extent were artists and others aware of the affinities of Jewish art with the avant-garde modernists? As we saw with the illuminated page of a Haggadah in the British Museum, such beautiful works were available in libraries. Gradually, archaeologists were able to uncover a rich heritage of synagogues, mainly from the Roman period, with figural murals and mosaics. In their stylization and disregard of perspective works of this kind resemble modern art. Perhaps these resemblances are more an affinity than a causal element. In any event more research is needed.

Despite well-justified concerns about national decline, there were positive developments. These were celebrated in the two World’s Fairs of 1889 and 1900. The Eiffel Tower remains as a permanent monument to Gustave Eiffel, who had many other achievements. For the 1900 Fair Hector Guimard designed the first of the marvelous 1900 Métro entrances in the art nouveau style. These monuments took their place within the preexisting framework of Baron Georges Haussmann’s earlier renewal, which effectively created the Paris of the Boulevards.

Today Pierre PUVIS DE CHAVANNES (1824-1898) stands as an enigma. More perhaps than with any other 19th century artist there is a yawning chasm between the esteem he enjoyed in his later years and our present indifference. His coloring, limited mainly to browns, grays and dull greens, is reticent in the extreme. At first it seems a kind of painterly tofu, offered up without seasoning. This limited palette goes together with matte surfaces to suggest a kind of antipleasure principle. If there is little pleasure of the obvious sort, what is Puvis’ lesson? People were not sure, yet one critic opined that he would do for France what Rembrandt had done for Holland. In short there was a territory to be claimed and Puvis’ gray battalions marched in to occupy it. If indulgence in color, á la Delacroix and Redon, was “vulgarity” we need not fear that transgression here. Still, Puvis influenced Van Gogh, Picasso, Signac, and Matisse, all of whom offered the tribute of imitation.

The severe and frontal “Beheading of St. John the Baptist” (1869) offers a kind of base mark. Yet Puvis was soon to depart from such standard iconography.

“The Poor Fisherman” (1881) is very different. The central figure is perhaps Christlike, though we are left to form our own conclusions. Is the woman in the middle ground his wife, a sister, or a youth? There is a remarkable composition of triangles in the fisherman and the landscape. This surface geometry, combined with the brownish tonality, has been regarded as an anticipation of the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque.

“Young Girls by the Seashore” (1879) presents three hermetic figures, one seen from the rear, another incomplete. One critic said that the colors speak so softly they seem almost to want to do away with themselves.

Representing Puvis’ major phase is “The Greek Colony of Massilia” (1868). This panoramic pastoral evokes the Hellenic forerunner of Marseilles, emphasizing the Mediterranean heritage of France. It also represents a major contribution to the perennial theme of Arcadia.

This work, or one very like it, was the source of Signac’s divisionist “In the Time of Harmony”(1893-95). The title suggests a utopian vision inspired by the visionary Charles Fourier, who advocated life in an ideal commune. This mode of living, “Harmony,” would be immeasurably superior to “civilization” which Fourier abhorred. Another hommage is an early work by Henri Matisse, “Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (1904-05). The title is purloined from Baudelaire.

The Nabis. Taking their name from a Hebrew term meaning the prophets, the Nabis were a group of avant-garde Parisian artists who flourished from 1888 to roughly 1900. History has judged that Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard were the truly outstanding artists, but at the time they were somewhat peripheral to the core group. With the possible exception of Maurice Denis, none of the others was a major artist, but their unity was their strength.

Les Nabis originated as a rebellious group of young student artists who banded together at Académie Julian in Paris. Paul Sérusier galvanized Les Nabis, disseminating the example of his mentor Paul Gauguin among them. In fact the term was coined by the poet Henri Cazalis, who drew a parallel between the way these painters aimed to revitalize painting and the way the ancient prophets had rejuvenated Israel.

Meeting at the Académie Julian, and then in the apartment of Paul Ranson, they preached that a work of art is the visual expression of an artist's synthesis of nature in personal aesthetic metaphors and symbols. The ideal of integrating art and daily life, was a goal they had in common with most progressive artists of the time. The influence of the English Arts and Crafts Movement set them to work in media that involved crafts beyond painting, including printmaking, book illustration and poster design, textiles, furniture, and theater design.

Generating a quasireligious atmosphere, the Nabis regarded themselves as initiates, using a private vocabulary. They called a studio ergasterium, and ended their letters with the initials E.T.P.M.V. et M.P., meaning "En ta paume, mon verbe et ma paume" ("In the palm of your hand, my word and my palm."). Such initials recall the PRB (for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood).

The writings of Maurice Denis put the aims of the group in the eye of a progressive audience. His definition of painting — "a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" — anticipated abstraction. His Théories (1920; 1922) summed up the Nabis' aims long after they had been superseded by the fauve painters and by cubism.

The work of MAURICE DENIS (1870-1943) ranged from somewhat bland religious works to truly forward-looking ones. Yet some of the religious works, such as “The Holy Women at the Tomb” (1894), with the almost eerie coloring of the figures, can be quite striking.

“Green Trees” (1893) with its flatness and reticence is a minor masterpiece. In true Symbolist fashion we sense that a narrative is there, though none is specified. If we deem it necessary we must devise it for ourselves.

Another work, “Tree Study” (1893) anticipates Mondrian’s 1908 “Landscape at Oele.”
While “Song” (1910) is dully conventional, “Sunspots on a Terrace” (1890) is, exceptionally, almost abstract.

Paul SERUSIER (1865-1927) was a disciple of Paul Gauguin, as seen in his Breton “Melancholia” (1890). His “Talisman,” based on a suggestion proffered by Gauguin, is a uniquely resplendent masterpiece, which he never equaled before or after. By 1910 (“Origins” and “Tetrahedrons”) he had become absorbed by an occult geometric preoccupation.

Belgium achieved its independence from the Netherlands in 1830. It cherished the glories of its Flemish past, as seen in the slide of the Grand’ Place in Brussels. In our period, though, it became a major center of the art-nouveau trend as seen in the townhouses of Victor Horta (the interior of the Van Eetevelde house, 1897-1900, was shown). Communication with France was facilitated by the fact that the major cultural contributions of this time stemmed from the French-speaking upper crust (whose members were sometimes sarcastically known as the fransquillons). Rodenbach, Maeterlinck, and Verhaeren were the three chief Symbolist writers. With its silent canals Bruges became the archetypal Symbolist city.

Thirteen Belgians--Khopff and Ensor being the most prominent among them--started the Groupe des XX (The Twenty) in 1883. Gradually other members were admitted, many printmakers and designers, and only some of them Symbolists. Before long foreigners, including Toorop, Signac, and Rodin, were invited to join.

KHNOPFF

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (1858-1921) ranks as the pivotal Belgian Symbolist painter. Stemming from an old Austrian family, he was raised in Bruges and went to law school in Brussels. He quickly dropped out, enrolling in the Académie des Beaux-Arts. During a trip to Paris in 1877 he was impressed by Delacroix and the Pre-Raphaelites. He remained a fervent anglophile, sometimes giving English titles to his works.

At first many of his works seem slight, mere bagatelles. Yet the gain in significance if they are regarded as fragments of larger wholes. While we may at first be tempted to disregard these seemingly slight works, their technical perfection, together with the enigmas with which we are engaged, ensure our attention. Khnopff never provided written explanations, so that we must do that work ourselves. His purported obsession with his sister Marguerite has been exaggerated; she happened to agree with a certain Symbolist concept of the ideal woman, with a straight profile, chiseled chin, and prominent hairdo.

“Blood of the Medusa” (1898) is a highly personal interpretation of this fearful creature.

One of his most daring works is “The Caresses of the Sphinx” (1896). Khnopff cunningly altered the physiognomy of the sphinx so that it has the body of a leopard, not a lion. Both figures are characterized by androgyny, a preoccupation that Khnopff shared with his friend Péladan.

Several works are hommages to Péladan.

His depictions of Bruges are usually from photographs (even thought town was only some twenty miles off). Khnopff’s concern with memory parallels that of Proust. His “Portrait of Georges Rodenbach" (1895), author of the celebrated novel Bruges-la-morte, has that city as a background.

A late work, the “Orpheus” (1913) presents three archetypal female forms. The first, a kind of Venus figure, stands for sensuality. The middle figure, a feminized Orpheus, represents the arts. Finally, the Diana of the Ephesians (who wears a Buddha) headdress stands for religion, understood in a syncretistic fashion.

Lecture FIVE Summary

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As we have seen, Odilon Redon gradually reinvented himself over the course of some twenty years. Eventually, he discarded the gloomy, sometimes alarming mode of the noirs, for a resplendent new manifestation, the vehicle of an almost orgasmic color. Even during the transition period when they chronologically overlapped, the two modes remained distinct, despite some ill-advised aftertouches aimed at “gingering up” charcoal works by adding color ex post facto.

Put another way, Redon began as a melancholic, ensconced “under Saturn,” as the traditional appellation goes. Then he turned into a Jovian. (In French the name Redon can be interpreted as re-don, a regiving. Or, as they say on Broadway, he was a “twofer.”)

In this transformation extra-personal factors played a role. Together with his nation, the artist experienced a deep pessimism in the ‘seventies, following the loss of Franco-Prussian war. Yet the following decade saw a general lightening of many artists’ palettes (as Van Gogh’s spectacular shift from the browns of the “Potato Eaters” phase to Arlesian saturated color attests).).

Looked at overall, then, Redon shows a creative bipolarism. It is as if two personalities dwelt in his body, one in the earliest phases the latter in the closing decades. For a time, cohabitation even occurred.

Avoiding the temptation to clinical labeling, which would be inappropriate, it is worth looking briefly at some comparative cases. Vassily Kandinsky’s first abstract style was gestural. After he joined the Bauhaus he remained abstract, but virtually reversed his style, which became hard-edge.

The case of the American artist Philip Guston is even more striking. His subtle abstractions yielded to an assertive cartoonish style. Guston’s daughter suggests that he was exorcising some inner demons. As with Kandinsky, though perhaps more so, we tend to prefer the earlier work, sometimes hazarding the view that “I wish he hadn’t done that.”

A final instance is the career of Paul Cézanne. His romantic phase, typified by “The Murder” of ca. 1867 evolved into what we think of as the “real Cézanne,” exemplified by the bathers of the 1890s. This instance is different from the other two. The romantic canvases can be regarded as tyro work. Here the underlying assumption is that an artist, like art, progresses. In this way the artist’s early indiscretions can be excused, because he is just finding his way.

Critics, dealers, and connoisseurs seem to concur in urging artists to stick to “their” style, and not to indulge in adventures. It is a little like those rock stars whose fans insist that they give concerts of favorite oldies rather than present new work, which might prove difficult.

Let us return to our subject. In Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, please read the following pages: 1-11, 35-64, 125-52, and 185-226. These documents provide an important set of period controls for our own efforts. Note in particular G.- Albert Aurier’s 1891 presentation of Gauguin in his essay “Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin.” His five criteria are ideist, symbolist, synthetic, subjective, and decorative.

Before going further, it is necessary to examine two key ideas of wide applicability. They are also particularly relevant to Gauguin.

1) Primitivism. The big MoMA show a generation ago, with its mammoth catalogue, should have been the last work, but it wasn’t. One complaint was that “primitive” art is not primitive; and it is interesting for the ideas it incorporates as well as the form. Formal stimulus was the key to the appropriation performed by Picasso and the German expressionists. -- In art history and criticism the term primitive originally meant pre-Renaissance European art. Lionello Venturi, Ernst Gombrich and others have chronicled the “taste for the primitives.” Typical objects of admiration in this trend were noted in Duccio’s “Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin,” and the Lamentation of Master of the Rohan hours (Lamentation). In privileging design and emotion over realism the primitives were regarded as preferable to Renaissance art. This new approach inverted the earlier art hierarchy. The concept was echoed in the label “Pre-Raphaelite. The whole scheme is a challenge to the idea of progress, for art may devolve instead of evolving. We cannot confidently assume that things will get better and better. They may get worse. (Note the affinitiy with the pejorative idea of decadence. --- Historians of ideas, preeminently Arthur O. Lovejoy, have identified another type of primitivism, which is oriented to social and economic conditions. In this view a more restricted environment may be better than the excess and luxury that tend to come about as a result of economic advances. The simple life is the virtuous life. There are two variants. Hard primitivism occurs when life is hard and challenging, as among, say, the Eskimos and Tuareg of the Sahara. Soft primitivism is when life is easy because of natural abundance. Arcadia (originally a district in Greece) exemplified the European type of soft primitivism. During the 18th century, however, many began to locate it in the South Pacific.

2) Multiculturalism. Like most societies, Europeans tended to ignore or caricature the cultural achievements of other civilizations. A major exception was China. During the 17th and 18th centuries Europe was gripped by enthusiasm for things Chinese that amounted to virtual Sinomania. This admiration had serious consequences in the writings of such thinkers as Leibniz and Voltaire. In art Chinoiserie was a more superficial counterpart. Few European artists had traveled to Asia, and they produced a kind of rococo caricature of Chinese art, which passed for the real thing. Probably, though, all cultural borrowing entails some degree of distortion. We seize upon features that appeal to us, discarding the rest. However, as the realities of the Qing dynasty of the Manchus became better known, the gloss wore off. Then it was the turn of India, as seen in Brighton Pavilion. Then, in the second half of the 19th century Japan became all the rage, as seen in the work of Van Gogh and other artists. All three, China, India, and Japan were acknowledged as “high civilizations.” Generally speaking, societies viewed as less evolved were not eligible for the club. Yet there was one prominent exception, up to a point. That was the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific. Beginning with the reports of the voyages of Cook and Bougainville, some came to regard the South Seas as the earthy paradise (a version of the soft primitivism discussed above. In this happy tropical setting nature provided everything, so there was no need for covetousness and warfare. (These things existed, but Europeans affected not to notice them. There was a stereotype of the sexual availability of Pacific maidens. In this belief we may perhaps detect the origins of the highly dubious practice known today as sexual tourism. At all events the South Seas combined the ideas of abundance, exoticism, and eroticism.

GAUGUIN

Aurier notwithstanding, the conventional view is that he is not a Symbolist but a Postimpressionist. The Postimpressionist triumvirate are an oddly matched group, unified neither by style nor by meaning. It is true that Van Gogh and Gauguin were briefly an odd couple, but that does not make a movement.

At any rate Gauguin’s standing as a Symbolist was present at the creation, so to speak. Critics regarded him as such, and he did not reject the label. More significantly, the sense that his works combine what is said with what is suggested fits the Symbolist bill

Gauguin’s career shows the power of the avant-garde to attract. Wisely or not, he gave up the day job in stock brokering. Immensely conceited, he felt that his genius authorized him to utilize others-—his wife and mistresses, his supporters, even the hapless Vincent Van Gogh-—as instruments, mere appurtenances along his way to ultimate fame and fortune. He fell into the model of the amoral genius. Wagner is the archetypal example in his day.

Gauguin’s sexual pluralism (perhaps better described by the old term of womanizer) reflected his sense of entitlement, the special privileges that his genius afforded. Since the Renaissance there have been lecherous artists whose pursuit of women became obsessive. All the same, with such figures as Fra Filippo Lippi and Giorgione we would not detect their hypersexuality from their works. With Gauguin it was different. The eroticism, combined with exoticism, is integral to the work. In this affirmation, of course, he was assisted by the aura of the sexual availability of South Pacific women.

A series of self-portraits convey his messianic concept of the artist who “nobly” sacrifices his own material comfort for the good of humanity. Or, as Debra Silverman witheringly remarks, he saw himself as an exalted bandit.

His stays in Brittany were not originally motivated by a quest for the primitive, but were undertaken for the sake of economy and the company of fellow artists. It was a kind of exurban bohemia. Yet once he had had some experience of this least French of French provinces, Gauguin began to savor what he regarded as the archaic in the guise of customs that may have stemmed from the Middle Ages, or even earlier—from Druidic times. In his dress Gauguin affected wooden clogs, imagining that his heavy steps caused Breton primordiality to resound.

“The Vision after the Sermon” is a pivotal work. Not simply an aesthetic achievement, this canvas reflects his interest in redefining religious iconography. Despite a strong dose of cynicism, there is an authentic strand of religious quest in Gauguin. Technically he makes use of two medieval devices: broad areas of unmodulated color and cloisons, the imaginary stays at the edges of his figures.

During his residence with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin experienced the attractions of another French area, Provence. This was the era of the “lure of the Mediterranean.” Monet and Van Gogh reflect two aspects of this fascination, which of course many tourists have felt. For Gauguin, however, the Arles stay was but a prelude to his Real South—the nine years spent in French Polynesia.

