For a few weeks, the Albertina will afford its visitors a glimpse into
an archive of dreams when the Musée d’Orsay opens its vaults to lend the
graphic gems of its collection for the first time ever to a museum outside of
France from 30 January to 3 May 2015. This major presentation of 19th-century
French art will feature 130 works.
Delicate pastels by Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and Odilon Redon,
painterly gouaches by Honoré Daumier and Gustave Moreau, fine watercolours by
Paul Cézanne, and works by salon artists who were highly esteemed in their day
will come together to provide a sweeping look at the French art of drawing.
Politically oriented realism will be seen as realised by its most
prominent protagonists: social conflicts dealt with in the era’s courtrooms are
exaggerated and contorted to the point of caricature by Honoré Daumier, while
Gustave Courbet and Ernest Meissonier document barricade battles and
significant political turning points on sheets of sketch paper. Giovanni
Segantini and Jean-François Millet, on the other hand, bathe monumentally
portrayed farmers and fisherfolk in a mystical light and show workers frozen
still in poses that aestheticise their repetitive gestures.
These socially motivated compositions will contrast provocatively with
works by impressionist painters including Paul Cézanne with his sundrenched
landscapes from the south of France, or Eugène Boudin with his airy,
atmospheric market depictions. Both artists allow the bright radiance of their
paper to shine through in places, and they bring a skilful lightness to bear in
constructing their motifs out of nearly geometric surfaces. Light is also a key
element in the works by Edgar Degas: his drawings observe dancers from hidden
vantage points as they work through their private exercises and play out
intimate scenes. And like Aristide Maillol, Degas also devotes himself to the classical
genre of the nude, infusing it with seemingly banal everyday activities to give
rise to something like a modern feminine divinity, a modern Venus.
Alexandre Cabanel and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, on the other hand, show
that despite all modern efforts, the 19th century’s second half
still saw the traditions of the academie
française held high: Cabanel’s The
Birth of Venus represents the zenith of classicism after Ingres or Raphael,
celebrating the classical ideal of beauty as well as the rules and tastes of
the salon. And literary figures inhabit narrative masterpieces by Edward
Burne-Jones, Jean Léon Gérome, and František Kupka, which this presentation
places in dialogue with drawings that were created as book illustrations. These
include Jean-Paul Laurens’s grisailles for Goethe’s Faust, a drawing by the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt for John
Keats’s Isabella, and finally Maurice
Denis’s illustrations for Les fiorettis
de saint François d’Assise [Little Flowers of St. Francis].
Odilon Redon conjures up mysterious and puzzling depictions by breathing
life into the technique of charcoal drawing: his “noirs” give form to a
suggestive, spiritual world akin to the equally dark but pointillist drawings
by Georges Seurat. These, done in black Conté crayon, are lent definition not
by lines but by the contrast between the subtle nuances of the black drawing
utensils and the whiteness of the paper - resulting in hazy and mysterious
silhouettes. Felicien Rops and Gustave Moreau peer into the abysses of the
human soul: their works show monsters and chimeras, and their reinventions of
Salomé, Medea, and Medusa serve well to illustrate the notions that surrounded
the turn-of-the-century femme fatale.
The way through this seemingly inscrutable labyrinth of styles, themes,
and motifs that simultaneously captivated the 19th-century art world
will be shown by Werner Spies, former director of the Musée National d’Art
Moderne at the Centre Pompidou. Spies compiled the selection of works to be
featured in this exhibition.
And for the catalogue being published to mark the occasion, numerous
artists, authors, filmmakers and architects have provided personal written
contributions and interpretations of individual works as expressions of their
bond of friendship with this esteemed curator.
