Читать книгу Symbolism - Nathalia Brodskaya - Страница 6

Carlos Schwabe, Sadness, 1893.

Oil on canvas, 155 × 104 cm.

Musée d’Art et d’histoire, Geneva.

Crucial transformations in the concept of man and of the world caused the emergence of new tendencies in literature, the field that always reacts the quickest to the changes in social surroundings. Precisely, literature has always possessed the prerogative of ideology formation in a society. Painting has always been connected with literature the most closely since the Renaissance. Literature has created the background for the appearance of new trends in fine arts.

At the close of a century, the interest in literature increases extraordinarily. Its scope widens, the writers of many countries are drawn to it. By 1886 France had learned of the latest achievements of Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Scandinavian countries had opened a new world for the French in the works by Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg. In the eighties, in Paris, the fascinating adventure novels of the Englishman Stevenson, Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae, were printed; after them, readers acquainted themselves with his The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which allowed them to peer into the sphere of man’s unbelievable possibilities, and into the mysteries of his subconscious. One after another, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s works were published, and Bergson’s philosophy astounded contemporaries. At the threshhold of the new century works by Freud and Jung appeared. Belles-lettres embraced the unusually wide world in the geographical aspect as well, novels by Loti, Kipling, Conrad beckoning the reader to far away, unexplored lands, and now it did not seem impossible. At the close of the century The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and, lastly, The War of the Worlds by the Englishman H. G. Wells were published in France; Wells thought that man’s fantasy was unable to invent that which could not be accomplished in life. His works seemed to sum up the century, foretelling inconceivable cataclysms.

It can be said of fin de siècle French literature that it was at the forefront of realism. The “natural school”, the most consonant with the paintings of Impressionism, had not yet yielded its position by the end of the century. The fame of Flaubert, who died in 1880, was growing; the novels of Maupassant, the Goncourts, Daudet, and, of course, Emile Zola, who remained one of the important figures in the public life of France, continued to be published. Zola gathered writers in his house in Medan, and published an anthology of their works. His noble speech in Dreyfus’s defence drew loyalist society’s hate upon himself. However, literary realism had already passed its apogee and was gradually becoming the property of the classics. The society’s indignation was now addressed to a new generation in literature. In the seventies, simultaneously with “naturalists”, such names as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle and Huysmans were appearing more and more often in the press. In 1876 L’Après-Midi d’un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé was published, having become the cause for the creation of one of the most remarkable compositions by Debussy – Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un faune – in 1894. Music, together with literature, affirmed the new in art – that which scared a society hardly used to naturalism. In 1884 Huysmans’ novel Vice Versa was published. The author broke up with his friends from Medan, extolled Mallarmé and the artists close to Symbolism – Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

John White Alexander, Isabel and the Pot of Basil, 1897.

Oil on canvas, 192.1 × 91.8 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Edward Burne-Jones, The Wheel of Fortune, 1883.

Oil on canvas, 200 × 100 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Edvard Munch, Jealousy, 1895.

Oil on canvas, 67 × 100.5 cm.

Rasmus Meyer collections, Bergen.

On 18 September 1886, the significant year of the Impressionists’ last exhibition, in the appendix to the newspaper Figaro, “The Manifesto of Symbolism” appeared, written by the poet Jean Moréas: immediately after that the term “Symbolism” came into usage. Moréas consolidated the new conception of literature, formed by that time. In 1855, when there was yet no Symbolism in literature, in the anthology The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire published the poem “Correspondances” that sounded as the rallying-cry of the new literary school. “Baudelaire was its precursor,” Moréas wrote, “Stéphane Mallarmé infused it with the taste for the mystery of the unsaid, Paul Verlaine broke the cruel fetters of versification.” (The Poetry of French Symbolism, Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1993, p.430). From 1884, the acknowledged head of the new trend, Stéphane Mallarmé, gathered its adherents, inviting artists, critics, musicians and theatrical figures to his “Tuesdays”. The theatre Creation and Free Theatre of the producer Antoine acquainted Paris with Ibsen’s drama, staging plays by Symbolists and closely-related authors. In unison with Symbolism, there sounded the music of Richard Wagner, the German composer and philosopher, the new wave of interest in whom rose after his death in 1883. Paris experienced its first infatuation for Wagner in the beginning of the 1860s, when Charles Baudelaire, among others, appealed in support of the composer’s. Attention was riveted on Wagner again after the attempt to stage his opera Lohengrin in 1887, in L’Eden-Theatre, had provoked violent protests. His music astounded with exaltation, now with flashes of ecstasy, now with gloomy, mourning intonations.

Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm.

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Wagner’s strength consisted also in myth-creation that corresponded with the Symbolists’ doctrine. In the middle of the eighties, in collaboration with Mallarmé, there appeared Revue Wagnerienne, around which the poets, artists and musicians of the Symbolism circle united. In 1891, the artist from the Nabis group, Félix Vallotton, made a remarkable portrait of Wagner using the technique of xylography. In 1889, two years earlier, there had been published the first issue of the journal La Revue blanche, to which its publishers, the Natanson brothers, attracted the writers of Symbolism and quite a number of artists close to the movement.

It was not just the populace in general but also adherents of former schools of art, now become classical, who reacted painfully to Symbolism. In the originality of its creators, they saw unnaturalness, a whim, the aspiration to put the self outside of society. Symbolism frightened them especially because it was not current in literature or art, but a philosophical concept, another attitude to reality, a new outlook. It was generated as a result of that grandiose revolution in science which so shook and frightened its contemporaries. It seemed that everything in life found a rational explanation and no mysteries remained in nature. Symbolism opposed society’s ideas of science, aspiring to return to art the priority of the spiritual over the material. Its adherents addressed not scientific logic, but intuition, the subconscious, imagination – the forces inspiring the struggle against the absolute power of matter and laws established by Physics.