Analysis of his Tahitian paintings shows that the style rarely features true Polynesian elements. Instead, Gauguin drew upon a stock of images he remembered or purloined from prints he had brought with him. These sources of inspiration were European, Egyptian, and Indonesian, among others. For example, “Ta Matete” with its figures aligned to the picture plane seems to derive from an Egyptian fresco of the 18th Dynasty. “Ia oriana Maria,” a path-breaking indigenization of a standard Christian theme, has two figures taken from a Buddhist relief carving at Borobudur in Java.

At first Gauguin knew little of Polynesian lore. Much of it had in fact been erased by the work of missionaries, who strove to eradicate remains of heathendom. Yet an old monograph of a writer named Jacques Antoine Moerenhout of 1837 provided him with much information about the Polynesia pantheon and beliefs. Gauguin was much taken with the moon and creation goddess Hina. On these matters see Jehanne Teillet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin's Polynesian Symbolism (Ann Arbor, 1983) and the postrumous work of Henri Dorra, forthcoming from the University of California early next year.

Oddly enough, Gauguin does not seem to have made explicit use of the two major Polynesian contributions to our thinking about religion: taboo and mana. The latter, virtually the opposite of taboo, refers to a kind of pervasive sense of the sacred.

The pivotal masterpiece of those years is the big work currently on display at the Vollard Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum: “Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?” The narrative of this canvas unfolds in frieze-like fashion--from the infant on the right to the old woman on the left.

For all of Gauguin’s devotion to the female body, he was occasionally receptive to the charms of the mahu, representatives of the “third sex.” At least two paintings show mahu persons. While the artist seemed to have toyed with the idea of androgyny, the notion of a “Gayguin” seems wide of the mark. On this matter see the somewhat speculative book of Steven Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt.

Perhaps the accomplishment of the nine culminating years in Polynesia can be understood in terms of métissage. This expression, current among some literary scholars, stems from the French word métis, mixture. The term may apply to persons whose parents are of two different ethnicities. However, there is a cultural application as well, referring to someone who strives to blend two different cultures.

In the light of this idea Gauguin did not truly succeed in “going native.” In fact he misunderstood some aspects of the Polynesian heritage. But he did succeed in grafting substantial portions of it onto his European base, which he enriched with other components. In doing so he very significantly enlarged the scope of Symbolism by bringing in major elements of non-European origin.

Lecture FOUR summary

2006-09-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

Two footnotes on yellow, one trivial, the other not at all. 1) The Yellow Kid was a scruffy urchin featured in New York tabloids of the 1890s. He wore yellow nightgown or smock.

2) In 1902 Marcel Proust saw Vermeer’s “View of Delft" for the first time. Twenty years later he was able to view it again in a special exhibition of works sent by the Dutch government. He then pronounced Vermeer’s masterpiece “the finest painting in the world.” (As an art expert Proust was no slouch, witness his translation of Ruskin and his visits to Venice and other art meccas.) He then incorporated the painting into one of the last segments of his gigantic novel. In this episode Bergotte, his ideal imaginary novelist, consumes a plate of potatoes and then visits the Dutch exhibition. There he goes into eyelock with the "View of Delft," focusing in particular on the little patch of yellow on the right. “My last two novels were a little flat: if only I could have done as Vermeer had done,” he thinks. Feeling unwell, he settles on a settee and dies. Bergotte’s last thought was that little patch of yellow.

Last time we examined the associative values of four leading colors—-black, white, blue, yellow—-in their late 19th-century context. We also looked at some precedents (El Greco, Goya) and some successor phenomena (Malevich, Le Corbusier).

The approach used was atomistic, taking each color as an independent variable. As is well known, 19th century color theory involved also the interaction of colors (e.g. Root and Chevreul). However, such theories generally confine themselves to the optical effects of colors. What is interesting to us in the light of Symbolism is the connotative dimension. What does the choice of colors say-—or, more importantly, seem to say?

A first approach to ideas about the combinatory use of (imputed) color meanings requires a brief excursion into the realm of the occult. As documented in a separate essay in the Archive, several branches of this hearty, but subterranean tradition flourished in the second half of the 19th century. (These trends would now be termed New Age.) As it turned out, the variant most important for art turned out to Theosophy, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in New York City in 1875. Blavatsky continues to be a figure of controversy. However, the influence of Theosophy on artists, notably Kandinsky and Mondrian, is beyond dispute.

The vehicle for this influence was a little book Thought-Forms, authored by Annie Besant (Blavatsky’s heir as head of the Theosophical Society) and C. W. Leadbeater. As seen in the image ostensibly produced by the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from Gounod’s "Faust," the authors subscribed to the principle of synaesthesia.

More directly linked to color theory is the chart at the beginning of the book, assigning color values to no less than 25 emotional states. Then there are diagrams showing the form that these take when inspected in the guise of personal auras (which Besant and Leadbeater claimed they could actually see).

Vassily Kandinsky owned a copy of the German edition of Thought-Forms, which he annotated. The painting “Woman in Moscow” was analyzed as a direct reflection of the Besant-Leadbeater ideas, with the large black blob representing malice, with the pink mass suggested the comforts of affection. Evidently Kandinsky found this experiment unsatisfactory, and it is difficult to find other direct uses of the Thought-Forms system. It is likely, however, that he assimilated something of its spirit. At all events his own early system of color relationships is different.

More generally, one has to acknowledge that Thought-Forms is an important bridge between Symbolism, broadly interpreted, and abstraction. In fact Besant and Leadbeater have a claim to be regarded as the first abstract artists.

Returning to Kandinsky, der Blaue Reiter was perhaps influenced by the blue flower of the romantics, possibly reinforced by Maeterlinck’s "Oiseau bleu" (first produced by the Moscow Art Theater in 1909 under Stanislavsky). Despite the title, blue backgrounds feature repeatedly in Kandinsky’s experimental playlet, “The Yellow Sound” (text printed in the Blaue Reiter Almanac).

We turn now to a pair of artists, Moreau and Redon, acknowledged from the 1880s onwards as primi inter pares among the Symbolist painters.

MOREAU (1826-98)

The best source of information is the Metropolitan Museum catalogue of 1999. Also, when in Paris one should visit the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris (1179 items!). Moreau left behind many unfinished and unsold works.

With his artistic inclinations fostered by his parents—the father was a city architect-—Moreau received excellent training. He attended the François Picot atelier (with its coldly academic precepts) together with William Bouguereau. The latter’s coyly meretricious work shows the trend not chosen. Bouguereau won the Prix de Rome; Moreau did not. Perhaps this was a fortunate failure for Moreau never succumbed to the full program of pompier art. Extremely popular in its own day, Pompiérisme was a kind of autumnal manifestation of the academicism of David and Ingres.. Recent years have seen an almost archaeological rescue of this once-dominant trend. (See the exhibitions at the Dahesh Museum in NY.)

Fortunately, Moreau tempered his Picot-inspired academicism with a large dose of Delacroix (and behind him Rubens).

Four categories of paintings were presented. The first are the relatively placid vertical paintings, sometimes pivoting around a pillar or pillar-like object. We examined Oedipus and the Sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum, an early work retaining something of the marmoreal figure presentation and smooth surface of his training. Of the grand academic machines, “Semele” is perhaps the most salient. Then there is a category of little gems, represented by the “Two Angels of Sodom." Intriguingly the final category consists of abstract works. Dating apparently from the late 1870s these have been claimed to be composition studies for major works. If so, the artist has very largely effaced the connection, making them functionally abstract. The question of such developmental “sports,” anticipations of what was to come later, has not been decisively addressed.

REDON (1840-1916)

Unlike Moreau, the Parisian born and bred, Redon was brought up in the grimly rural Médoc (though his parents did move to Bordeaux for his education). He received his artistic formation from the reclusive Bresdin. His reputation was initially secured not by Salon pieces, but through the circulation of his prints.

At first his work seems to divide into the first phase, consisting of the noirs (mainly charcoals and lithographs) and the brightly colored works (pastels and oil paintings. In fact, beginning in the mid-1870s the two categories overlap. By the mid-nineties, though he gave up the noirs. His last two decades are an almost orgasmic riot of color.

The noirs show the inception of certain obsessions: sinister spheres, severed heads, and fantastic creatures. The later work mitigates the somewhat depressive effect of these by the ecstatic color.

Redon was much influenced by literary sources, including Flaubert, Poe, and Shakespeare.

His approach to religion seems eclectic, with some overtones of the occult (though these are hard to pin down, and should not be exaggerated. His iconography shows much classical material (including the Orpheus theme), Buddha, and Christian motifs. The use of the Gothic arch and stained glass seems more generic than specifically religious (cf. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series).

Lecture THREE summary

2006-09-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

[Two prefatory notes. 1) Last time we discussed the beneficial results of Sir William Jones’ discovery of the kinship of Sanskrit with (most) European languages. The discovery resulted in the founding of the discipline of Indo-European linguistics. 2) The revelation fostered a new approach to mythology on a comparative basis. This approach eliminated the monopoly of Greco-Roman myth, encouraging questions about the function of myth in general. 3) By showing the kinship of Europeans with the Indians, the discovery helped to undermine the ideologies of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and racism.

There may be a downside: the tendency to ignore the specificity of various cultures. Anyone who has visited India knows that there is much to assimilate there that is distinctive. But there was worse for, paradoxically, this reorientation in the world of scholarship served to reinforce a certain type of racism. The root problem is the confusion of language with culture. Consider the cases of the Hungarians and the Basques. Neither is Indo-European in terms of language, but they share the same culture with their neighbors.

At any event, the spread of the idea that there is an Indo-European mentality, helped to foster a parallel idea that there is a Semitic mentality. In other words, language determines culture. Hence the invention, ca. 1880, of the term Anti-Semite. There was also a borrowing of symbolism: the Aryan label and the swastika. Visitors to South Asia are sometimes dismayed to see this emblem publicly displayed. But they had it first. Derived from an expression for “well-being,” it originally connoted a wish for prosperity.

2) We dealt last time with Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. A broader consideration of the philosopher’s entire oeuvre reveals a number of disconcerting features. A Social Darwinist, he believed that life was permeated with a struggle for dominance. Conflict, and even war, were inevitable. Nietzsche was opposed to democracy and socialism, which he viewed as relicts of the ideology of pity inherited from Christianity, which he disliked. An elitist, he dismissed the views of “the herd.” He regarded social stratification as inevitable. He was a misogynist.

With all these deficits why is he is he still read and admired? The recent decline of the left has something to do with it, though Nietzche has his admirers on the left too. Perhaps the attraction boils down to this. Living in an age of uncertainty; we can no longer casually accept any of the old prefabricated world views. In this situation Nietzsche insists that we must embrace the relativism of all values—including his own. Instead of accepting things ready-made, we must attempt the arduous task of c o n s t r u c t i n g our own foundations.]

AESTHETICISM

If decadence is Symbolism’s evil sibling, aestheticism is the gentle one. So much so that the trend was held to lack backbone, and was often the object of satire, as in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Patience.”

The roots of the aesthetic trend lie in the principle of “art for art’s sake,” propagated by Théophile Gautier in France. However, the epicenter was late-Victorian England. Yet connections that ranged as far away as Japan, whose society was regarded as the archetype of the aesthetic approach. Hence the vogue for japonisme.

Aestheticism was more a general tendency than a movement. However, the key ideas can be readily reconstructed. They are as follows. With the proper effort one can achieve a more or less seamless harmony linking one’s personality and life style with one’s clothes and surroundings. The theater for this achievement is the home, sometimes termed the House Beautiful. Domestic surroundings were regarded as a haven from a heartless world. And it was the industrial revolution, with its filth, noise, and pollution that constituted that world. As the industrial revolution had started in Britain, reaching its height—-and nadir--in Dickensian London, it is not surprising that that nation should have created this riposte.

Advocates of social change tended to regard the aesthetic trend as an evasion, a turning away from the urgent task of reform. Aesthetic surroundings indeed provided a refuge for the well to do, but what about the toiling masses? Still, as the career of William Morris (a socialist) shows, it was possible to combine the two: the aesthetic and the socially progressive. Followers of Morris’s arts-and-crafts approach said that they were the advance guard of a campaign for decent surroundings for everyone. They published books and manuscripts showing how even people of modest means could create beautiful furniture and textiles, even whole houses, with their own hands. In this way, they anticipated the “small is beautiful” trend—-and more broadly for the Green Movement.

It is probably fair to say that James Abbott McNeill Whistler did not subscribe this democratic side. Yet he made other contributions. He was a pioneer in the use of Japanese motifs as emblems of the aesthetic life, as seen in “Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen" (1864-65; Freer Gallery), showing his kimono-clad companion Jo Heffernan immersed in this eminently cultivated life style.

Thomas Jeckyll, an interior architect, had created the basic structure of the Peacock Room in the London house of the shipping magnate Leyland. Yet it was Whistler who gave the final, decisive touches to this opulent jewel box (now a permanent fixture of the Freer Gallery). While Leyland halved Whistler’s bill, he continued to enjoy the exquisite cage of the Peacock Room, the setting for his elegant dinners. We can imagine these events as the ultimate expression of aesthetic refinement.

Philip Webb’s Red House at Bexley Heath near London represented an even more complete realization of the aesthetic ideal—a whole building with all its furnishings. The house was built for William Morris and his wife Jane. Their pre-Raphaelite friends pitched in to create the furnishings. Unfortunately, these were later sold off, and the house is still (I understand) undergoing restoration. The building itself, blending Gothic and Renaissance features, is an example of the Vernacular Trend, exploiting all that was best in Olde England. Note the nationalist touch. The industrial revolution had important consequences, some deleterious, but as we learn in 1066 and All That, Britain was still Top Nation.

COLORS

Today many extol colors as the key to personality assessment and a major asset in controlling behavior. In my view, however, such endeavors are unrealistic. The associations of colors are extremely variable, sometimes volatile. Fifty years ago a red was a leftist or Communist, now it is dweller in the “red states” of the heartland, probably conservative. The meanings of color are culturally determined.

We turn now to attitudes to color among the Symbolists, and during the later 19th century more generally. For Paul Verlaine, who showed little response to the visual arts, colors are to be avoided (“Pas de couleur”), for music is the thing. Colors interfere with our quest for the nuance. For this reason we must prefer the chanson grise.

Be that as it may, we might think that “off shades” would be the characteristic color preference of the late 19th century. As such terms as violet, lilac, and lavender suggest, these shades project a decadent aura. Yet these color intermediates, generally residing in the red to purple range, are less salient in the period than one might think.

In 1858 the English chemist William Perkin invented a stable dye producing the color mauve from coal tar. The fashion industry took up the new shade almost immediately, precipitating a fad known as “mauve measles.” Not an enthusiast, Whistler remarked: “Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.” At all events, the fashion was slow to reach America, so that the 1890s are sometimes known as our Mauve Decade.

On the whole designers and artists preferred standard hues, chosen from the basic six of the standard color wheel, plus the “counter-colors” black and white.

Baudelaire claimed that “Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.” But which to which? Rimbaud’s sonnet of the vowels provided an answer, attempting to stipulate connections. Generally speaking, though, each of the favored hues attracted favor for its own sake.

Black: This was the color of Des Esseintes’ dinner party. Black was also associated with Satanism (with its black mass) and Anarchism (since 1834). Writers like Balzac and Baudelaire complained about the increasing dominance of black clothes for men. “We look as if we are always in mourning.” Gender contrasts appear in many paintings of the time (e.g. Renoir, “Dance at Bougival,” 1883), with the woman in white, the man in black. In this way, what was assumed to be the “natural complementarity” of male and female was pointed up. There was also a class distinction. Black was the power color of successful men, setting them off from workmen (who tended to wear blue and other hues).

Yet the bichromatic convention was violated by John Singer Sargent’s sensational “Madame X,” actually a portrait of Virginie Gautreau, who had been born in Louisiana. Her pose is at once provocative and reticent. The painting seemed to have touched off a minor fashion flurry (though most costume historians believe that it was not until Coco Chanel revived the fashion in the 1920s that the “little black dress” became a standard of women’s attire). In the 1930s Marlene Dietrich could still shock by appearing with top hat, coat and tails.

Looking back in history, the first great wave of black garments was in Spain, as seen in the grandees in El Greco’s “Burial of Count Orgaz.” Ostensibly this fashion was set by Charles the V, the most powerful monarch of his time. The underlying concept is that only upstarts, like England’s uncouth Henry VIII, need show off their flashy garments. The truly powerful individual practices a version of “less is more,” eschewing any unnecessary gaudiness. Power is inherent, and not to be enhanced by such superficial accoutrements as clothing. In short, if you’ve got it, you needn’t flaunt it.