Curator: Prof. Dr. Werner Spies
Introspection
Closing one’s eyes in order to behold one’s own self in the dark – this form of introspection caused many artists to portray themselves with their eyes in shadows. The mysterious darkness of their eyes expresses doubt, pain, delusion, and a fear of the unknown, of what lies beyond, of the face of the night – the fear of death. The pain-stricken face of Charles Baudelaire, with its sorrowful eyes, stands out against ‘this blackness that produces light’ (Victor Hugo). The author of The Flowers of Evil sees man torn between an ideal world and world-weariness. Courbet presents himself as a disregarded and offended artist who has been insulted by society and defies the world as a free man, ‘un homme libre’, firmly holding on to his canvas. Jean-François Millet’s face betrays the melancholy accompanying artistic crises. Scrutinising his mirror image, Henri Fantin-Latour weighs it against the portray that appears behind his closed eyes, i.e., before the eye of his mind. In Léon Spilliaert’s self-portrait, the eyes lie in deep, dark holes from which the mirror reflects the artist’s hallucinations about his own transience. Pain and a fear of death are also written all over the face of the German artist Lovis Corinth in the works from his late period. The older he grew, the more he was plagued with self-doubt and increasingly perceived a threatening infirmity in his mirror image.
Architectural Visions as the Spawn of Bourgeois Imagination
Delving into a dream in order to soar to the heady heights of unrealisable utopia: around the turn of the century, this was what François Garas was striving for. And because he thought that utility stood in the way of beauty, he refused to actually build things and committed himself entirely to thought experiments. His architecture was only realised on the drawing board and in the form of models. He dedicated his utopian temple complex to the freedom of thoughts and ideas. Unfolding into infinity, they are just as unlimited as the unfinished building itself. At the foot of the temple, Garas envisioned his own house, where he would develop his architecture in seclusion from the world. Other architects were dreaming of the past. Some felt the structure of the Eiffel Tower, a masterpiece of engineering, to be an expression of banality: on the occasion of the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, its construction elements were to be hidden. Henri Toussaint contrived a palace of electricity for which the base of the iron lattice tower should be generously concealed. The entire 19th century oscillated between the antipodes of a future-oriented belief in technology and a poetically distorted reality oriented towards the past – between the poles of utopia, realism, and a sense of longing for a lost idyll. The exhibition Archives of the Dream traces the 19th century’s fault lines between romanticisation and reality, between the Salon and the avant-garde.
Labour and Time Standing Still
Jean-François Millet
Harvesters Resting or Ruth and Boasz, sketch for the painting of the same title, 1850–1853
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Hervé Lewandowski
In the art of
Jean-François Millet and Giovanni Segantini, farm labourers and peasants
returning from work at the fall of darkness bend under their heavy loads.
Leaning out of their boats, fishermen throw their traps by moonlight. During
the day, they relax in the sun and abandon themselves to daydreams. In such
moments, time stands still. At dusk, however, when day and night blend
together, movement stirs anew, and the farmer’s wife heads for home with her
herd.
Millet and Segantini
mark the beginning and the end of realism. Their drawings are separated by half
a century, but they share the atmospheric and tranquil interpretation of
peasants and farmworkers giving in to the cycle of life. These images are
devoid of an acute presence, of accusation and pathos. They do not romanticise
life in the countryside, in spite of their conciliatory, diffuse light. Neither
do they deplore the social misery of the industrial age. These pictures also
resemble each other in terms of the rhythmical repetition of movement: most
simple gestures become symbols of human existence per se.
Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier
The Print Collectors, 1863–1865
Chalk, pen and black ink, watercolour
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Tony Querrec
No one pilloried the
faces of the bourgeoisie and its double moral standards more fittingly than
Honoré Daumier. He exposed these self-righteous and haughty citizens to
dazzling light and to the caricaturist’s scorn. Daumier’s victims were
ivory-tower amateurs and collectors who preferred to stick with their own kind
and mirror-gazing lawyers who thrust themselves into the limelight with the
mendacity of hollow pathos.
Daumier did not
spare the privileged social strata. His caricatures extracted the truth from
behind the scenes of the Second Empire and unveiled the complacency of its
hypocritical upper middle classes. Parliamentarians, judges, barristers, and
artists were the profiteers of the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III and a
parliament that had deprived itself of control and had placed substantial power
in the hands of corrupt courts.
Honoré Daumier
The Carnival Parade, ca. 1865
Chalk, pen and black ink, watercolour and gouache
© Musee d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Franck Raux
Yet Daumier also
parodied the outsiders of society, figures related to the circus. The showman’s
outcry goes unheard; the spectators remain indifferent, no matter how
threatening the monster in the background may appear.
Daumier was the
first prominent artist to resort to caricature as a medium of expression in
realism, for only the exaggeration of reality allowed him to render its
ugliness uncensored.