Wassily Kandinsky, Moonlit Night, 1907.

Watercolour woodblock print, 20.8 × 18.6 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Kazimir Malevich, Oaks and Dryads, c. 1908.

Watercolour and gouache on paper, 21 × 28 cm.

Private collection.

Odilon Redon, Veiled Woman, c. 1895–1899.

Pastel, 47.5 × 32 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

As to literature, the main enemy and opponent of Symbolism in it remained realism. In the humdrum of life Symbolism opposed mysticism, the mystery of the “other worldly”, the search for the latent sense in any phenomenon or image. It drew attention to the huge, incomprehensible world surrounding us, asking us to discover the mysterious meaning of being, which is accessible only to a true creator. Instead of mere observation of life, it put forward an unusual imagination, inaccessible to the ordinary artist. Searching for the secrets of this imagination, twentieth-century surrealists turned precisely to Symbolism. In The Manifesto of Surrealism André Breton said that the poet-Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux, going to bed, hung up on his door a note with the request to not disturb him, because “the poet is at work”. However, Symbolists did not mean literally the images coming to the artist in a dream. Sung by them, both in literature and in painting, the dream was a demonstration and even a symbol of their exceptional imagination, capable of transcending reality.

Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890.

Oil on canvas remounted on board, 44 × 36 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

It seemed that with the death of Hugo in 1883, Romanticism, in the atmosphere of which the artists of the middle of the century created, finally left. Analysing Symbolism, Saint-Pol-Roux said: “Romanticism sang only sparkles, and shells, and small insects that come across in sandy thickness. Naturalism has counted every single grain of sand, whereas the future generation of writers, having played long enough with this sand, will blow it away in order to reveal a symbol hidden under it…”.[1] Although the contemporaries of post-Impressionism considered Romanticism obsolete, in reality it was not able to regenerate itself for some time, yielding under the pressure of realism in all its aspects. But Symbolism had become its closest heir. The researchers of Symbolism even sometimes called it “post-Romanticism”. Like the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, Symbolism appeared the brightest and the fullest style in the realm of literature. Nevertheless, it had penetrated the arts.

Alphonse Osbert, Muse at Sunrise, 1918.

Oil on wood panel, 38 × 46 cm.

Private collection.

Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel, 1903.

Oil on canvas, 127 × 154 cm.

Ateneumin taidemuseo, Helsinki.

Symbolism in literature, which Jean Moréas introduced and defined in his manifesto in 1886, was to become a fully-fledged genre. Moréas established that every renewal of a genre met the corresponding decrepitude and atrophy of a previous school. “Romanticism, ringing loudly the alarm bell of riot and surviving the days of battle and glorious victories, lost its strength and attraction…, it surrendered to naturalism…,” he wrote. Consequently, naturalism was subjected to the severest criticism and accusations by the ideologists of Symbolism. Emile Zola remained for them the embodiment of naturalism in literature. Despite his admiration for Zola’s talent, Mallarmé considered his works to be on the lowest level of literature. Moreover, Remy de Gourmont, in the heat of the struggle, called Zola’s writings “culinary art” that merely borrows the ready “pieces of life”,[2] ignoring ideas and symbols. Replying to the question about naturalism, Stéphane Mallarmé found a literary image from the treasury of Symbolists for its definition. “So far, literature imagined quite childlike,” he said, “as if, having gathered precious stones, and then, having written down – albeit even very beautifully – their names on paper, it thus makes precious stones. Nothing of the kind!… Things exist apart from us, and it is not our task to create them; we are required just to capture connections between them…”.[3]

Charles Baudelaire splendidly stated the priority of these connections in the new world perspective in his Correspondances:

Nature tries to talk to man in its own language, but man is unable to understand it; this language is full of obscure symbols, and it would be vain to look for their solutions. The magnetic force of Symbolism, in contrast with the simplicity and clarity of naturalism, consists precisely in its enigmatic quality, in the deeply-hidden mystery, the revelation of which actually does not exist. The difference between Symbolism and naturalism was best explained by Emile Verhaeren. “Here, before the poet, is the night Paris – the myriads of luminescent specks in the boundless sea of darkness,” writes Verhaeren. “He (the writer) can reproduce this image directly, as Zola would have done: to describe streets, squares, monuments, gas-burners, ink-like darkness, feverish animation under the gaze of immobile stars – undoubtedly, he will achieve an artistic effect, but there will be no trace of Symbolism. However, he can gradually infuse the same image into the reader’s imagination, having said, for example: ‘This is a gigantic cryptogram, the key to which is lost,’ – and then, without any descriptions and enumeration, he will find room in one phrase for the entire Paris – its light, darkness, and magnificence”.[4]

Only the chosen one, only a lone artist is capable to create the abstracted from actual reality, generalised, symbolic image. Quoting Mallarmé, “This is the person, intentionally secluding himself in order to sculpt his own gravestone”.[5] Symbolists create something like the cult of the chosen loner. Listing the qualities inherent in Symbolism, Remy de Gourmont first of all names individualism, creative freedom, the renunciation of studied formulae, the aspiration for everything new, unusual, even strange. “Symbolism… is nothing else than the expression of artistic individualism”,[6] he wrote in The Book of Masks, illustrating his thesis by the brilliant literary portraits of poet-Symbolists.

Jacek Malczewski, Thanatos I, 1898.

Oil on canvas, 134 × 74 cm.

The National Museum, Warsaw.

Edgard Maxence, The Concert of Angels, 1897.