Sticking to the Spanish theme, towards the end of his life Francisco Goya is thought to have created fourteen black paintings on the walls of his country house, la Quinta del Sordo. Recently, the Spanish art historian Juan José Junquera has expressed doubts about their authenticity, basing his conclusions on a series of original documents. Whoever painted them (and it is hard to dismiss the idea that they are in fact by the master himself), these powerful works are wonderful attestations of the “power of blackness.” One black painting represents “Saturn Devouring His Son.” On closer inspection the boy seems too old, since Saturn is supposed to have eaten the babies right after they were born. It may be that Goya, a close student of folklore, was a pioneer in the flexible interpretation of classical mythology we have ascribed to the Symbolists.

For a long time Odilon Redon restricted himself to chiaroscuro designs, either drawings or lithographs. The lithographs were generally released in sets (6-10), contributing to his renown. One set, dedicated to the memory of Goya, is a free set of variations with little direct connection to the Spanish artist—what is probably a more sincere form of homage. The one shown in class, the “Marsh-Flower,” reflects Redon’s fascination with aberrant biological forms, in this case a plant that is giving rise to human faces. A similarity to Lucian’s “True History” was noted.

In three separate series Redon took up Gustave Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. The two slides shown follow the text fairly closely. After Flaubert’s death in 1880, the book became a cult item among the Symbolists (Khnopf also illustrated it). The book itself is a vast panorama of religions, from Isis, Oannes, and Mani to the historical Buddha (not to mention the classical deities), reflecting the new comparative approach to mythology. Long before, of course, Hieronymus Bosch had provided the archetypal rendering of the saint’s tribulations in art.

White: The other “counter-color,” white also found much favor among late-19th century artists. The title of Whistler’s “Symphony in White” suggests a synaesthetic motive. Yet Khnopf’s portrait of his sister is probably a more consummate work. Minor artists, like Henri Le Sidaner (“Sunday,” 1898) came into play. The Revue Blanche (cover by Pierre Bonnard) was the key literary review of the Parisian ‘nineties.

However, the real triumph of white occurred after the turn of the century. In his Glasgow lunchrooms, Charles Rennie MacIntosh seems to have been the first major architect to adopt the color. A little later Le Corbusier made gleaming white surfaces the hallmark of his mature architecture (though he also executed a few houses in pastel colors). Le Corbusier’s white preferences were echoed by other architects of the International Style, so that it became usual that buildings “avoid color” (that is, be mainly white). It is only with postmodernism in architecture that other colors have made a comeback.

In painting Malevich’s “White on White” is a touchstone, though most of his work uses other colors. Today Robert Ryman prefers to paint only in shades of white, and so does (very largely) Cy Twombly. Rachel Whiteread’s monumental works tend to be in white plaster.

Blue. The history of blue reveals a remarkable ascent, a kind of rags-to-riches story. Little regarded in classical antiquity (where it could even be used to represent death), the color gained traction in the Middle Ages, when it was associated with the Virgin Mary. Today majorities in many countries affirm that blue is their favorite color. (For the fortunes of blue through the centuries, see the beautiful book by Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, Princeton University Press, 2001).

Whistler made brilliant use of blue, sometimes in association with other colors. As previously noted, Edvard Munch picked up the fever. After the turn of the century Picasso entered his Blue Period, to be succeeded by a preference for pink (the so-called Rose Period).

Yellow: Historically, this hue has been burdened with an unsavory reputation. According to Herman Pleij: “Yellow was the color of sorrow, covetousness, hunger, and death.” Leaves turn yellow in fall (decline); jaundice (hepatitis) makes the eyes yellow (sickness). Yellow also drew some stigma as a cheap stand-in for gold, that truly noble color. Medieval aristocrats wore yellow as a sign of defiance.

Some of this yellow-negativity clung to the English ‘nineties, consorting with a new fashionability. The signature periodical was The Yellow Book, 1894-97. Ostensibly Aubrey Beardsley adopted the hue from the covers of French novels (as seen in several paintings by Van Gogh, an avid consumer of such texts). Why French publishers preferred this color is unclear. Perhaps it was to increase the shelf life of books on poor paper, which were bound to turn yellow anyway. (Late 19th century American publishing forged a more plebeian connection. The “yellow press” was what we would now call tabloids, exploiting popular interest in gossip and scandal.)

All in all, the idea of the ‘nineties as the “yellow decade” was largely limited to England. Still there were some Continental analogues. Even though the original Breton crucifix cited by Gauguin in his 1889 painting was ivory-colored, he chose to make it yellow. This change corresponds to the preference of many painters at the time for “pure hues” taken straight from the tube. A year later Ranson imitated Gauguin’s form in his “Christ and Buddha.” Buddha, looming in the foreground, is blue

Dislike of yellow has not been universal. In imperial China the color was considered auspicious, and reserved for the emperor. Today, the negativity has largely faded, and yellow adorns taxis, school buses, and the raincoats of traffic guards. Evidently the intention is to make them noticeable, thereby reducing the likelihood of accidents. Yet the pejorative connotations of yellow did not entirely disappear, as seen in the yellow star the Nazis imposed on the Jews. We still term a cowardly person “yellow.”

CONCLUDING NOTE. Not inappropriately, most studies of color in art deal with the physical means (pigments) and with the optical processes triggered by our perception of colors. Recently, a discussion has developed concerning the cross-cultural terminology of color (the so-called Kay-Berlin controversy), with possibly important consequences regarding the universality of concepts..

Out concern is different: it is with the aura of associations summoned by color. In this realm one may consult two volumes by John Gage: Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Little, Brown, 1993) and Color and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (U. of California Press, 1999). These works of synthesis make valuable points. Yet they seem relatively weak on the late-19th century connotative values of individual hues that have been our theme in the above discussion.

Lecture TWO Summary

2006-09-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Abstr TWO lecture

[Prefatory note. One way of tracking the postclassical image of Orpheus is through opera. Monteverdi and Gluck created notable examples, but the libretti omit the final phase in Thrace. Haydn’s splendid "Orfeo ed Euridice," 1790, recently broadcast, does deal with the maenad attack in a somewhat sanitized version. Possibly, Offenbach’s 1858 "Orphée aux Enfers" (Orpheus in the Underworld), a comic opera that generated much commentary and cartoons, provided some of the background for Moreau’s painting of seven years later. Such considerations belong to the thematic approach, which will be addressed in the latter part of the course.]

The first lecture alluded to the “chain of custody” scheme, whereby the spirit of advanced art was claimed first by impressionism, then by postimpressionism, followed by fauvism and cubism. Voila! Abstract art is the “inevitable” result. We noted several problems with this formalistic monism.

Another issue is where does Symbolism fit in? In truth there is no single Symbolist style. Moreau remained largely faithful to his academic training. Redon, with the value contrasts of his “noirs” and the jewel-like color of his later style, is romantic. Khnopf is a kind of pre-Raphaelite. And so on. Thus Symbolism is a tendency, not a style.

Or perhaps, as we suggested last time, it is an ethos or a world view. In this light one may be tempted to seek a “perennial Symbolism” (paralleling “perennial abstraction”). The names of Chirico, Whistler, Cocteau, and Beckett came up. It is best to avoid this expansionist temptation, at least for the present, sticking to the historical core.

One way of defining Symbolism is in terms of absences.

1) Breaking with a venerable European tradition, the Symbolists abjure clarity and directness of statement. For this reason didactic works, such as those of conventional religious imagery, are generally excluded.

2) Also missing is the related project of enlightenment. They are more concerned with obnubilation: what you think is bright and clear is dark and murky.

3) There is a death of irony. Symbolists seem to lack a sense of humor. Or if they have it, it is not qua Symbolist. Oscar Wilde had a marvelous sense of irony and humor, but in his one Symbolist work, Salome (written in French) he renounces it. There is nothing funny about Salome. This lack is striking in the era of Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Alphonse Allais, and the invention of the comic strip. Sometimes, though, there is a kind of bitter satire, as in the coarse graphic works of Félicien Rops.

4) System is eschewed. For this reason comparisons with philosophy and religion only take us so far.

5) Even in a patriarchal era, the Symbolists seem to be notably misogynistic. The Salome theme-—part of the larger preoccupation with the femme fatale-—is characteristic. The Symbolists were virtually an all-male club. Exceptions are the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), whom Verlaine admired, and Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery). Monsieur Vénus, Rachilde’s 1884 novel, boldly addresses the issue of sex roles, with Raoule, the heroine, playing the man’s part. Among painters the lesbian Romaine Brooks may rank as a late-blooming Symbolist. Perhaps, then, there is some redeeming quality in the way that Symbolists raised the issue of sex roles. Indirectly, there may be a connection with “Sapphic Paris,” so welcoming to creative women from foreign lands.

Viewed as such, this onslaught of deficits raises a question. In presenting, and indeed advocating for the Symbolists, are we not trying to turn a collection of quaint knickknacks into profound evidences of the Absolute? The answer, I think, is that all historical inquiry is “dated” to some degree or other. Yet with their affinities with postmodern indeterminacy, the Symbolists seem to have acquired new relevance.

We now return to the question of mysticism.

Maurice Maeterlinck translated John of Ruysbroeck from the Dutch. The writer was a Flemish priest (d. 1381) who retired to a hermitage with a few followers. He would wander in the woods writing down his ideas as they came to him. “We are one with God,” he observed. He was accused of pantheism. God does not reside in some remote spot, looking down on humanity, but pervades the universe. Spinoza equated God with nature. Some find the idea in the Upanishads. The idea that the divine is ever present (even though we may not realize it) has affinities with Surrealism.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a distinguished Swedish scientist who experienced a religious conversion in his middle years. He claimed to have talked with angels, devils, and spirits while visiting Heaven and Hell. Christ commanded him to proclaim the doctrine of the Second Coming. To spread his message Swedenborg founded his New Church, which still thrives in a number of countries.

Swedenborg influenced a number of artists, notably William BLAKE (cf. his daring observations in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”) . He also had adherents among American painters, such as George INNESS. In France he influenced Balzac (who produced two Swedenborgian novels) and Baudelaire. The latter’s “Correspondences” is a kind of Symbolist charter (see text in Dorra). In this sonnet Baudelaire set forth three types of correspondence. Horizontal links occur between different entities in the visible world (this corresponds to common garden symbolism). Vertical links connect elements of the phenomenal world with their numinal counterparts. Finally, synaesthesia connects experience in one sense with another, as in “scarlet sounds,” “loud colors” and so forth. Synaesthesia, especially in the appeal to music, became an important component of abstraction.

As it happens, three of the four paintings presented last time as typical Symbolist productions incorporate classical mythology (the works by Moreau, Redon, and Khnopf). However, the artists tend to “tweak” the stories, so as to provide a personal interpretation. This practice assumes that mythology is familiar, but also presupposes that a certain loosening of its canons has taken place.

In Greek mythos simply meant “plot.” Today, the word myth has two meanings, broadly speaking: 1) something that is not true; 2) a profound truth presented in an allegorical fashion.

This loosening just noted is the product of the New Science of Mythology, of which an extended discussion ensued. In the course of the presentation it emerged that three major explanations for the origins of mythology have been dominant. 1) Euhemerism assumes that the gods and goddesses were originally human beings who were immensely charismatic. First they ascended to the status of heroes (cf. (Hercules and Orpheus), and then achieved full divinity. Perhaps in future centuries such figures as John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe will make such an ascent. 2) The gods and goddesses are simply names for natural forces, e.g. Helios, the sun, and Selene, the moon. Sometimes, as with Apollo and Diana, these forces have other names. 3) Mythology reflects social stratification. Thus there are three types of deities representing sovereignty (Zeus, Mitra) , power (Ares, Indra, Athena), and fecundity (Aphrodite and many others). Early European and Indian society was divided into three classes--priests, warriors, and producers.

In might have been expected that with the rise of Christianity, classical mythology would die out. In fact this lore survived through the Middle Ages. In the early Renaissance classical myths received powerful support from the Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, who sought a kind of universal understanding of religious truth.

Sandro BOTTICELLI’s “Birth of Venus” (ca. 1482) is a celebrated attestation. The classical goddess emerges from the water on a shell, blown towards shore by the Zephyrs, symbols of spiritual passions, and with one of the Horae, goddesses of the seasons, handing her a flowered cloak. Contrary to our off-hand modern view, the naked goddess is not a symbol of earthly love (lust) but of spiritual love—she is Aphrodite Urania (as distinct from her humbler sister Aphrodite Pandemos; see Plato’s Symposium). Her origins were explicated by a strange story, in which Ouranos, the sky god, suffered castration at the hands of his own son, Kronos or Saturn, who threw the genitals into the sea. One motivation for allegorical interpretation of such myths is to mask such indecencies, which caused embarrassment even to the ancient Greeks.

Anthropologists surmise that mythology may be universal. All the same, for a long time Greek mythology (and its Roman adjunct) mythology enjoyed a uniquely privileged status. Books by Hesiod and Ovid, supplemented by a tradition inaugurated by Giovanni Boccaccio, provided a rich repertoire. Yet during the 19th century this Greco-Roman monopoly ceased, for two other types of mythology became known. Copiously attested in written records, these “other” mythological systems cast light on poorly understood parts of Greco-Roman mythology. The first of these sisterly rivals was Norse or Germanic; the second Indian.

Remarkably, traces of Germanic mythology survive in our days of the week; Tuesday (Tur), Wednesday (Woden), Thursday (Thor), and Friday (Frigg). In fixing dates we unknowingly pay tribute to these deities. (As they say, maybe it can’t hurt.) Around 1800 scholars began to study and translate the Old Norse myths where these deities are ensconced. Wagner adapted this store of Germanic mythology in his Ring cycle, and Wagner was a big favorite among the Symbolists. The set of four operas ends with the Twilight of the Gods, or Götterdämmering. This is an image of cosmic decline, reflecting the Scandinavian myth of Ragnarok.

The second competitor, India, was perhaps even more important. New comparative material appeared in the wake of the fundamental discovery of Sir William Jones (1784). For the first time, Jones demonstrated conclusively that Sanskrit was a sister language to Greek and Latin. He noted pitar (=pater), bhratar (=frater, brother), agni (=ignis) and thousands of other correspondences. By showing that Indian languages were not exotic products of “barbarism,” Jones poked a big hole in the ideology of imperialism, which relied on the assumption of the “otherness”of the subject peoples. . His findings were instrumental in founding the science of Indo-European linguistics, whose comparative perspectives extended from India and Persia in the East to Ireland and Scandinavia in the West.

If words could be compared, why not myths? The Vedic documents, the earliest surviving Indo-European texts, contain much mythological material

At first a good deal of confusion reigned, for assimilating new truths is always difficult, particularly when they go against ingrained beliefs—-in this case the idea of the inherent superiority of Europe. In this way Schopenhauer conflated Brahmanism (which he studied in the Upanishads) with Buddhism. Once the latter became known it was understood in terms of simple categories, such as “nothingness.” While that idea exists (as the shunyata), there is much more to Buddhism. In these initial speculations, Buddha was even identified with Wotan! Comparison sometimes goes too far.

Some attempts to combine religion are deliberate, reflecting the idea that there are truths common to all religions. This idea, already adumbrated by Ficino, seems to underlie Paul RANSON’s “Christ and Buddha” (ca. 1890-92).

Eventually, it emerged that the leading advocate of the Indological approach to mythology was Friedrich Max Müller, a German savant who settled in England. This scholar was responsible for a whole library of translations, the Sacred Books of the East. Many of these volumes are still consulted. He was an almost fanatical exponent of the idea that the ancient gods and goddesses represent natural forces, especially the sun.

Max Müller’s ideas reached France by an indirect route. Reverend Cox, his disciple, condensed them into a single book, which adds Norse and Indian examples to the Greco-Roman core. This book in turn was translated by no less a figure than Mallarmé, in his Les Dieux antiques of 1885.

One more figure must be cited in this reorientation of mythology. Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book,The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), represents a turning point in the understanding of ancient Greece. The German thinker posited a basic polarity of two drives, one ruled by Apollo, the other by Dionysos. The first, the Apollonian component, reflects the principles of rationality and clarity that the conventional wisdom had long taken to be the exclusive hallmarks of ancient Greek civilization (“Noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur,” as Winckelmann put it) The Dionysian pole is one of ecstasy and excess. For the Apollonian reverie, a dream or order, clarity, and rationality, it substitutes frenzied intoxication. The Dionysian is the irrepressible, overflowing surge of life itself. A typical Apollonian gathering would be a committee meeting, governed by Robert’s Rules of Order. A Dionysian gathering would be an orgy. Yet we cannot allow the Dionysian impulse to rage unchecked. Civilization requires the interplay of both, but the Dionysian is primordial, for it is the ultimate principle of creativity. The Dionysus pole comes to the fore in music (Nietzsche is thinking of Wagner), while the Apollo trend is dominant in the visual arts. The whole construction is part of Nietzsche’s “metaphysic of the artist,” the assumption that the creation of great art is society’s highest task. The world itself is governed by a kind of artistic interplay of opposing forces. Nietzsche’s ideas remain controversial among classicists, but have insinuated themselves into the ground structure of our thinking about culture, and perhaps life itself.