Ernest Meissonier
In June 1848, the
working class unsuccessfully rose to protest against the abolition of the
National Workshops, which had been introduced as a measure against
unemployment. The young Second Republic, which had emerged from the demolished
barricades in February 1848, brutally smashed the dream of equality and
fraternity. An artillery captain in the National Guard, Ernest Meissonier
participated in the fights and captured the events on the spot immediately
after the barricades in the rue de la Mortellerie in Paris had been stormed. He
produced a small, inconspicuous masterpiece, which due to its relentless
observation of the revolutionaries’ mutilated bodies has been chosen as the
historical prelude to The Archives of the
Dream: an image that would gave birth to both the idylls fleeing the
cruelty of reality and the resulting nightmares.
Historicism and the
Salon
Year after year,
large crowds stormed the huge exhibitions of the Paris Salon in order to admire
the latest paintings or pour scorn and derision on them to the critics’
applause. Past reviews of the Salon, whether expressing admiration or contempt,
and today’s assessment of the works in question frequently diverge
considerably. In the 19th century, Alexandre Cabanel was a celebrated artist,
while Édouard Manet was misunderstood as a provocative agitator. Because of its
feminine beauty, Cabanel’s Birth of Venus
aroused enthusiasm, whereas Manet’s Odalisque
was vehemently rejected because of its ugliness. Manet’s Reclining Nude with a Cat likely depicts a prostitute, who looks at
the spectator provocatively: an affront to academic tradition. Yet the poet and
‘social reporter’ Émile Zola was well aware that Manet’s Odalisque would pave the way for modernism. Such masters of
idealising history painting as Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Jean-Paul Laurens soon
fell into oblivion during the long years of the modernist era. Only recently
have their works no longer been misunderstood as painted literature, but have
been reassessed as autonomous and virtuoso products of visual narration.
Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau was a
‘collector of dreams’. Images came naturally to the mind of this shy, learned
maverick, fired by myths and literary inspiration. Moreau preferred the
jewel-like transparency of watercolour painting. He owed his imagination and
inventiveness to his enormous visual memory and erudition. His works stand out
against the dark visions of other Symbolists like glittering diamonds.
Like other escapists, Gustave Moreau was an anti-naturalist and vehement
opponent of the depiction of modern life. He was fascinated by the poetry of
the Old Masters in the Louvre. Far from being a history painter committed to
archaeological accuracy, he presented his visions of dreams as an alternative
to realism, surprising beholders with his reinterpretations of traditional
subject matter. Long before Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, he had Salome
engage in an erotic dialogue with the head of John the Baptist.
In his Oedipus and the Sphinx, Moreau
memorialised ‘the mystery of the woman’ before Freud appeared on the scene.
Moreau’s preference for decorative detail and its sensual splendour and
sumptuous surfaces derive from his knowledge of oriental weapons, garments,
rugs, and jewellery.
Gustave Moreau
Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1882
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Thierry Le Mage
Carlos Schwabe
Carlos Schwabe
Death and the Grave Digger, 1895 (watercoloured in 1900)
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Jean-Gilles Berizzi
In his pictures, Carlos Schwabe hallucinates death as
the fictitious body of the ‘femme fatale’ – a woman embodying the male fear of
a death brought about by lust. The angel is a deathly female creature that
holds the promise of final bliss – not in the guise of satanic depravity like in
the case of Félicien Rops, but in the shape of a beautiful woman. The female
angel of death, furnished with scythe-shaped wings, appears as a redeemer
exonerating the gravedigger from his dreary existence. The angel’s smouldering
colours recall those of the scarab, the Egyptian symbol of the sun god and of
rebirth.
In Schwabe’s art, winged female figures are guardian angels – be it that
they protect man from adversity in the manner of archangels or that they
relieve man from the burden of life through death. In his book illustrations
for Le Rêve [The Dream] by Émile Zola, the writer’s least naturalistic novel,
Schwabe, a Symbolist, saw plenty of room for his subjective interpretation of
the story and illustrated scenes that cannot even be found in the novel. Zola,
a Naturalist, complained about the lack of realism of the Symbolist images,
which took the beholder to a phantasmagorical world. Convinced of the artistic
merit of his illustrations, Schwabe exhibited them successfully at the Salon de
la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts before the book was published.
