Symbolist Art Theories

Symbolist Art Theories
Author: Henri Dorra
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520077683

Presents the development and the aesthetic theories of the symbolist movement in art and literature

Symbolist Art in Context

Symbolist Art in Context
Author: Michelle Facos
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520255828

The Symbolist art movement of the late 19th century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from conflicting definitions. In this book, Michelle Facos offers a comprehensive description of this challenging subject.

Symbolist Art

Symbolist Art
Author: Edward Lucie-Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1972-01-01
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9780500181317

Symbolic art - Romanticism and Symbolism - Symbolist movement in France - Gustave Moreau - Redon and Bresdin - Puvis de Chavannes and Carriere - Gauguin, Pont-Aven and the Nabis - Edvard Munch.

Theories of Modern Art

Theories of Modern Art
Author: Herschel Browning Chipp
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 692
Release: 1968
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520014503

A Forest of Symbols

A Forest of Symbols
Author: Andrei Pop
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-09-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1942130333

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period—the problem of subjectivity in particular. In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop presents a groundbreaking reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century associated with the Symbolist movement. For Pop, “symbolist” denotes an art that is self-conscious about its modes of making meaning, and he argues that these symbolist practices, which sought to provide more direct access to viewers and readers by constant revision of its material means of meaning-making (brushstrokes on a canvas, words on a page), are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. The symbolists saw art not as a social revolution, but as a revolution in sense and how to conceptualize the world. The concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, who were dissatisfied with the strict empiricism dominant in their disciplines, which made shared knowledge seem unattainable. The problem of subjectivity in particular, of what in one's experience can and cannot be shared, was crucial to the possibility of collaboration within science and to the communication of artistic innovation. Pop offers close readings of the literary and visual practices of Manet and Mallarmé, of drawings by Ernst Mach, William James and Wittgenstein, of experiments with color by Bracquemond and Van Gogh, and of the philosophical systems of Frege and Russell—filling in a startling but coherent picture of the symbolist heritage of modernity and its consequences.

The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin

The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin
Author: Henri Dorra
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2007-02-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520241304

"Modern Gauguin studies—complex interpretations of the works based on the identification of the artist's sources in ancient sacred art from around the world—began in the early 1950s with the pioneering research of Bernard Dorival and Henri Dorra. The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, Dorra's ultimate meditation on the art of Gauguin, constitutes a milestone in the history of Post-Impressionism."—Charles Stuckey is an independent scholar and consultant

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art
Author: Professor Michelle Facos
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1472419626

The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work

Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work
Author: Paolo Euron
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2019-08-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004409238

This book introduces the reader to the literary work and to an understanding of its cultural background and its specific features, presenting basic topics and ideas in their historical context and development in Western culture.

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form
Author: Allison Morehead
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 027107938X

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.

Four French Symbolists

Four French Symbolists
Author: Russell T. Clement
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 608
Release: 1996
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The first comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook/research guide/bibliography on the major French Symbolists painters, this work includes nearly 3,000 entries covering a variety of materials. Each artist receives a primary and secondary bibliography with many annotated entries. Art works, personal names, and subject indexes facilitate easy access. The volume is designed for art historians, art students, museum and gallery curators, and others interested in this major art style of the last half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Art museums and art libraries in both the United States and abroad were gleaned for sources. This is a unique and substantial research tool. Symbolism is one of the most difficult art movements to define. Its primary meaning is the representation of things by symbols, by the imaginative suggestion of dreams and the subconscious through symbolic allusion and luxuriant decoration. The writings of Charles Baudelaire on the arts powerfully influenced the aesthetic theories of Symbolist artists and critics from 1860-1900, much as Baudelaire's poetics were the root of Symbolist literature. The Symbolist work, be it painting or poem, is above all personal and revelatory, precious not commonplace, reflecting and evoking a journey of the imagination. French Symbolist artists explored this style, attitude, and atmosphere from the 1880s to the early twentieth century. This sourcebook organizes biographical, historical, and critical information on four major French Symbolist artists: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), Gustave Moreau (1826-98), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and Maurice Denis (1870-1943). The first three artists are recognized as originators of the movement. Denis is regarded as Symbolist's foremost theorist and profoundly religious practitioner. Although all four artists have been the focus of major retrospective exhibitions since 1990, no comprehensive sourcebook/bibliography exists.