In our own day, the heirs of Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle are such beat writers as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Rock and Roll has also been named. These allusions make Nietzsche’s point that the contrast of Apollonian and Dionysian does not simply apply to ancient Greece, but reflects fundamental human drives.

The final unit of the lecture broached the question of words. Time permitted only a discussion of Decadence, the rival of Symbolism ostensibly replaced by the latter term in 1886. The ultimate reference point for decadence is the Fall of the Roman Empire, leading (ostensibly to the Dark Ages). The painting by Thomas COUTURE (1847) offers a lurid portrayal of supposed Roman excesses.

We must avoid this fate ourselves. But can we? It may be inevitable. With this prospect some discovered (rightly, I think) attractive features in “Dark Age” art, such as the splendid Byzantine mosaic of the Empress Theodora in San Vitale in Ravenna (547). Des Esseintes showed a predilection for sophisticated literary works of Late Latinity.

The word decadence is an example of “detoxification” of negative terms. For further information, see Decadence, below.

Several strands come together in a beautiful poem by Paul Verlaine, “Languor” (1884).

“I am the Empire at the end of the decadence,
Watching great and white barbarians pass by
As I doodle my lazy acrostics
Scribed in gold beneath a play of languid light.

“Lonely would weighted down by ennui,
There, they say, it’s long and bloody war.
Ah, what if slow and weak desire stopped
Trying to make life sing with color?

“What if the need to die there went?
Everything’s been drunk. Stop laughing, Bathyllus.
Everything’s been consumed. Nothing left to say.

“Just a silly poem for the fire,
Just a wanton slave neglecting you,
Just afflictions of ennui sprung from God knows where.”
(trans. Martin Sorrell)

Lecture ONE summary

2006-09-07T10:56:00.000-07:00

In his book Human Accomplishment (New York, 2003) Charles Murray has identified fourteen meta-inventions that occurred since ca. 800 BCE. There are six in the arts, three in philosophy, three in mathematics, and two in the sciences. The three in the visuals arts are naturalism (the ancient Greeks), perspective (Italy, ca. 1400), and abstraction (Europe, 1909-14). One may quarrel with the details of Murray’s analysis. About abstraction, though, he is surely correct. This was a revolutionary development in Western art that calls for tenacious, serious examination, with regard to its nature and above all as to the causal factors that shaped it.

[One should set aside a preliminary objection, namely that abstraction is no novelty of a hundred years ago, but has always existed. It is true that, since neolithic times, there has been a perennial abstraction, but Western art banished these patterns to the margins, relegating them to the so-called minor of decorative arts. Early twentieth-century abstraction is not “decorative.” It boldly assumes the place formerly occupied by figuration, landscape, and still life. For further documentation, see the essay on Perennial Abstraction, below at this site.]

One common explanation for the rise of abstraction ascribes it to kind of chain reaction set off by the tiny dots making up the surface of the impressionist paintings of CLAUDE MONET and his colleagues. Thus impressionism began postimpressionism. In turn postimpressionism begat fauvism, fauvism begat cubism, and finally cubism begat abstraction. This occurred, according to the influential theory of Clement Greenberg because of the essential flatness of painted surface. One this condition was tacitly acknowledged in impressionism, what followed was inevitable. This story is one of progress towards a goal, in short, of teleology.

Others have noticed that the development was not unique to the visual arts, for a similar evolution has been evident in music, where Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system is analogous to abstraction and literature (Stein’s Tender Buttons, ditto). The reason for these correspondences has been sought in technological determinism, viz. the extraordinary inventions in information storage and transmission (film, telephones, and radio) and transportation (automobiles, aviation). While it is easy to affirm this connection, it breaks down under close analysis. As seen in class, GIACOMO BALLA and LE CORBUSIER drew very different conclusions from their devotion to the automobile.

In fact the rise of abstraction is overdetermined. That is to say, a number of factors have converged. Over the years I have become convinced that the most important of these conditioning factors is the Symbolist Movement.

Officially, Symbolism (with a capital s) was launched by an 1886 manifesto of Jean Moréas in a Paris newspaper. (Excerpt in Dorra; full text in a separate entry below.) The writer rebranded the old term decadence, judged too negative. According to the manifesto, Symbolism had been existence for some time. Already present in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (died 1867), it may have been anticipated by the American Edgar Allen Poe (died 1849). Moréas ignored the visual arts, but others detected the connection (above all, Huysmans, who included it in his programmatic novel Against Nature of 1884).

Four examples provide an initial clarification of visual symbolism.

1) MOREAU’s Orpheus (1865) draws upon a classical myth of the death of Orpheus, but modifies it in a significant way, by making the woman a Thracian instead of an inhabitant of Lesbos (Ovid). This change creates an almost eerie sense of mystery, as to why this woman, possibly one of the poet-singer’s slayers, should assume a reverential pose. As a symbol of creativity, Orpheus was honored throughout the 19th century. Later, Apollinaire purloined the name for the “Orphic Cubism” of the Delaunay’s.

REDON’s “Cyclops” is a much freer adaptation of classical mythology. The circular eye and head of the creature reflect the artist’s obsession with spherical forms. The giant may also be connected with Redon’s interest in the bypaths of biology. The scintillating colors of this late work add to the appeal.

KHNOPF’s “I Close My Door Upon Myself” (1891) takes its title from a poem by Christina Rossetti. The woman is modeled on the artist’s sister Marguerite. While this connection is not incestuous, it does reinforce what might be termed the “calm claustrophobia” of the scene. The flowers (irises and a poppy) suggest transience, and perhaps even death. The marble head of Hypnos, Greek god of sleep, presides over the scene. This figure connects with the Symbolist fascination with dreams.

MUNCH’s “Night” stems from the artist’s brief Parisian period (1889-90), when he was introduced to Symbolism by his friend, the Danish poet Immanuel Goldstein. It is almost a monochrome, dominated by blue, a color much in vogue at the time (Whistler, Mallarmé, Darío). “Night” is best regarded not simply as a portrayal of the artist’s dismal quarters in Saint-Cloud, but as a rendering of his state of mind. In its muted way, it forecasts Munch’s later obsessive angst.

[For images, try googling these art works.]

We now turn to a first pass at a challenging task, and that is to characterize the Symbolist ethos or world-view. Initially we acknowledge that Symbolism posited two procedures: 1) with the appropriate effort, the perceptive observer may intuitively access another realm that lies beyond the everyday world; and 2) in this endeavor there is a need to attenuate the distractions of specificity, for the world of objects occludes the window that the Symbolist is seeking to create as a way of contemplating another world.

Applying these principles, Symbolism came to stand for fluidity, slippage, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. In this context, peripheral perceptions could become central and vice versa. It is tempting to identify Symbolism with contemporary postmodernism. Yet that is probably an oversimplification.

Let us return to point two. Put baldly, as above, that is probably overstated. While the Symbolists show affinities with transcendental idealism, they refused to be pinned down. In philosophy transcendental idealism appears in one of two main guises. The first is Plato’s two-worlds theory, in which the things we encounter in our everyday lives are inadequate copies of the archetypes, the Forms or Ideas, which dwell in a kind of supernal realm. Kantian idealism is less definite. Kant proposed a dichotomy between the phenomenal and numinal realms. The first is what we see and experience in our daily lives; the latter interpenetrates it. We can be absolutely certain that the numinous realm (“the thing in itself”) exists, but must remain agnostic as to its contents.

Yet earlier versions of transcendental idealism tend to posit that something inspiring or uplifting lies beyond the veil. We seek to pierce it for relief from the disappointments and heartache of everyday existence. The Symbolists seem to believe that no such consolation is readily available. We can only gesture towards things that may lie in the Beyond. Moreover, their character may not be uniformly positive, for they may be laced with forbidden material, such as incest, sexual variation, and sadism. Enter at your peril.

Now we leave these gloomy precincts, at least for a while. Another interesting parallel is with the Christian religious mystics of the late Middle Ages, who flourished mainly in Germany, the Netherlands, and England. In our quest for union with God we must renounce the tools of the intellect. We must frankly recognize that we dwell in the Cloud of Unknowing, as an anonymous English mystic put it. Ignorance, if it can lead us on this path, must be frankly embraced. However, these mystical approaches differ markedly from the way of the Symbolists. The earlier traditions assume that we can indeed “break on through to the other side,” as Jim Morrison would put it. Instead we must honestly acknowledge the possibility that there may not be any “other side,” and even if there is, there is no guarantee that we can attain any definite knowledge of it. Were we to do so, we might find that circumstances there are less pleasant than we imagined. As the old saying has it, ignorance is bliss. But we are better off without the narcotic of such assurances.

Stimulating as these parallels are, it must be conceded that the Symbolist Movement is neither religious nor philosophical—though it has affinities with both. One philosopher did influence the Symbolists. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) attacked the logocentrism of philosophy, its overemphasis (in his judgment) on the sovereignty of the intellect. Instead, he stressed the role of a vast impersonal factor he termed the Will. The operations of this inescapable ground of being are in large measure inscrutable, but they are inescapable. Schopenhauer’s disciple Eduard von Hartmann popularized the idea of the Unconscious forty years before Freud. Symbolism shares with Surrealism a desire to explore hidden aspects of human experience.

The prospect of our engulfment in Schopenhauer’s vast empire of the Will may seem daunting, even terrifying. But there is one readily available antidote, and that is the arts. Their real purpose, Schopenhauer avowed, is to hold the Will at bay. Among the arts, music is supreme. The Symbolists agreed with him: “De la musique avant toute chose” (Verlaine).

[Btw, I was mistaken in saying that Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to be influenced by Asian thought. The first was probably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who used Chinese sources (including the I Ching) to help in formulating his concept of the differential calculus.]

As the 19th century advanced, many educated persons concluded that the rising tempo of scientific discovery left no room for any belief other than materialism. At the opposite pole were those who, for a variety of reasons, retained their allegiance to organized religion. The Symbolists were inclined to pursue a third path. They held that there must be some way of attaining and deepening a sense of spiritual awareness.

The Symbolist Movement sought to challenge a tradition in Western country that had been honored for centuries. That is the idea that we must strive for “clear and distinct ideas.” In the view of its supporters, this is an asymptotic process. We may never arrive at complete clarity, but the main thing is gradually to eliminate zones of imprecision. This endeavor links up with another project, loosely termed Enlightenment. The Enlightenment project seeks to challenge and defeat various forms of superstition. In the view of many, this means not just challenging false beliefs, but even revealed religion itself. Needless to say, all forms of mysticism-—including “new-fangled” ones imported from Asia-—are anathema to this view.

According to the Symbolists the highminded quest for ever-increasing clarity is vain and inadequate. The most important truths cannot be expressed in any definite form. Verbal and mathematical formulations give us only information about the least important aspects of reality. As Wittgenstein said, “[A]bout that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” For the Symbolists, though, complete silence would mean giving up. We must not do this.

What is really important is intangible reality. This reality, the true reality, can only be hinted at. But that is an indispensable task. For this purpose the devices of suggestion and nuance must be relentlessly deployed. Hence Mallarmé’s 25%/75% split. Naming or description provides only 25% of the value of the poetic transaction. The other 75% obtains through suggestion.

At first sight it seems odd that the Symbolist should work, in the first instance, in the medium of words. Words had in fact been the primary vehicle of the striving for clarity noted above. However, Symbolists noted that words contained all sorts of hidden connections, devices we term metaphors, puns, sound affinities, and so forth. These devices can be turned to good use to subvert the Clarity project.

As noted above, in order to achieve its aims Symbolism seeks the attenuation of specificity. Art being specific creates a problem. However, Symbolist artists like Moreau, Redon, and Khnopf found ways around this obstacle, so that there is in fact Symbolist art.

Perhaps the ULTIMATE LESSON of the Symbolist challenge may be this epistemological truth: “Knowing is inseparable from the not-known. And the not-known may not even be knowable. ” Symbolism offers a lesson in intellectual humility.

A concluding footnote concerns the conventional view of symbolism. The "Adoration of the Lamb" from the Ghent altarpiece and Bartholdi's colossal Statue of Liberty illustrate the ordinary use of the term. These instances display a one-for-one correspondence between the symbolic token, on the one hand, and the person or idea for which it stands, on the other. The Bartholdi work is an example of the device of personification, an invention stemming from Greek and Roman art that is used to denote concepts, cities, and countries. Once one knows the appropriate code the answer to the puzzle is readily obtained. Such links are the subject matter of the discipline of iconography. There are many useful reference works in which such correspondences are listed in alphabetical order.

Two proto-Symbolist works, GIORGIONE’s “Tempest” and CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH’s “Two Men Contemplating the Moon,” document an entirely different approach. Here no code is available. Such works convey their meaning by connotation instead of denotation.

It is true that symbols of the conventional type sometimes make their way into works of the true Symbolist type. A case in point is the lyre (an attribute) in MOREAU’s “Orpheus.” However, this device is not the main point. Instead it serves as hook to involve us in the classical subject matter-—which the artist then treats in a special subjective way.

In short, we must bear in mind the distinction between symbolism and Symbolism. The latter is the main theme of this course.

Overview of Symbolism (revised)

2006-09-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic and historian influential in the 1920s. Brooks posited a contrast between "two publics, the cultivated public and the business the public of theory and the public of activity, the public that reads Maeterlinck and the public that accumulates money." As a characterization of the split in our elites between the eggheads and the business types, this comment is astute. But who was Maeterlinck, and why did people read him?

The Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was the leading Symbolist playwright. That seems an oxymoron. How can the stage, the home of intensity and conflict, have any connection with Symbolism, with its reliance on suggestion and indirection? In fact the affinity was real. This apparent anomaly shows that a full understanding of Symbolism calls for some serious cultural archaeology, seeking to recapture lost themes, figures, and interests.

But first a preliminary approach to defining Symbolism itself.

In ordinary art-historical usage symbolism denotes the evocation of something, usually sacred or conceptual, by adducing a material object, e.g. a lamb for Christ or an anchor for the idea of Hope. Given their conventional status, such symbols lend themselves to fairly easy decoding, provided the viewer is acquainted with the semiotic system employed. Today there exist many dictionaries of symbols, aiding in this task.

The lamb and anchor examples just cited display a quid-pro-quo relationship, as one thing can be read for another. This “common-garden” variety of symbolism occurs frequently in medieval and Renaissance art, where it is addressed by the subdiscipline of iconography.

In the early nineteenth century, however, a new concept of symbolism arose in which the associations are broader, being suggestive rather than precise. Things in the real world do indeed point to something else. Yet what that something else is one cannot be certain. It might be a host of things--or nothing definite.

Symbolism therefore came to stand for fluidity, slippage, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. In this context, peripheral perceptions could become central and vice versa.

The symbolist world view posited two principles: 1) With the appropriate effort, the perceptive observer may intuitively access another realm that lies beyond the everyday world; and 2) In this endeavor there is a need to attenuate the distractions of specificity, for the world of objects occludes the window that the Symbolist is seeking to create as a way of contemplating the other world.

To a considerable degree these ideas stemmed from German idealist philosophy with its contrast between the phenomenal, visible world and the unseen numinous world. Particularly influential was Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who stressed the role of a vast impersonal factor he termed the Will. The operations of this inescapable ground of being are in large measure inscrutable, but at the same time they are inescapable. Schopenhauer’s disciple Eduard von Hartmann popularized the idea of the Unconscious forty years before Freud. Symbolism shares with Surrealism a desire to explore hidden aspects of human consciousness.

Why was the Symbolist quest undertaken? As the nineteenth century advanced, many educated persons concluded that the rising tempo of scientific discovery left no room for any belief other than materialism. At the opposite pole were those who, for a variety of reasons, retained their allegiance to organized religion. The Symbolists were inclined to pursue a third path. They held that there must be some way of attaining and deepening a sense of spiritual awareness.

At this crossroads knowledge itself came to the rescue, in the form of the New Science of Mythology. Prior to 1800 mythology had meant primarily the Greco-Roman gods and heroes. This view came to seem too narrow, for a reexamination of ancient vernacular documents provided new information on Celtic and Germanic myth and legend. Even more significant was the study and translation of Indian texts, especially the Vedas, which provided the oldest available mythological data, including ideas and deities that were clearly related to the European ones. Buddhist texts also became important.