Félicien Rops
Rops shocked the public and
attacked the Catholic Church. His pornographically drastic illustrations
unsettled the prudish sexual morality of the 19th century. In his bizarre and
highly inventive works, the artist mockingly and impiously roused the demons of
repressed desires, which eventually closed in on society and its tabooed
sexuality. Rops reinstated the mysterious force of voluptuousness and restored
it to the devilish context to which it had been assigned by religion. According
to the Symbolist poet Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rops’s designs can be referred to as
‘Catholic works’ for this very reason.
In 1874, Rops settled in Paris, where he gave free rein to his talents
and ideas as a graphic artist. He drew a series of illustrations for Barbey
d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques. On the
frontispiece, a nude female figure nestles up against the cold stone of a
sphinx and requests to be let in ‘on the supernatural secret of new sins and a
voluptuousness undreamt of’ (Joris-Karl Huysmans). Satan, an elderly gentleman in
a dark suit and with a monocle, is seated between the sphinx’s wings and
listens lecherously. He is the symbol of an aged and exhausted society that has
suppressed its sexual desires.
The Pre-Raphaelites
and the Aestheticism of the 19th Century
The dream of art’s renewal celebrated the past.
William Holman Hunt vehemently rejected academism and its teachings, which
relied on the ‘classical’ art of Raphael. In 1848, Hunt founded the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London together with other artists. They pleaded
for a return to an aestheticism void of pathos as it had prevailed during the
period before Raphael and the Roman High Renaissance. Their drawings,
characterised by precise contours and a lack of modelling, resembled those of
medieval craftsmen. Outline drawings based on Italian frescoes of the Early
Renaissance served as their guide. Nature was their unrelenting teacher and
supreme model.
Medieval devotional
literature became a moral authority for the Pre-Raphaelites and their themes.
They illustrated works by Dante and Petrarch, virtuous poetry of the early
modern age, and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In deliberate opposition to early industrial mass production, Walter Crane
sought to reassert the status of craftsmanship. In his book illustrations, he gave
equal attention and care to the figural elements and to the floral ornaments in
the decorative borders.
Edward Burne-Jones
aesthetically transfigured the games and intrigues between the sexes. His drawn
head of the goddess of Fortune belongs to a ‘femme fragile’: the idealised yet
no less fictitious counterpart of the menacing vamp, the man-devouring ‘femme
fatale’. Delicately built, anaemic, and frail, she requires male
protection.
Rodolphe Bresdin
Bresdin was an ‘artiste maudit’ – a misjudged artist
who was excluded from the official art scene and would ultimately deliberately
choose the way into self-destructive isolation. Bresdin’s work relies on Dutch
17th-century art, on Rembrandt and Hercules Seghers. Bresdin’s style as a
draughtsman is obsessive. He meticulously drew his landscapes with a great
sense of precision, losing himself in detail, until a multitude of elements
would overgrow a picture. Dense foliage and lush forests spring not from direct
observation, but from uncontrolled fantasy. In these scenes, man is small and
meaningless. Odilon Redon was Bresdin’s student, friend, and future apologist.
Eugène Boudin and the Landscapes of Gustave Doré and
Edgar Degas
Boudin’s watercolour
brush seems to have swept across the surface spontaneously yet confidently,
causing the transparent, scintillating patches and light-suffused silhouettes
of a lively, colourful market in Brittany to blend in with the paper. He
accurately sketched down the details and later carefully finished his sheets of
studies.
Eugène Boudin was
one of the first painters to consider a fleeting moment – an ‘impression’ –
worth depicting. What Boudin considered unpretentious souvenirs he had painted
in front of the motif for summer visitors paved the way for the future
generation of Impressionists, above all for Monet’s painting ‘en plein air’.
Although Edgar Degas
was primarily a figure painter, he also devoted himself to the landscape, this
quintessential Impressionist genre. Here, too, he preferred the pastel with its
creamy consistency and intensity so as to achieve soft transitions and
brilliant colours.
Degas’s contemporary
Gustave Doré, a prolific illustrator, was also one of the leading landscapists
in 19th-century France. In his landscape watercolours, which the enthusiastic
mountaineer had painted in the Scottish Highlands in 1873, he dispensed with
figures entirely. Drama and narration derive solely from the eloquent twilight,
the gloomy sky, and the solitary, mysteriously glittering lake. Doré’s
landscapes are dream-like, poetic visions inspired by contemporary literature.
In their sublimeness, they hark back to works by William Turner and Gustave
Courbet.
Women at
Their Toilette
Edgar Degas
After the Bath (Woman Drying Her Neck), 1885/86
© Musee d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Herve Lewandowski
In the shadow and out of the limelight of the public stages on which
actresses, dancers, and singers radiated with beauty and charisma, women
pursued their trade in gloomy bars and dimly lit brothels. It was in the
boudoirs of these establishments that Edgar Degas found the models for his
pastels. When he went public with his works, the audience was appalled. The
true-to-life depictions of these unadorned women and their profane corporeality
contradicted the academic beauty ideal mainly because of their realistic postures.
People preferred classical renderings of women in mythological guises and
elegant poses, clearly composed with the possibility of public exhibition at
the official Salons in mind.
Degas, on the other hand, presents women uncompromisingly captured in
intimate activities and realistic contortions while washing, combing, or drying
themselves. The washbowls and zinc tubs indicate the women’s routine of taking
a bath before or after a client’s visit. Degas chose equally unconventional
views, daring perspectives from above, and abruptly cropped motifs in order to
emphasise both the women’s unselfconsciousness while engaging in their habitual
actions and the intimate closeness of the spectator, who remains unnoticed by
them.
Degas – Pastels and Monotypes
Degas saw
himself not only as a decided draughtsman, but also as a declared colourist:
irreconcilable opposites Degas managed to balance in his pastels. The
brilliantly bright and colourful appearance of the pastel ideally suited the
Impressionists in their ‘painting with light’.
The
pastel technique, which was highly appreciated by Venetian and French painters
because of the matt and velvety surface it produced, had reached its peak in
the 18th century. For a pastel, pigments are applied in powdery layers and can
then be loosely blended with a brush, which results in soft transitions and
shimmering surfaces. Having disappeared almost entirely during the period of
Neo-Classicism, the technique was revived and taken to a new zenith by Edgar
Degas. With his parallel and cross-hatching, Degas succeeded in lending his
pastels intensive surface textures without blending the colours. It is amazing
that Degas, the master of light and breezy pastel painting, simultaneously
paved the way for black monotype, which he used to render the dreary atmosphere
in the dark backrooms of brothels.
Degas and the Ballet
Edgar Degas
Spanish Dancer and Leg Studies, study for the pastel Dancer with a Tambourine, ca. 1882
Chalk and pastel
© Musee d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Adrien Didierjean
In countless
drawings, studies, and pastels, Degas devoted himself to the subject of dance –
the ballet: above all, to the young danseuses’ rehearsals and warm-up and
stretching exercises. Unlike such Impressionist landscapists as Monet or
Renoir, who sought to arrest a fleeting light atmosphere, Degas aspired to
capture previously unnoticed movements by constantly varying his unpretentious
motifs: ‘One must draw the same motif over and over again, ten times, a hundred
times, in order to approximate reality as closely as possible.’
In the pastel, light
effects and optical stimuli generated by the colours contribute to a great
degree of realism. The dance that has been frozen in the picture is brought
back to life so as to vividly convey its dynamism.
In his pastels,
Degas rarely depicted the public stage and more frequently rendered the world
hidden behind it. As an ‘abonné’, a regular visitor to the Paris Opera, he had
free access to the dance studio, where, from 1870 onwards, he observed not so
much the stars and protagonists, but rather the pupils, the ‘petits rats’. He
drew them during their hard training, their exercises at the barre, and their
breaks or when they adjusted their costumes. In these private moments Degas
caught them in intimate poses, which his contemporaries frequently felt to be
unaesthetic and too ‘ordinary’.
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1900–1902
Graphite and watercolour
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Tony Querrec
Southern light softly caresses the Montagne
Sainte-Victoire, whose misty shape rises out of the surrounding land. The blue
haze blends in with the white surface of the paper and directs our gaze into
the depth. The atmosphere and the wide expanse of the landscape, with its
trees, hills, and slopes, flicker and vibrate in pale yellow and green light
reflections. Time stands still; neither time of day nor season diverts us from
this dazzling play of colours and light.