These studies gave birth to the discipline of comparative religion, which sought underlying truths beneath the plethora of individual data. In addition to the comparative perspective, scholars like Friedrich Max Müller detected a more general principle, and that was the idea that mythology was simply a sophisticated cloak for perceptions about the natural world, especially those that invoked the solar principle. By depersonalizing mythology, stripping from it the adventitious details of the various gods and heroes, one could reveal the essential truths concealed within. It is significant that in 1880 Stéphane Mallarmé, who was to become the most influential of all Symbolist writers, published a translation (Les Dieux antiques) of a manual of mythology by the English scholar George W. Cox, who was essentially a popularizer of the work of Max Müller.

The era also saw an upsurge of hermetic or occult thought. Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant) conveyed knowledge of alchemy and Rosicrucianism. In Les grands initiés (1889) the Alsatian writer Edouard Schuré sought to establish the equivalence of religious figures from various traditions--Rama, Krishna, Hermes Trismegistus, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus.

We now turn to the pivotal event in the narrative. Jean Moréas, a French poet of Greek extraction, launched Symbolism as a literary movement in a manifesto published in Le Figaro Litteraire in 1886. Closer inspection shows that the precepts advanced by this document were rather sketchy. Literary progress requires renovation from time to time, the writer maintained. The central concern of the new school must be to clothe the Idea in a sensible form. In their quest for purity of expression the poets must not fear obscurity. As a movement Symbolism represented a reaction against naturalism and positivism, which were viewed as simplistic and unsubtle.

In fact Symbolism was a new name for an existing group known as the Décadents. Moréas had the brilliant idea of rebranding them with the more dignified label of Symbolists. The initial band of practitioners was not very impressive. However, Symbolism gained credibility by annexing to their cause a quartet of luminaries, among the most brilliant poets of any time or country. These were Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Baudelaire had died in 1867, while Rimbaud gave up poetry in 1875.

Baudelaire, who ranks as one of the greatest of French poets, was also active as a prose writer and art critic. In his Les Fleurs du Mal Symbolists particularly cherished the sonnet “Correspondences" (See Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories.) Here Baudelaire used several metaphors for the riddle of a world that calls out for interpreting in a deep sense, but does not always provide the clearest guidance for doing so. He wrote of Nature as a “temple where the living columns sometimes breathe confusing speech.” He also evoked the human passage through “forests of symbols.” Finally, he taught the doctrine of synasesthesia: “perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond.” Baudelaire’s concepts reflect the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist-mystic.

Initially Verlaine gravitated to the Parnassian movement in French poetry. He established an individual voice with his first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1867). In the eyes of the general public his copious poetic production became overshadowed by his scandalous private life. He abandoned his wife for his ephebic lover Arthur Rimbaud. Romances sans paroles was the poetic outcome of this period. Verlaine’s lyric gift allowed him to capture the allusive and musical qualities of symbolism to the full.

Arthur Rimbaud was a prodigy who, by the age of fifteen, had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in Latin. He matured rapidly, becoming an anarchist, amusing himself by shocking the local bourgeois with his shabby dressing and long hair. In a letter that has proved influential he wrote of his method for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses." In 1871 he joined Verlaine in Paris, the beginning of their liaison. After separating from the older poet, Rimbaud wrote his phantasmagoric Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing. His final major work Illuminations includes what are thought to be the first two French poems in free verse. After 1875 Rimbaud wrote no more poetry, preferring to work as a gunrunner in East Africa.

It was widely recognized that de facto the central figure in the Symbolist movement was Stéphane Mallarmé, rightly famed for his salons, Tuesday gatherings of intellectuals at his house for discussions of poetry, art, and philosophy. His earlier work owes a great deal to the style established by Baudelaire. His mature poetry anticipates many of the interactions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist schools. Often perceived as a formalist, Mallarmé's work was more generally concerned with the dialogue style and content. This is particularly evident in the intricate, innovative Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ('’A roll of the dice will never abolish chance'’) of 1897, his last major poem.

Mallarmé’s poetic credo is hard to summarize, and for many that is the point: poetry is about nuances, not bald statements. With perhaps uncharacteristic clarity, Mallarmé put the matter in this way: “To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the pleasure of poetry, which is meant to reveal itself little by little. To suggest it, that is the dream.”

Mallarmé's poetry has been the inspiration for several musical pieces, notably Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” (1894).

Inspired in part by Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamkunstwerk, a fusion of the arts, Symbolists paid much attention to parallels between the arts—to one parallel in particular. Paul Verlaine stipulated: "Music above all else." Symbolists took music as their touchstone, because as a medium it stands the farthest from direct representation of the world. The musical ideal also presided over subtle experiments in poetic rhythm. Central to Symbolist poetic practice was muting or veiling, what the composer Debussy referred to as things "à démi voix." (1889). It is this attenuation above all that was prophetic of, though it did not realize, abstraction.

As the public became better acquainted with Symbolist poetry, its subject matter was reduced to an easy series of stereotypes. The poets conjured up a décor of forests and parks, pools and fountains, suffused with an atmosphere of legend. Such settings typically enshrined languorous princesses, escorted by unicorns and surrounded by doves, swans, and peacocks, while wearing fantastic jewels. At a deeper level the Symbolists proposed a new approach to myth, utilizing some traditional figures, such as Orpheus, Narcisssus, and Salome. The latter was part of a larger concern with the “fatal woman.” Gender issues were also explored in the theme of the Androgyne. More broadly, there were explorations of Northern mythology, especially as mediated by the music dramas of Richard Wagner.

There were also Symbolist novels. By common consent, the most remarkable of these is Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (Against the Grain, or Against Nature; 1884). The hero is the reclusive Duke Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the last member of a powerful and once proud aristocratic family. He fills his country house with his eclectic art collection, which includes paintings by Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. In Latin literature he is attracted only to “decadent” works of late antiquity and the middle ages. Little pleases him among the moderns, apart from Baudelaire and Mallarmé (then little known). He tries his hand at inventing perfumes and he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. A major feature of the house is a mouth organ, in which tubes led to various casks of alcohol. In his view every liqueur corresponded to the sound of a particular musical instrument, so that dry curaçao was like the clarinet, while kümmel recalled the sound of the oboe. At one point Des Esseintes spontaneously decides to visit London, but when he reaches the train station he is disgusted by English voices. Feeling that he now knows what London would be like, he immediately returns home.

Other Symbolist writers of fiction were Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and the prolific Josephin Péladan. The latter is also known for organizing the Rose + Croix exhibitions of Symbolist paintings, many of them showing occultist leanings.

Having achieved its maximum strength in the period 1886-1895, Symbolism remained controversial. Its opponents tagged it with the sobriquets of decadence and the fin-de-siècle.

The first formal adherents of Symbolism were French and Belgians writing in French. Close relations, political as well as literary, with England facilitated the movement’ s migration into that country. Arthur Symonds published the first account in English, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, in 1899. A group of minor poets, including Ernest Dowson, John Gray, and Lionel Johnson, may be regarded as Symbolists. Oscar Wilde is sui generis.

Looking more widely Symbolist qualities have been detected in such figures as Stefan George, Rubén Darío, William Butler Yeats, and the early Ezra Pound. However, these major figures did not formally subscribe to the Symbolist program. Matters were different in Russia.

Russian Symbolism assumed a variety of forms, which can only be sketched here. The poet Valery Bryusov claimed to have created, almost single-handedly, Russian Symbolist poetry. In order to project an image of Symbolism as a major movement, Bryusov adopted numerous pen names, while publishing three volumes of his own verse entitled Russian Symbolists. Anthology (1894-95). Bryusov's campaign succeeded, for several young poets were drawn to Symbolism as the latest fashion in Russian letters. Notable among them were Konstantin Balmont, who believed in first inspiration and sometimes intentionally left his verse unrevised, and the pessimistic Fyodor Sologub, who styled himself the “bard of death.” Innokenty Annensky was known primarily for his masterful translations of French Symbolists and Euripides. Annensky managed to find Russian equivalents for the essential intonations of Baudelaire and Verlaine, while the subtle music, ominous allusions, arcane vocabulary, and the spell of minutely changing colors and odors were all his own.

As Symbolism gradually spread across the Russian Empire, Moscow asserted itself as its principal center. Three of these Muscovite poets--Alexander Blok, Andrey Bely, and Sergey Solovyov--were all indebted to the latter's uncle, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. In their recondite poems, redolent of religious hymns, they paid tribute to Solovyov's mystical concept of Eternal Womanhood.

At first glance, the theater, with its emphasis on dramatic situations and vivid characterization, would seem inhospitable to Symbolism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Symbolism found favor in the theatre antidote to the naturalism prevailing in the medium, which had, many felt reached a dead end. Symbolist directors employed lighting, gesture, pauses, and the intonation of the actors’ speech to create a mood independent of the referential character of the words. A notable exponent was Aurelien-Marie Lugné-Poe, who founded the Théatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris in 1893. Lugné-Poe’s productions of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, and Strindberg “introduced a new minimalist aesthetic to the French stage—décor stripped down to its bare essentials, emphasis on cryptic lighting effects, actors transposed into mere shadows (or symbols) dispersed across dreamscapes” (Richard Sieburth). A little later Edward Gordon Craig was to pioneer an even more drastically simplified stage presentation. Craig aspired to reduce the actors to marionettes.

The play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) is the masterpiece of the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. It is set at an indeterminate place during an indeterminate period. The origins of Mélisande, the heroine are never explained. Against these indeterminate features Maeterlinck tells his story of the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters.

The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Nowadays even better known than the play is the opera by Claude Debussy (1902), which builds upon the Symbolist features of the play adding music that is perfectly suited to it, and thereby creating a composite work of art, one of the ultimate aspirations of the period. Earlier, in 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for the play, from which he later extracted a suite. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius also wrote incidental music for it in 1905. The story is also the basis for the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s early symphonic poem "Pelleas und Melisande" of 1902-03.

As early as 1889 critics and others began to speak of Symbolism in painting. The principal French painters associated with symbolism were Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon. Very different from one another, these three all had established reputations before the publication of the Manifesto. Rallying to the cause were Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, and the Nabi group. There was a signification Belgian contribution, of which the names of Fernand Khnopf and James Ensor are outstanding.

Symbolism in art is a "greedy" concept, ever seeking to expand the bounds of its empire. Currently, it is rampant in the interpretation of later Victorian art, including such figures as Edward Burne-Jones, Frederick Lord Leighton, and Aubrey Beardsley. Burne-Jones had previously been assigned to a pigeonhole labeled "continuation of Pre-Raphaelitism." And except for an attraction to classical subject matter, what do Leighton and Beardsley have in common?

Still, if one attends to a reasonable core group, symbolist painters addressed a variety of themes. Mythology was a significant area of interest. Classical subjects, such as Orpheus and Narcissus, appeared, seen through a kind of haze of ambiguity that was preferred to the clear light of earlier Neo-classicism. In addition, Northern myths and medieval legends figured prominently. Some turned to Satanism. All this subject matter was viewed in the light of a kind of twilight of culture (recalling the decadence motif, to be discussed presently).

The precariousness of the self was expressed in various ways, including dreams and death. Settings often involved transposition to troubling places. The cosmos appeared, but interpreted in the spirit of Weltschmerz, a weariness with the world.

An old theme was renewed in Central Europe in a new concept of the evocative landscape in which scenes became, as it were, mirrors of the soul. This approach began precociously with the northern landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. In his several versions of “The Isle of the Dead” the Swiss Arnold Boecklin shifted the focus of interest to the Mediterranean. While they are little known today, artists such as Ludwig Brach, Max Klinger, and Franz von Stuck exploited this vein in many evocative, subtly disturbing works.
A search for innocence was generally found to be problematic. Adolescent awakenings were ambivalent. Men found themselves confronted with the femme fatale, personified by Salome and Judith. Many paintings appeared of these two archetypal figures. It was left to Eduard Munch, however, to achieve a more general presentation of woman as a site of attraction and danger, at the same time.

Hope was found only in Arcadia and Paradise—-and the latter was often understood as a Lost Paradise. Synaesthesia, the simultaneous experience of perfumes, colors, and sounds, offered consolation.

The melancholy and pessimism residing in the iconography of Symbolism trenched with the recurrence of the decadence theme towards the end of the nineteenth century. Previously, decadence had been viewed with dread and loathing, as a symptom of societal breakdown. However, writers such as Huysmans and Verlaine "detoxified" the term, ascribing positive qualities to it. Efforts were made to detect specific qualities of decadent art works. These in turn led to the reevaluation of previously disparaged art styles, such as the baroque and especially late antique art (as seen in the research of the Viennese art historians Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff). The qualities of stylization, frontality, and replication noted in the late-antique works of the Roman Empire contributed to a general tendency towards abstraction. Similarly, the new admiration for Byzantine art, particularly mosaics, helped to nudge (as it were) progressive tastes towards less naturalistic styles.

František Kupka and Vassily Kandinsky, two artists who became pillars of abstraction showed significant Symbolist qualities in their early work. In the first few years of the twentieth century Kandinsky painted a series of atmospheric paintings evoking the chivalric culture of medieval Russia that are clearly Symbolist in their evocative, almost haunting vagueness. For a time Kandinsky allied himself with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. He also experimented with dramatic presentations--some simple treatments, others more fully worked out. There seem to be nine major texts, all from the Murnau period, 1908-14. Of these efforts only “The Yellow Sound” is well known today. Assisted by the composer Thomas von Hartmann and the dancer Alexander Sakharov, Kandinsky acknowledged Wagner as his inspiration of the idea of the union of the arts.

Arguably,the Symbolists created the first avant-garde movement in Western culture. Disregarding appeal to familiar patterns and appeals, hey were unafraid of being difficult and hermetic. The demands they made on their audience were extraordinary, so much so that it sometimes seemed that their only public was each other. Of course there was always the possibility of recognition later. Wagner’s works were termed the music of the future. The German composer actually lived to see that future come true. Not so Vincent Van Gogh, who reputedly sold only one painting in the course of this lifetime.

Notwithstanding their shared hermeticism, Symbolism was not so much a style or a movement as a kind of climate of opinion that gripped Europe from 1885 to 1905 or so. Why did it do so? The simple answer is that it was a reaction, a kind of collective burrowing beneath the sand to escape acknowledging the triumphs of material civilization. Perhaps this stance also has to do with a major psychosociological reality: the alienation of the artist (in the broad sense) after the French Revolution. Artists were adrift but also free: free to be flaming leftists or apolitical aesthetes, also free to speak obscurely among themselves.

From the foregoing it should be evident that Symbolism, while pervasive in its time, cannot take its place unproblematically as the source of twentieth-century abstraction. This so because of its retention of referential elements. In Symbolism there is the story that isn’t told—-and the story that is told. One cannot have the former without the latter.

REFERENCES a) General: Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993; David Michael Hertz, The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement, Carbondale, Il; University of Southern Illinois, 1987; Jean-Nicolas Illouz, Le Symbolisme, Paris: Livre de Poche, 2004 (best recent synthesis); Henri Peyre, What is Symbolism? Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970; Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; René Wellek, "The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History," in his Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 55-89.

b) Art specific: Jean Clair et al., Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995 (indispensable); Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; Ingrid Ehrhardt and Simon Reynolds, eds., Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany, 1870-1920, Munich: Prestel, 2000; Robert Goldwater, Symbolism, New York: Harper & Row, 1979; Sharon Hirsh, ed., "Symbolist Art and Literature," Art Journal, 45 (1985); Rodolphe Rapetti, Symbolism, Paris and New York: Flammarion, 2006; Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone, eds. The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain, 1860-1910, Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1997 (accompanied an exhibition at the Royal Academy; seeks to extend the concept to British artists not normally regarded as Symbolists).

c) Decadence: Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900, University of Chicago Press, 1981; John R. Reed, Decadent Style, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.

Aestheticism and Art for Art's Sake

2006-09-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Aestheticism designates a general tendency in English art and letters that was prominent from the 1870s to the end of the century. It is associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler. By common consent, the high priest of the trend was Walter Pater (1839-1894), an introverted, homoerotic Oxford don. Captivating readers with his almost hypnotic style, Pater’s interpretations of the Renaissance, including art, were influential. The famous evocation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is iconic.

By 1881 the type had become familiar enough to be satirized by W. S. Gilbert in his musical comedy Patience. The trend reached triumph, and then tragedy in the meteoric career of Oscar Wilde, whose trials and conviction for gross indecency tarnished the whole tendency.

The guiding principle of aestheticism is nonutilitarian. In this light the pursuit of beauty is the main thing, a pursuit not to be sullied by the intrusion of irrelevant ethical, moral, or political issues. “Sing me a song without social significance,” might be their motto.