Paul Cézanne drew
and painted by carefully rebuilding nature’s structure on the paper with the
brush: like an architect. He has rendered the Château Noir, a castle in
Provence, with a thin, pointed brush, whereas the rest of the scenery has been
captured much more fluidly and generously. The transparent and modulated
patches of colour leave large parts of the painting ground uncovered. In spite
of all their lightness and brilliance, Cézanne’s watercolours are governed by a
strict geometric structure. Cézanne responded to the fleetingness and
momentariness preferred by his Impressionist friends with an entirely new
pictorial stability that would set the trend for modernism.
What appears to be a
randomly composed still life or a green jug lost in its surroundings seems to
have always existed, since all the elements are firmly rooted in the paper and
the picture’s structure.
Georges Seurat and Neo-Impressionism
With his works, Georges Seurat succeeded in pinpointing the dream of eternity, reliability, stability, and universality in the visual arts. He drew and painted against Impressionism’s philosophy of coincidence, momentariness, spontaneity, and improvisation, meticulously putting his motifs together from a multitude of tiny dots.
Georges Seurat
The Veil, ca. 1883
Conté crayon
© Musée d´Orsay, Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais, Thierry Le Mage
Before Seurat applied his new principles to painting, he exhibited a
number of drawings he referred to as ‘noirs’, just like Odilon Redon. Seurat
used greasy chalks in various degrees of hardness, which allowed him to achieve
subtle transitions. The silhouettes he created on the paper as if by magic are
composed of delicate, yet extremely powerful contrasts of light and shade,
which Seurat employed to examine the effects of chiaroscuro.
Seurat’s cropping of the motif, by which he took the figures to the
picture’s margins, was entirely new and unusual. He thus arrested his
geometrically shaped figures within the sheet’s rectangle. Together with the
artist’s complete renouncement of realistic detail, this results in the great
inner monumentality of his drawings.
Paul Signac was Seurat’s closest companion. As Seurat, the inventor of
Pointillism and victor over Impressionism, died prematurely, Signac would
eventually publicise his theories. The Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe
also belonged to the Parisian circle of the Pointillists. He acted as a link to
the artists of this avant-garde movement in Brussels.
Odilon Redon
The world of Odilon
Redon presents itself to us as a disturbing nightmare, gloomy, mysterious, and
enigmatic. Deadly smiling women in the form of spiders, devils wearing masks,
underwater monsters, and Caliban, the animalistic slave in Shakespeare’s Tempest, take the beholder to an
anxiety-ridden world of the unconscious that has been repressed by a
purpose-oriented sense of reality. The charcoal, which is ‘devoid of any
beauty’ (Redon) and which the artist employs to commit his dark, fantastic
world to paper, makes the Symbolist an early explorer of the subconscious mind.
He referred to his drawings as ‘noirs’ – black images – and thus named them
after the ‘colour’ that is used to render the dark aspects of human abysses,
similar to Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde. Redon’s bizarre and grotesque phantasmagorias were inspired by
Hieronymus Bosch, ‘Hell Brueghel’, and Goya and made him the forerunner of the
Surrealists and their depictions of horror.
Symbolism
Society had
forgotten how to dream. Scientific knowledge, Darwinism, and awakening
Freudianism called man’s self-concept into question. But what remains when an
individual’s existence and mind are scrutinised down to the very last nook and
cranny and even religion fails to supply answers to the final doubts? Symbolism
attempted to offer remedies. Its spokesman, Joseph Péladan, proclaimed: ‘The
Louvre will act as a substitute for Notre Dame’ and ‘The artist will rise to
the position of priest, king, and magician.’ Art and literature were considered
capable of expressing the unfathomable mystery, the invisible and unnameable
aspects of the world.
The Symbolists were
not a homogeneous group, yet they shared an interest in new themes, which they
discovered not only in Christian, but also in exotic theologies, as well as in
mysticism, esotericism, spiritualism, and occultism.