Still that is not quite right, for the followers of aestheticism asserted that in promoting the domestic side of their program--the “house beautiful"--they would ultimately improve the quality of everyone’s life. Fine fabrics, good wallpaper, and well-made furniture can do no harm.

In France Théophile Gautier vigorously promoted the slogan “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) from about 1835 on. Ultimately the idea stems from a key distinction residing in the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. The German philosopher held that one must distinguish between nonutilarian beauty, untrammeled by practical concerns, and dependent beauty. From this distinction many drew the lesson that the former is better.

The principle of art for art’s sake responded in large measure to the demand by artists and writers that their work be unfettered by the demands of church and state, two institutions seeking to maintain power by spreading their ideologies. Artists and writers must not be complicit in this enterprise, but always strive to maintain their independence. As the motto of the Vienna Sezession put it: “Der Zeit ihre Kunst/Der Kunst ihre Freiheit” (to the age its art, to art its freedom).

Many have doubted whether, in the last analysis, such independence is truly possible. There are always the realities of class, gender, and the economy. Artists and writers strive to sell their works and this aim must influence the form of what they produce. Ironically, the slogan of “art for art’s sake” assisted this economic goal. “Why did Cézanne paint those apples blue?” The answer is “Don’t ask; that is part of his sovereign independence.” Trust the artist, and don't quibble. Do open your check book, though.

However that may be, the ideal of art for art’s sake contributed to the emergence of formalism as an analytic tool towards the end of the century, at the hands of Heinrich Wölfflin and others. And this approach, as we see from Vassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, assisted the rise of abstraction.

REFERENCES. J. R. Chamberlin, Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde, New York: Seabury Press, 1977; A. L. Guerard, Art for Art's Sake, New York, 1936.

Decadence

2006-08-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

A biological metaphor sustains the idea of decadence. In this view civilizations are born, enter into a lusty adolescence and a confident maturity, only to sink into a feeble old age. The process is inevitable and irreversible. If we find ourselves living in a decadent age, we must make the best of it.

The great historical exemplar, discussed by Montesquieu and Gibbon, was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This debacle was seen as the inevitable conclusion of the great cycle of classical civilization. A visual landmark attesting this belief is Thomas Couture’s huge canvas.“The Romans of the Decadence,” the sensation of the Salon of 1847. Later, under the Symbolist writers and artists, the figure of Salome gained prominence. In addition to suggesting that the social milieu in which she lived was decadent (contrasting with the purity and asceticism of her prey, John the Baptist), this legendary woman signified the femme fatale and illicit love (necrophilia).

Historians tended to focus on the spectacle of the decline of a single civilization, that of ancient Rome. Others observers went further, advancing the view that historical patterns repeat themselves. Thus one could pinpoint the decadence of pharaonic Egypt and ot imperial China under the Manchus. One must even confront the dreaded possibility that we ourselves are living in an era of decadence.

What is the “we”? Some countries, it seemed, were declining faster than others. As early as 1850 Charles-Marie Radot had written a book titled De la decadence de la France. Many pointed to the country’s declining birthrate as a definitive (and alarming) proof of this decline. Others spoke of “la decadence latine,” the decline of all of Southern Europe. This was contrasted with the ebullience of “young” peoples like the Germans and the Americans.

Conservatives seized upon the concept of decadence as a stick to beat the present with. Everything had been better, as they liked to think, in the “good old days.” Today this vein of thinking is evident in those who decry the prevalence of rock-and-roll, the decline of marriage, and the drug culture. In former times these ills did not exist. Tolerance of them can only be a sign of the decline of civilization.

In short the original concept of decadence was an overwhelmingly negative one. It was left to the poet Charles Baudelaire to present a positive alternative in remarks he made about Edgar Allen Poe in 1857 (I translate freely). “At its zenith the sun shown pitilessly, crushing everything with its harsh, white light. But before long it will illuminate the Western horizon with its gorgeous colors. In these effecs produced by the dying sun some poets find delightful novelties. They discover astonishing colonnades, cascades of dark metal, fiery paradises, in short a melancholy splendor, the pleasure of remorse, all the majesty of the dream, the memory of opium.” (Note the evocation of hard drugs, used by many creative persons in the first half of the nineteenth century.)

In effect Baudelaire tamed the concept of decadence, paving the way for more positive versions. During the 1880s the term was adopted as a talisman by a number of writers, above all Paul Verlaine. Others held that the negative connotations could not be completely bleached out; hence Moréas’ rebranding (“Symbolisme”) in his 1886 Manifesto.

As an aside it is worth recalling some other attempts at defanging negative expressions. Some did not catch on. The Marquis de Sade was an early practitioner of this device. For the term “contre-nature” (against nature) he proposed antiphysique. Even in French this term remains rare. Interestingly, he termed masturbation, which he praised, pollution. Recent decades provide a number of salient examples. In my view the jury is still out on “queer.”

We often forget that a number of now-standard terms for artistic styles began as terms of opprobrium The word baroque, for example, was shunned by many leading artists and critics of the era because it connoted irregularity and excess. Fauve means “wild beast.”

Moreas’ new label attracted many new followers, attracted by the positive aura of the word Symbolism. Yet some stubbornly clung to the term decadence. Anatole Baju conducted a magazine entitled La décadence littéraire et artistique (1886-89). Paul Verlaine remained fond of the term-—which did in fact fit the squalid circumstances of his personal life. In a series of critical pieces Verlaine introduced another expression that was to enjoy some popularity: les poètes maudits, the accursed poets.

The older term continued to enjoy some favor abroad. In November 1893 the Englishman Arthur Symonds published a critical article entitled “The Decadent Movement in Literature” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. At the turn of the century, though, after the Wilde scandals had subsided, he published an enlarged version in book form. The new study bore the title The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Decadence was dead, or so it seemed, while Symbolism had entered into a dignified old age.

The writings and works of art that have been identified over the years as decadent are exceedingly various. It would seem vain to attempt any general set of characteristics that would govern a posited “decadent style.” Yet some have made the attempt. Early on, Paul Bourget perceived a general tendency to disorganization in which the creator of a decadent work deliberately decomposed it into parts. Detail triumphs over the whole. This idea is certainly suggestive. On the one hand, it helps in the appreciation of certain works of the Roman “decadence,” such as the relief carvings of the Arch of Constantine (CE 315). On the other hand, the criterion may help to understand the break-up of neo-impressionist works into a sea of little dots, though these are supposed to fuse visually for the observer who stands at a proper distance from the canvas. In Cubism, the fragmentation becomes blatant.

Another hallmark of decadence is artifice. The elaborate and highly wrought are preferred over the simple and natural. Some have been impelled to defend cosmetics, others lying (Oscar Wilde). An interesting twist on this idea is Huysmans’ take on two powerful locomotives. Are not such means of transportation (not to speak of the automobile, which arrived five years after Against Nature) artificial and indeed unnatural? Indeed with television, the computer, and cell-phones we could be said to be living today in a hyperdecadent world, in which artifice ever triumphs over nature. It is only when we take that long-postponed trek to the wilds of Alaska that we put such indulgences behind us.

See also Nietzsche and Symbolism, below.

REFERENCES. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, 1990; Louis Marquèze-Pouey, Le Movement décadent en France, Paris, 1986; Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, Chicago, 1981; John R. Reed, Decadent Style, Athens, OH, 1985; David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, Amherst, MA, 1995. On England, see Ian Fletcher, ed., Decadence and the 1890s, London, 1979.

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Reading Huysmans (assigned)

2006-08-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS, Against Nature/ A Rebours (required; any edition)

[Some biographical details: Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848–May 12, 1907) was a French novelist and bureaucrat born in Paris to a Dutch father, Godfried Huysmans, who was a lithographer by trade, and a French mother who had been a schoolteacher. He published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans, using an approximation of the Dutch version of his given names to emphasize his roots.

For thirty-two years, he followed the precept “keep the day job,” faithfully toiling as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior. His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, heavily influenced by Baudelaire and called Le drageoir à épices (1874). They attracted little attention, and the writer turned to writing novels, adhering to the Naturalist current championed by Emile Zola. Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876) is story of a young prostitute. This early period climaxed with À vau-l'eau (Downstream or With the Flow), a grim account of a downtrodden clerk, Monsieur Folantin, and his quest for a decent meal.

Then Huysmans decided to reinvent himself as a novelist, publishing his “decadent” masterpiece, À rebours (Against Nature) in 1884. This book led to an inevitable break with Zola, who was appalled at the defection of his erstwhile acolyte. Moving away from the Naturalists, Huysmans found new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in À rebours, including Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Léon Bloy. Stéphane Mallarmé, then little known, was so pleased with the publicity his verse had received from the novel that he dedicated one of his poems, "Prose pour des Esseintes" to its hero.

In 1891, with the publication of Là-Bas (Down There), Huysmans turned to Satanism.

Then, in a final reinvention, he converted to Catholicism. En Route depicts the central character’s spiritual struggle during his stay at a Trappist monastery. La Cathédrale finds the protagonist at the Cathedral Chartres. This novel has long passages expounding symbolism in the traditional sense-—the figures of the saints and theological concepts expressed in medieval art.

Huysmans was also known for his art criticism. He was an early advocate of Impressionism, as well as an admirer of such Symbolists as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. During his last, religious phase he rediscovered the great German artist Grünewald.]

Sometimes termed “the breviary of decadence,” A Rebours is both more and less than that. Jean Floressas des Esseintes is the effete scion of a noble French family; he devotes himself mainly to eccentric pursuits in the suburban house that he treats as a kind of sanctuary. Through the prism of his antihero Des Esseintes, Huysmans presents a number of facets of an ultrarefined sensibility. While the concept of decadence is never stated overtly, it does undergird many themes of the novel.

[The usual English translation “Against Nature” is not quite right—or rather it goes a little farther than Huysmans would seem to be going. “Against the grain” is a little closer to the French. Literally, the expression à rebours means “in reverse; backwards.” There is also a connotative aura, for since the Middle Ages the expression has served to suggest sexual irregularity--not unlike the later term “inversion.” (There is a surfer adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Perhaps a surfer version of Huysmans’ novel would be called “Ass-backwards.”)]

As has been noted, Des Esseintes is the last, degenerate specimen of an ancient family of French aristocrats. With his death the family will be extinct. Des Esseintes embodies not only individual degeneration, with its characteristic ill health and neurasthenia, but also the melancholy sense that France itself is in decline. The degenerate microcosm and the degenerate macrocosm are in synch.

Still, there is a silver lining, for Huysmans offers many indications of the exquisite aesthetic perceptions that, paradoxically, illuminate this sad state. “A song at twilight” might be another possible rendering of the book’s theme.

Chapter Five shows Des Esseintes’ preferences in painting. He has a particular predilection for Gustave Moreau (whom Huysmans had praised in print as early as 1880. He is also fond of Odilon Redon and, precociously, El Greco (“Theotocopouli"). The lengthy account of the two works owned by the hero reveals Huysmans’ obsession with Moreau, who (to judge by a critical piece) had first come to his attention in 1880, four years before the appearance of the novel.

As we learn in Chapter Three, the hero’s favorite reading comes from the late Roman Empire and the earlier part of the Middle Ages, typical decadent eras. His favorites among modern writers are few, but he does like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Symbolists all. See Chapters Twelve and Fourteen. In Chapter Fifteen the composer Richard Wagner makes a de rigueur appearance, somewhat anomalously in view of Des Esseintes’ other tastes.

Apart from reading he spends his time with such toys as the liquor organ and cultivating perverse flowers. Increasingly reclusive, he has given up his dinner parties. We learn of a notable occasion in Chapter One, the Black Dinner. All the cuisine and liquor are of a dark hue. Naked black women serve the guests, while a hidden orchestra discretely plays funeral music. This chapter also contains an account of Des Esseintes’ color preferences. All these preoccupations are laden with synaesthesia, owing something to Baudelaire’s influential sonnet “Correspondences” (reproduced with commentary in Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories).

A misanthrope, Des Esseintes tends to avoid human contact, so that the servants must be invisible to him. He ventures into Paris mainly for his jaded sexual couplings. Sadistically inclined, he delights in spoiling the lives of others, as in Chapter Six, where he encourages a friend to wed, only to sabotage the marriage, and where he corrupts a teenage boy.

A Rebours appeared two years before Moréas’ Symbolist manifesto. Accordingly, many of its Symbolist features are still couched in terms of decadence. Implicitly, Huysmans made the comparison between Symbolist art and Symbolist literature.

See the entry on “Decadence.”

Reading Mallarme' (assigned)

2006-08-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

STEPHANE MALLARME. Required. The edition that must be used is Collected Poems and Other Verse, eds., E.H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford University Press paperback).

Coming to terms with Mallarmé is one of the hardest tasks in the whole history of Western literature. He is a supremely “difficult” poet. Sometimes, in my frustration with him, I have thought that I had rather succumb to a lifethreatening disease than to have to confront those darned poems one more time. All the same, he is the indispensable linchpin of the Symbolist Movement. A lion in the path, there is no way getting around him.

At first the compression of his corpus seems a help. He was surely the least productive of all major poets. The oeuvre that he approved for collection amounts to a scarcely more than 100 pages. Scholars have augmented this total several times with other poems, published and unpublished, and juvenilia. The results of this harvest are far from vast.

As one might expect, a horde of scholarship has accumulated to decode the work. Some hold that this endeavor goes contrary to Mallarmé’s intention, which was to create “open” works that defy any complete resolution. Their inderminacy is deliberate an inexpugnable. At all events, it is imperative to look at his work in French (with the helpful crib afforded by the bilingual Oxford volume), for much turns upon relations of sound and sense integral to that language. But take heart: someone remarked that it would have been better if Mallarmé had written his poems in German!

As the Blackmores remark, [f]or him … the vital role of poetry was to purge language of its everyday setting.” In this he indicated one of the main paths of defamiliarization or estrangement, that deliberate departure from everything ordinary, indeed everything that we normally expect, that is characteristic of the most challenging twentieth-century poets, such as Eliot and Pound, George and Rilke. In Mallarmé’s case, the achievement is all the more remarkable in that he keeps to standard verse forms. The subversion of language—which the poet would call a return to its true nature—takes place on the deepest level

The high priest of modern poetry, Mallarmé seems formidable for the reasons stated. However, he had a lighter side: he even edited a ladies’ fashion magazine for eleven months. Much of his work is also occasional, and therefore more approachable. In the end, though, one comes back the fearsome, hermetic Scriptures of modern poetry—-the core oeuvre.

Here are some hints to assist in your reading.

Examine the Introduction to the Oxford volume for discussion of the poet’s commitment to suggestion, nuance, and the thing not said. In a famous sentence Mallarmé formulated the 25/75 rule. Mere statement or “naming” affords only one-quarter—25%--of the value of a poem. By contrast, the other 75% provides the true measure of the enjoyment and appreciation of the poem. In that 75%, or so it seems to me, lies the essence of the Symbolist quest. Its exact content, of course, Mallarmé does not divulge. “Those who say, don’t know; those who know, don’t say.”

Examine the poems for references to decadence (esp. pp.83-85) and nothingness (le néant; cf. p. 20). How is the latter connected to theme of impotence (pp. 14, 20)?

What is Mallarmé’s take on the Salome-Herodias theme, as part of the larger issue of the femme fatale?

“The Windows” p. 10-13, offers parallels with Symbolist paintings.

What color words does the poet use?

In “The Demon of Analogy” (p. 88ff.) Mallarmé defends “accidental” relations of words. In his view, these links are not accidental at all, but take us into the realm of the essences of words. The poet preferred traditional verse forms, but in his affirmation of the “secret” links of words, he was farseeing. He implicitly posited the concept of the poem as an artifact, not dependent on relations with the outside world.

Note his reference to Puvis de Chavannes (pp. 208) and various other painters, many his friends (217 ff.). Famous for his defence of Manet, the poet cultivated a long friendship with the American James Whistler. Edgar Allen Poe was another major American influence.

What is the role of the blank spaces in the revolutionary concrete poem “Un coup de dés“?

Reading Stein (assigned)

2006-08-23T10:08:00.000-07:00

GERTRUDE STEIN, Tender Buttons (required; any convenient edition).

Three Lives (1909), Stein’s first published book, was begun in 1905, before she had absorbed the full lesson of Picasso and the Cubists. Easily accessible and full of human interest, Three Lives, as an early work, does not provide an adequate measure of Stein’s capacity for innovation. Tender Buttons, published in 1914, accomplishes tnis. The little book is a landmark, since it is one of the first literary works in any language to provide a plausible counterpart for Abstraction. (The most attractive edition is the Dover one, but you can get Tender Buttons together with Three Lives in a cheap Mentor paperback.)

In writing the book she said she “needed to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening.” Note the synaesthetic motif. Elaborating on this point Stein noted that it was her “first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense and eliminating rhythm.” The last phrase seems to men that she renounced poetry in all of its forms, as prose was challenging enough.

As a first approach, it is best to read Tender Buttons in small sections. Nonetheless, it has a tripartite structure: objects, food, and room. Together these themes evoke Stein’s coupled, domestic life with Alice B. Toklas. More generally, they pertain to “woman’s sphere,” as conceived of a hundred years ago. (Some readers have detected sexual themes here and there, with hidden anatomical references.)

Broadly speaking, the book may be said to be about similarity and nonsimilarity, and about causation and noncausation. The first is shown in the unusual juxtapositions, possibly following Lautréamont’s talisman: “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine on an operating table.”

Several stylistic devices put causality into question. The frequent use of the word “and” implies contiguity but not necessarily anything more. And the omission of question marks in sentences that seem to be questions, elides these sentences into a uniform whole. Declarative sentences and questions are all one thing. The suppression of the difference implies the zetematic (questioning) apprehension of reality.

Do what extent does Stein’s disjunctive technique resemble the compositional procedures of the analytic Cubist works of Gris and Picasso?

Observe her repeated citations of the colors red and white.

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Circles and spheres

2006-08-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Research has shown that a particular gesture may have one meaning in one culture, while it possesses a different, perhaps opposite meaning in another culture. In Italy for example the gesture corresponding to the Anglo-American one signifying “come here” (that is, one hand placed in the air with the fingers retreating back to the body) in fact means “good-bye.”

The meaning of gestures may even vary within cultures. Take for example the circle formed by the thumb and forefinger of one hand. This may either mean something like “A-OK,” that isn’t all is well, or it may be a goose egg, an indicator of nullity. Thus when a student emerges after an examination flashing this gesture, the student’s friends can only interpret it by the supplementary information supplied by the examinee's face. Accompanied by a big smile, it means, “I aced it.” Accompanied by a frown, it indicates failure.

During the Renaissance the circle generally conveyed the first meaning, that of perfection. A Renaissance tondo, such as the one comprising Raphael’s "Madonna della Sedia," seems to complement the holiness of the figures. The domes of central plan buildings have a similar effect. For centuries it was assumed that the planets must move in circular orbits. It was only Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century who proved that their orbits are parabolic ellipses.

Yet the other meaning hovered in the background, attested by the version of Arabic numerals adopted in Western Europe in which the circular figure represents zero.

We turn now to the sphere. During the Middle Ages a special sphere, the orb, was an item of imperial regalia, signifying universal domination.

An early enigmatic version of the sphere appears in Dürer’s “Melancholia I “ of 1514. In Jacques De Gheyn’s “Vanitas” (Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, pl. 11), the bubbles rising on the left signify transience. Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s bubbles provide a more playful version.

Ambiguity inheres in the circles and spheres found in Symbolist paintings. In the work of Odilon Redon circles appear in various guises: a well, the sun, a bull’s eye window. Circles, some elongated into ovals, sometimes constitute a kind of simulated opening in the surface out of which enigmatic heads project or peer out. Redon’s spheres are generally mysterious. In some instances he qualifies them to produce eyeballs or balloons. Elongated they form egg-like shapes, and these can be modified with human features so as to produce severed heads.

A prominent circle dominates the background of the signature work of Fernand Khnopf, “I Lock My Door Upon Myself.”

Turning to abstract work, circles, either complete or segments of them are major features of the Orphic work of Robert Delaunay. A connection with scientific theory is implied by “Disks of Newton” (1911-12), an important painting by Kupka. The later, hard-edge work of Vassily Kandinsky is replete with circles.

The window theme

2006-08-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

Windows constitute an essential feature of dwellings and public buildings. Or at least they should. It is to be hoped that the depressing practice of erecting school buildings without windows, common some years ago, has been abandoned. By contrast some modern buildings are sheathed completely in glass, and thus “all windows.” In these structures the glass is usually transparent on the inside and opaque to the outside. Few of us would like to live in a building in which our windows were always open to the prying eyes of others. That, interestingly enough, is the premise of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1919), where the dictator requires that the activities of all the residents of his ideal city be seen at windows at all times (except for brief periods when sexual activity is permitted).

In our culture the idea of the window has taken on significant metaphorical functions. Thus we may speak of the eyes as “windows of the soul” and a “window into the mind of Shakespeare.” The window represents liminality, a passage from one realm to another. We may think of this window as either transparent or opaque.

In actual buildings the stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals are spectacular examples. They host a variety of fascinating colored lights, while barring any detailed access to the outside. They are translucent not transparent, so that only the light tells us that there is something beyond the glassy surface. Instead of views, we get images of Christ, the Virgin, the Apocalypse and the saints. The stained-glass windows thus present immediate renderings of things that spiritually they “open out to.”

This medieval concept of the window has appealed to a number of modern artists. Odilon Redon produced a number of pastels exploiting the rich colorism of the windows, while veiling the subject matter. Together with other followers of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones produced an important series of designs for actual stained-glass windows. The abstract artist František Kupka derived some interesting paintings from his inspection of the stained-glass windows of the Cathedral of Chartres.

Some background will be useful. The illusionistic frescoes of Pompeii, whether large architectural vistas or simulated easel paintings, presuppose a notion of the transparency of the wall, which becomes a membrane through which one views figures and landscapes. Unaware of this precedent but knowledgeable about similar practices in his own time, Leon Battista Alberti formulated the equation of the picture with the window in his De pictura of 1435. During the baroque period this idea was expanded to devote whole ceilings to heavenly vistas (as in the church of Il Gesu in Rome).

Some artists of the nineteenth century challenged this concept of the smooth, “invisible” membrane by deliberately enlivening the picture plane with visible brushwork and rough surfaces. In this way they blocked the illusionistic effect. An interesting device, common in the late nineteenth century and continued in the early abstract work of Kandinsky, is to paint the frame. In this way the dichotomy between frame and the illusion it surrounds is elided.

Windows were important in the work of the proto-Symbolist Caspar David Friedrich, who depicted views from the window of his river-bank studio in Dresden.

An early poem by Mallarmé is “The Windows” of 1863. This Symbolist writer occasionally evokes them in other works.

During the early ‘teens of the twentieth century one of the major themes of the Orphist Robert Delaunay was the view from his window in Paris. Some show the Eiffel Tower, to which he devoted a number of independent works.

Particularly striking are two examples of windows by Henri Matisse done during his summer vacations at Collioure in the South of France. In the first, from 1905, the large French windows open to reveal a pleasant jangle of Fauve colors. In 1914 he returned to the theme. Now, however, the view from the window is a great block of black pigment. Perhaps significantly, this work was created at the very end of the Belle Epoque, the year of the outbreak of World War I.

Comeraderie of writers and artists

2006-08-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

Everyone will recall the opening situation of Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème. The curtain arises to reveal a bare attic occupied by a quartet of Bohemians, a poet, an artist, a musician, and a philosopher. The cold is so intense that they burn the manuscript of the poet’s drama to warm their frozen fingers. And so forth.

The opera is based on a set of stories written half a century before, the Scènes de la Vie Bohémienne by Henri Murger (1822-1861), first published as a series in 1847-49. Murger, who lived in poverty and suffered from poor health, based the character of the poet on himself.

While Murger and Puccini’s works are fiction, they reflect an authentic social reality of nineteenth-century cities in which rundown quarters of the inner city (“Bohemias”) attracted impoverished, but ambitious creative people. This residential proximity naturally led to a comradeship of writers, artists, and musicians.

These creative types often shared a commitment to the avant-garde in their respective fields. It was natural, therefore, that Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Jules Laforgue would defend their artist friends in print. Beginning in 1873 Stéphane Mallarmé made almost daily visits to the studio of his friend Edouard Manet. While the poet was not a prolific art critic, these visits did result in memorable writing about the painter’s work. For his part, Manet produced a memorable oil portrait of his writer friend, as well as illustrations for his translation of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. Later Mallarmé kept up a long friendship with the painter James Whistler.

As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century these alliances proved particularly crucial. This is true especially of such poets as Pound, Pessoa, Marinetti, Apollinaire, Kruchonykh, Khlebnikov. One thing that is noteworthy of them is nomadism. Ezra Pound, for example, was born in Idaho, raised in Philadelphia, made a name for himself in London, went through a Paris phase, and finally settled in Italy (a stay interrupted by twelve years in a Washington, DC insane asylum). Paradoxically, this expatriation seems to have induced both cosmopolitanism and a renewed (sometimes-odd) sense of national identity and attachment.

What drew these writers to the visual arts, especially at this time? One answer is comradeship: they wanted to help their artist friends. Also, a few bucks from art criticism relieved their strained financial circumstances. At a deeper level, they came to see mutual benefit from cross-fertilization between the two media. There was also perhaps a shrewd calculation: artists may have had their troubles obtaining publicity, but these were nothing compared to the situation of poets.

Let us glance by comparison at the present situation, which features poetry readings, poetry in the subway, a Poet Laureate, and so forth. But these signs of activity cannot conceal the truth: today, when all is said and done, poets are marooned, and no rescue parties are being sent out. Other poets are virtually the only consumers of a poet’s work. Today the near vanishing of the art of poetry is a major cultural tragedy.

The poets themselves bear some responsibility for the neglect in which they find themselves. There is the blight of the notorious obscurity of modern poetry. Modern poetry seems hermetic, replete with recondite allusions, quotations in foreign languages, and suppression of normal syntactic connections. Compared with work of the past, poetry has suffered the loss of some major functions, including mnemonics (“Thirty Days Hath September”) and patriotism (“America the Beautiful”). What is left is individual sensibility, which is often not enough.

By contrast, exhibitions of modern painting, even difficult work, just pack them in. During the Belle Epoque too, people flocked to the big events, such as the great exhibition of Postimpressionist painting in London, 1911, and the Armory Show in New York, 1913. Perhaps poets saw that, in the words of Emerson, they could hitch their wagon to a star. Painting was getting the attention, and they too could bask in this by coming forward as prominent supporters of the new art.

REFERENCES. D. B. Balken, ed., “Interactions between Artists and Writers,” Art Journal (Winter 1993), 52:4 (special issue); P. Collins and R. Lethbridge, eds., Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven, 1994; U. Finke, ed., French 19th Century Painting and Literature: With Special Reference to the Relevance of Literary Subject-Matter to French Painting, New York, 1972.

Line and color

2006-08-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

An old adage has it that there are no lines in nature. This generalization may not be literally true—-think of the veins in leaves and the brief trajectory of a shooting star as it passes in the heavens—-but line are nonetheless vastly more common in art than they are in the world around us. The prominence of lines is therefore a token of the imposition of culture on nature’s flux.

Around 1800 linear approaches became prominent in the art of John Flaxman and others. This approach received a major push from the study of newly excavated Greek vases, which rely on lines for contours and for internal divisions of figures. The approach became part of the armory of neo-classical art in general. J. A. D. Ingres produced many bravura examples in his drawings, using a technique emulated by Pablo Picasso in the twentieth century.

Implicitly, the use of lines takes one away from simple imitation of nature, because the lines impose boundaries that are not there, at least not clearly so, in the motifs. In abstraction lines are particularly significant in the work of the De Stijl group, who produced work generally emblematic of the hard edge approach.

Sixteenth-century Italy saw the contest of disegno and colore. The word disegno, which means both drawing and design, may be said to represent the linear element in art. Color was long regarded as a secondary, even subversive aspect of art; it was even connected with prostitutes. Many recognized, sometimes grudgingly that the Venetian school owed its special excellence to the subtle use of color, though it was not generally considered as belonging to the same rank as the Florentine and Roman schools, which relied on disegno, or drawing.

In the wake of this theorizing for a long time disegno ranked as superior. In the late seventeenth century, however, supporters of Peter Paul Rubens counterattacked, asserting the importance, even superiority of color. After the neo-Classic interlude, color returned in triumph with Delacroix, and this tradition passed on to the Impressionists. In a different, sometimes more somber way, the coloristic trend appears in the work of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, two arch-Symbolists. Effusive color returned with the Fauves and the Orphic painters, headed by Robert Delaunay.

In looking back over this history, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and others have regarded the shift to painterly art in the seventeenth century as crucial. Even those with little concern with theory have noted that Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez excelled in "brushy" art. The daub-like disorder the surfaces present on close inspection fuses at a distance into a shimmering vision of reality. Such effects may occur even when colors are not particularly bright.

Edouard Manet and others resuscitated this trend in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it was left to later critics to apply these insights into a program for avant-garde art itself. In order to promote advanced art Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) created the journal Pan. Deeply impressed by the personality of Toulouse-Lautrec, he settled in Paris, where he was active as a journalist and dealer, joining forces with the Japanophile Samuel Bing, who also became identified with the art nouveau. Meier-Graefe began to seek more and more the sources of this art in a tradition that led him through Delacroix back to Rubens and Titian. A series of papers concentrating on nineteenth-century art coalesced into his major survey, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), the history of the development of modern art. Basically, he traces modern art to the tradition of color with its fountainhead in Venice, as against Florentine disegno. In this work he saw the flat color of Manet as the decisive turning point, initiating the still-prevalent idea of that artist as the pivotal modern figure.

In the work of the old masters brushy effects are more likely to be salient in sketches, rather than finished works. The oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens are even more painterly than his full-scale works. For this reason the interest in painterly effects mingles with the aesthetics of the sketch.

Immanuel Kant's observations about art in the Critique of Judgment (1790), mix traditional views with startling flashes of innovative insight. On the one hand, the "formative arts" of architecture, painting, and sculpture are, unsurprisingly, dominated by the element of design. Yet in a different category he posited a kind of pure art of color alongside music. Perhaps the German philosopher had in mind something like the color organs that existed in his own time. If so, he would have anticipated something like abstract painting, a phenomenon which (significantly) he links to music.

At all events with the emergence of the Romantic movement much of the stigma formerly attaching to color dissipated. Still, it was held, color is a potentially subversive element if used without restraint; to function properly, it had to be subjugated to the discipline of a system. John Gage has traced much of the proliferation of theories of color harmony in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among the most assiduous of these theoreticians was Vassily Kandinsky. His early abstractions are the starting point of the whole twentieth-century gestural trend.

REFERENCES. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, Boston: Bulfinch, 1993; idem, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi, eds, Color Categories in Thought and Language, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History, London: Bell, 1932 (first published in German, 1915).

Flatness, design reform, and the Carpet Paradigm

2006-08-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

Art instruction has always been implicitly concerned with the way marks on a flat surface, known as the picture plane, correlate to make up a composition. To be sure, since the Renaissance it has been assumed that this concern must work in tandem with the procedures of illusionism, especially chiaroscuro and perspective, to create a convincing idea of depth. There was thus a tension between picture plane and its use to create a sense of space.

What happens when the first element, the picture plane, becomes dominant over the illusionistic effects laid upon it? The result is flatness, for which many analogies were found in medieval and non-Western art.

As such, the foregoing account is too schematic. The turn towards flatness as an ideal is first observable in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. The 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London was the first world’s fair. It assembled craft products from many countries. In the view of some influential observers the quality of the works shown was all too often pretentious and kitschy. Standards were low. How could they be improved? One criterion that emerged was appropriateness. While creation of the illusion of depth was appropriate for an easel painting, it was not for a piece of silverwork or a carpet. In these media a more limited depth should be presented, something in fact approaching to flatness.

The new aesthetic appears in an episode near the start of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854). Thomas Gradgrind, a martinet teacher whose gospel is facts and only facts, has a special guest in his class. This guest is a government official who proceeds to offer a disquisition on Taste in interior decoration. First, there must be no depictions of horses on walls because “horses do not walk up and down the sides of rooms in reality. Similarly, carpets must not display flowers because we do not walk on flower beds. Finally, crockery must not bear images of exotic birds and butterflies because we would not allow their presence in reality.

The unnamed government official was actually Henry Cole, one of the organizers of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and head of the Department of Practical Art, where he argued against excessive and inappropriate decoration. In retrospect we can see that Cole’s ideas were not only opposed to illusionism in decoration, but heralded the aesthetic watchword of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “Less is more.” In Victorian England William Morris sought to put these principles into practice with a profusion of designs for mass-produced furniture, weaving and wallpaper.

Joseph Masheck has identified the Carpet Paradigm as a key element in this aesthetic. While the elucidation of the principle is new to the era we have been discussing, it rests on a millennial experience of the human crafts. The invention of textiles stems from some 8000 (or more) years ago, during the Neolithic era. Together with plowing patterns and coiling of pottery, it ranks as one the key cultural innovations of that era. All of these innovations, reflect in one way or another the introduction of agriculture, with its regular patterns imposed on the environment.

The European Middle Ages excelled in the making of tapestries. Yet carpets were commonly imported from Arabic lands because of their superior quality. Because of the Islamic tendency to eschew images, these carpets were often abstract, dominated by geometric patterns and arabesques derived from vegetable ornaments. Sometimes the carpets are depicted as objects in Renaissance paintings (as by Jan van Eyck and Hans Holbein). But while the paintings include visual renderings of carpets, their principles of organization did not provide the basis for the compositions as a whole, which remained stoutly European in affiliation.

At the end of the nineteenth century the Austrian theoretician Alois Riegl, who had directed a carpet museum in Vienna, sought to work out the principles of arabesque designs in his book Stilfragen (1893). This achievement was part of a general reevaluation and upgrading of the so-called minor arts.

In 1910 a great exhibition of Islamic art was held in Munich, influencing Henri Matisse and other avant-garde artists. In the same year Paul Klee and August Macke traveled to Tunisia where they viewed characteristic Islamic designs, including carpets.

REFERENCES. Joseph Masheck, "The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness," Arts Magazine, 61 (Sept. 1976), 82-109; Hans-Günther Schwarz, Orient-Okzident: Der orientalische Teppich in der westlichen Literatur, Ästhetik und Kunst, Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 1990.

Western art: Two grand narratives

2006-08-16T19:43:00.000-07:00

Viewed in the broadest possible terms, the story of Western art since the end of the Middle Ages reveals two grand narratives. The first is naturalistic, the second antinaturalistic.

It is generally accepted that the Renaissance is marked by a series of devices that made depictions more lifelike. For the relatively flat, unmodulated presentations typical of medieval art, the new artists substituted a series of technical devices that created greater verisimilitude. Among these are linear perspective and aerial perspective, achieving a successful simulation of depth, and chiaroscuro, which served to model figures in the round.

Masters of the seventeenth century, preeminently Caravaggio and Velázquez, Hals, and Rembrandt, achieved a fuller presentation of light and shade, capturing the complexity inherent in many varied scenes.

In the view of E. H. Gombrich, author of Art and Illusion (1960), the most sustained analysis of the development, the final achievement occurred in the art of John Constable. That painter developed a technique of recording light that revealed showed the English countryside with a new and convincing verisimilitude.

Others would say that Constable did not go far enough, and that the full potential of light in nature was not captured until the work of the French impressionists. Here, though, there is a paradox, for while the Impressionist technique of plein-air painting did capture the effect of light with new vividness, the division of the brushstrokes brought a new sense of art as artifice. By directing our attention to what was happening in the picture plane Impressionist practice opened the way for the second great narrative. Unlike the first, this was antinaturalistic. Its final goal, some came to believe in the early years of the twentieth century, was abstraction.

The Impressionist enlivenment of the surface was to be continued by most other movements of advanced art. It contrasted with the established academic practice of the glassy, “licked” surface, which created the effect of looking through a window at reality. With the new brushwork the window itself became the theme.

In his “Little Fifer” Edouard Manet had shown that it was possible to break the unity of figure and ground, as his figure floats almost effortlessly against a neutral background.

Paul Gauguin and especially the Fauve artists coming after him used color for its own sake, feeling free to use colors that did not naturally occur in the motif.

Paul Cézanne began to depart the accepted norms of perspective, though in a subtle way. His example was the basis for the much more radical experiments in spatial fragmentation.

These changes coming-—so it seemed—-pell-mell constituted the second great narrative, which in effect repealed the results of the first. They signified that a painting was not a window into reality but an artifact the essence of which lay in its physical being.

The Sublime

2006-08-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Sublime is an eighteenth-century idea that engendered a major shift in taste. Formerly the Beautiful had reigned supreme, the unique standard of aesthetic value. Henceforth, though, it was compelled share the stage with its nemesis, the Sublime. Jointly, and also competetively, the two constituted the poles of aesthetic response.

The spread of the concept of the Sublime prepared the way for the Romantic Movement. Through this channel the concept ultimately had an effect on the Symbolists.

While the idea was adumbrated by a number of English writers, it received its definitive formulation at the hands of the Irish polymath and politician Edmund Burke, whose book Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757. Burke held that "terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime" and, in keeping with his conception of a violently emotional sublime, his idea of astonishment was more violent than that of his predecessors: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other."

Burke ascribed the opposition of beauty and sublimity to a physiological substratum. He made the opposition of pleasure and pain the source of the two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain. According to Burke, the pleasure of beauty has a relaxing effect on the fibers of the body, whereas sublimity, in contrast, tightens these fibers. This ingenious theory underlay his opposition of the beautiful and sublime: "The ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon the passions.”

Burke's recourse to this physiological theory of beauty and sublimity makes him the first English writer to offer a properly aesthetic explanation of these effects. Burke was the first to explain beauty and sublimity purely in terms of the process of perception and its effect upon the perceiver. Most crucially, Burke posited that our aesthetic standards are not unitary but binary: a different approach is needed depending upon whether one is attuned to the Beautiful mode or the Sublime mode. By positing a polarity between the beautiful and the sublime, aestheticians prepared the way for a more pluralistic understanding of art---including the art of the middle ages, much of which was rehabilitated under the rubric of the Sublime

With further elaboration, Immanuel Kant incorporated the idea into his system of aesthetics.

Neither Burke nor Kant possessed any extensive knowledge of the visual arts. For this reason they seem to have thought in the first instance of the sublime as a property of nature—or rather, one way in which we may perceive nature. In a landscape, for example, we surrender ourselves to wild, jagged forms in which the immensity of the natural features dwarfs the individual human being. In due course a number of artists made use of the ideas, J. M. W. Turner most grandly.

The contrast between the sublime and the beautiful has many affinities, including the polarity of the classical and the romantic. Some have perceived Nietzsche’s opposition of the Apollinian and Dionysian as another version of this theme. For abstract art the most important polarity is the one posited by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer in his 1908 book Abstraction and Empathy.

The concept of the sublime resurfaced as a talisman for abstract art after World War II, as seen in the title of Barnett Newman's 1950 painting "Vir Heroicus Sublimis." In an The influential 1961 article, Robert Rosenblum compared nineteenth-century American landscapes, generally regarded as sublime, with major canvases of the Abstract Expressionist group, suggesting a continuous lineage.

At the end of the twentieth century some art critics sought to refashion the concept of the sublime as a way of understanding contemporary works; the success of this gambit remains uncertain.

REFERENCES. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge: CUP, 1996; Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, New York: Alworth Press, 1999; S. T. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England, London, 1935; Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," Art News, 59:10 (Feb. 1961).

Interanimation of the arts: music and synaesthesia

2006-08-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

Ordinary speech recognizes analogous effects among the different categories of sensory experience. Colors may be described as “loud,” even though colors are incapable of emitting sounds. We may characterize a person as a “smooth” talker, even though talk does not have the smoothness of surfaces available to the touch. Some choose to dress in fashions that are “hot” (or “cool”) even though clothing and accessories do not operate like stoves or air-conditioners.

Among sophisticated thinkers the idea that the arts make up a set was already current in classical antiquity. Yet only in the Renaissance, as Paul Oskar Kristeller has shown, was a system correlating the arts created.

Within the concert of the arts particular alliances seemed inviting. From the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, the Horatian tag "ut pictura poesis" (poetry is like painting) tended to suggest that painting was about the imitation of reality and narrative. In his "Laocoon" essay of 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing presented serious arguments against this pairing. Once this divorce had been achieved, two paths opened as they do in human marriages: living alone, or remarriage. The first path hews to a strict sense of the distinctiveness of the arts according to media (as emphasized in the later criticism of Clement Greenberg), while the second proposes various alliances of the arts.

During the middle years of the nineteenth century poets began to reemphasize a range of comparisons among the arts. The title of Théophile Gautier’s 1852 collection of lyrics is Emaux et camées, enamels and cameos, suggesting that the French writer wished to emulated the miniaturized precision of those two techniques. One of the poems included is called “Symphonie en blanc majeur.” James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted his first “Symphony in White” (Also known as “The White Girl”) in 1862. He also produced a number of Nocturnes, evoking the musical form created by John Field. Whistler’s Arrangements are also probably meant as musical analogies, though flower groupings could also be meant. These practices adumbrated Vassily Kandinsky’s naming of “Improvisations” and “Compositions,” as noted below.

During the course of the nineteenth century the prestige of music increased enormously. There were a number of reasons for this eminence, including the excellence of particular composers, especially Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms; the close link with the ideals of the romantic movement; and the sense that music, perhaps alone among the arts, offered an immediate rendering of deep feeling without the interference of imitative effects.

Abstract art has been typically linked to music. In 1909 Kandinsky painted the first of his series of relatively informal works, called “Improvisations.” By 1914 there were 35 of them. Of the larger, more elaboration “Compositions” he produced only ten, placing them strategically across most of his career as an abstract artist (1910-39). More generally, the numbering of some artists' works, as "Painting No. 12" and the like, recalls the opus numbers used to designate the individual pieces produced by composers. The work of Mondrian offers good examples.

To some extent, composers were to return the favor with their tone poems (or symphonic poems). Most of these have a general character, evoking historical or legendary figures, or scenes, as in Debussy’s “La Mer.” Yet a few aspired to achieve a translation of specific paintings. Modest Mussorgsky composed “Pictures at an Exhibition (1874); the pieces pay homage to canvases by his friend Victor A. Hartmann. Originally written for piano, the work was memorably orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. In 1909 Sergei Rachmaninov limned Arnold Böcklin’s symbolist “Isle of the Dead” for orchestra.

For a time Kandinsky was in close contact with the innovative composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). As a secondary activity Schoenberg executed paintings in an expressionist style; in 1910 the Heller Gallery in Vienna held an exhibition of them, while musicians performed two of his string quartets. During the winter of 2003-04 New York’s Jewish museum highlighted Schoenberg’s paintings and music, affording a comparison also with works by his friend and comrade in arms, Vassily Kandinsky.

Schoenberg's earlier masterpieces, such as "Verklärte Nacht" (1899)and "Gurrelieder" (1901), derive from the late romanticism of Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. As his musical thinking advanced, Schoenberg came to the conclusion that the Western tradition of tonality, which had prevailed since the Renaissance, must be abandoned. This led to the condition of atonality, dethroning the Western system of major and minor chords and creating a king of democracy of notes in which none was superior to another. This revolutionary reform affords a comparison, somewhat remote to be sure, with the downgrading of perspective and figuration (two hierarchy-creating deviced in painting. Some date this musical breakthrough as early as 1908.

The shift turned out to be only the first stage of an evolution, leading ultimately to the emergence of the mature twelve-tone system, probably in 1924. In its turn, the twelve-tone system, also known as serialism, bears a number of interesting resemblances to abstraction. As noted with atonality, like abstraction the new musical system presents itself as a radical rejection of norms hitherto broadly accepted. Perhaps the closest visual parallel with twelve-tone music is the Neo-plasticism of Mondrian (and not the work of Kandinsky). Like Neo-Plasticism, twelve-tone music presents itself as ruthlessly logical, for it is based on a system of permutations of the twelve tones of the series. Departures from the rigor of the system were sternly forbidden. Both systems claimed to be the ultimate form of their art in the twentieth century, superseding any other.

Time has not been kind to either of these exclusivist assertions. Overlooking the perhaps grandiose claims made both for Neo-Plasticism and twelve-tone music, the credos maintained by the developers of these systems resulted in a number of major works.

Just prior to Schoenberg's time, critics had evolved the concept of absolute music. Absolute music, essentially instrumental, stressed the autonomy of music based on soundscape, much as abstract art was later to do with colors and forms.

For a variety of reasons, then, the analogy with music was central to the apologetics of abstract painting. Yet music had an older partner. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802-03) the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling had proclaimed “Architecture in general is frozen music.” Indeed, the analyses of architecture and music share some common terms, including rhythm, composition, and proportion. Many, however, have felt that there was a deeper affinity. For this reason, the affinity between painting and music became in a sense a triad: painting, music, and architecture.

While some secondary features of architecture (such as Corinthian acanthus leaves and caryatids) are representational, on the whole architecture is not. It is a craft in which considerations of structural integrity and practical utility loom large. Because it is so different from painting and architecture, some have concluded that it architecture not a fine art at all. Still, others regard it as the dominant art, one which provides shelter for sculptural adornment and for painted altarpieces as subordinate parts However this may be, architectural analysis has often invited concentration on proportion, scale, aptness of form, and functionality, rather than of representation. Significantly, the influential Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, later noted for his formalist analyses of painting and sculpture, chose to write his 1886 dissertation on Roman triumphal arches, which require careful attention to geometry, rhythm, scale, and proportion.

A significant turning point occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, when many critics disparaged fussy, overdecorated buildings in the academic taste. But what to adopt instead? A prominent counter-example was the Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park in London for the Great Exhibition (the first World’s Fair). The architect Joseph Paxton, whose background was in greenhouse construction, created a simple but grand design using iron and glass. While the term was not used at the time, this building ranks as an early example of functionalist simplicity in architecture. The American architecture Louis Sullivan popularized the idea in his watchword “Form Follows Function.”

The most thoroughgoing early advocate of such simplification was the Austrian avant-garde architect Adolf Loos, whose trenchant 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” virtually equated the two Several buildings created at this time show his radical flensing principle in which all superfluous ornament was omitted.

In the early 1920s the International Style emerged in architecture. A noted center was the Bauhaus in Dessau, which also welcomed abstract artists, such as Kandinsky and Joseph Albers.

In France Le Corbusier created highly simplified (though not nonobjective) paintings in his “Purist” mode. As an architect Le Corbusier is famous for his statement that “a house is a machine for living.” Indeed, the machine aesthetic played an important role in both architecture and painting during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet there is more to Le Corbusier’s aesthetic. “Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage.” In this way the architect arranges forms in a way similar to the painter. In fact, Le Corbusier pronounced that “Today painting has outsped the other arts,” pointing the way to progress on a broader front.

In the Netherlands architecture was an important component of the De Stijl trend, and such figures as Gerrit Rietberg and Theo van Doesburg produced designs for buildings utilizing forms that recalled those in the paintings of the group.

Many found the analogies among the arts compelling for another reason. When Kandinsky wrote stage works such as "Yellow Sound" he was invoking established doctrines of synaesthesia.

During the nineteenth century scientists began to study subjects who experienced involuntarily two sensations simultaneously as the result of single stimulus. This is the physiological definition of synaesthesia. Apparently rare, the faculty can be stimulated in artists--perhaps in alliance with "thinking with the right brain."

As noted at the outset, the parallel in experience has long been recognized in linguistic metaphors, when we speak of "loud colors," "soft sounds," or even "music that stinks" (as one nineteenth-century critic expressed his dislike of Tchaikovsky).

Baudelaire attempted a theoretical grounding of these analogies in his doctrine of correspondences. Rimbaud illustrated the idea with his sonnet of the Vowels, which opens with the line: "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu."

Sometimes artists have sought to create technology that would achieve such affects, as in the "clavecin oculaire" of Louis-Bertrand Castel (mid 18th century), in which the performer produces colors by touching a keyboard. The symbolist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans imagined a sybaritic equivalent, in which a device would drip various liqueurs on the countenance of a diner, combining the effects of taste and odor.

During the Belle Epoque that saw the breakthrough of abstract artists, some poets were taken with the idea of introducing abstraction into literature. As in art, forerunners have surfaced, in this instance in the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Stéphane Mallarmé, where the attenuation of meaning served to evoke nuances and moods.

The most striking effects were found in Russian Futurism, where poets created works in pure sound. F. T. Marinetti, the Italian theorist of Futurism, had tried out various forms of arrangements of words so as to produce visual poetry. In this he was followed by the Russians, who achieved notable effects. Some of these recurred in the poster art of the Russian Revolution.

During World War I the Dadaist Hugo Ball arranged public presentations of sound poems in Zurich. The rhythms of these performances were influenced by the chants of the Eastern Orthodox church. Ball's heir in this sphere was Kurt Schwitters, best known as a collagist. Schwitters' "Ursonate" (Primal Sonata) of 1921-32 is probably the masterpiece of the genre; it is available on a CD recording.

Addendum: Here is the French text of Rimbaud's famous poem.

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d’ombres ; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombrelles ;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands front studieux ;

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges :
- O l’Omega, rayon violet de Ses yeux !

REFERENCES. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London, 1960; Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison, eds., Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997; Carl Dallhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; Kevin C. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner to Schoenberg, New York: Harper, 1973; Karin von Maur, ed., Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Prestel, 1985; James F. O’Gorman, ABC of Architecture, Philadelphia, 1998. William Thomson, Schoenberg's Error, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.