Léon Spilliaert
obtained his inspiration from the port town of Ostend. Darkness, emptiness, dim
lights in the city’s fine haze, and a bridge rendered in hardly discernible
colours convey desolation and loneliness.
William Degouve de
Nuncques frequently painted park landscapes in the dark that exhibit confusing
visual axes and lights. For his palette, the artist harked back to James
McNeill Whistler and the latter’s penchant for a combination of painting and
music. The Hungarian painter Jószef Rippl-Rónai, on the other hand, sought to
imitate the appearance of negatives in photography: the light-coloured trees
against the dark background lend his park the ghostly atmosphere of a dubious
place.
Fin de siècle:
Between Belle Époque and Classical Revival
Around the turn of the century, Salome and Medea were
projection figures of a profoundly unsettled society in whose microcosm raged a
war between the sexes: from Oscar Wilde to Otto Weininger and Richard Strauss –
the ‘femme fatale’ lured men to their ruin. In Mariano Fortuny’s art, she even
catapults the man out of the picture.
Fortuny was a painter and fashion designer who invented new treatments
of textile fabrics, including a technique for pleating silk. Salome
triumphantly lifts the plate with the Baptist’s head to the upper margin of the
picture, thus sparing the beholder the ghastly sight. Salome turns her back on
us, presenting her sumptuous, elaborately draped robe. Splendour and beauty
mitigate the horrible event.
In the work of Alfons Mucha, the applied arts were similarly seized by
antique tragedy. On a poster design, the artist stylised the legendary actress
Sarah Bernhardt in the guise of the vengeful heroine Medea and the children
killed by her to the limits of legibility. Iconography came to be governed by
ornament.
As art threatened to be decoratively trivialised, artists sought refuge
in the revival of classical art. Aristide Maillol started out as a designer of
tapestries; after 1900, he turned his attention to sculpture, lending his
monumental figures a statuary stability. After a sojourn in Greece, he was
preoccupied with the idea of ‘pure sculpture’, which he later projected onto
drawings for the sake of a more direct sensual experience. He made use of the
entire surface of the sheet in order to translate the wonderful linear
arabesques into what feels like sculptural monumentality.
Maurice Denis
In 1893, Maurice Denis embarked on a long, fictional
journey into the realm of sensations, desires, and secrets in the company of
his friend, the Symbolist writer André Gide. Denis illustrated Gide’s Le Voyage d’Urien, describing the inner
voyage of an intellectual idler with extremely reduced means. ‘This journey is
but a dream of mine,’ wrote Gide, hiding his vision in the first name of his
fictitious hero ‘[U]rien’. Resorting to a simplicity bordering on abstraction, Denis
translated the story into a new, radically flat visual language of arabesques
and curved lines. The figures, water surfaces, groves, gardens, and ships exist
side by side, without any hierarchy.
After 1900, Denis
sought to revive religious art, illustrating, among other books, the ‘Fioretti
[Little Flowers] of Saint Francis of Assisi’, which contributed to the legends
around the saint through a romanticised account of his life.
Catalogue
The catalogue accompanying the
exhibition – a homage by artists to Werner Spies – offers a unique approach to
the works on view in the form of one hundred statements by the most celebrated
and influential contemporary visual artists, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and
directors:
Adel
Abdessemed Adonis
Nicolas Aiello Jean-Michel
Alberola Anita Albus
Pierre
Alechinsky Eduardo Arroyo Paul
Auster Georg Baselitz Valérie Belin
Christian
Boltanski Luc Bondy Laura
Bossi Fernando
Botero Alfred Brendel
Daniel
Buren Michel Butor Sophie Calle Jean
Clair Tony Cragg
Thomas
Demand Maryline Desbiolles Marc Desgrandchamps Marlene
Dumas
Hans Magnus Enzensberger Philippe
Forest Jean Frémon Gloria Friedmann
Jochen
Gerner Laurent Grasso Mark Grotjahn Durs
Grünbein Andreas Gursky
Yannick
Haenel Peter Handke Michael
Haneke David Hockney Rebecca Horn
Siri Hustvedt Anish
Kapoor Alex Katz William
Kentridge Anselm
Kiefer
Konrad
Klapheck Alexander Kluge Karin Kneffel Imi
Knoebel Jeff Koons
Julia
Kristeva Michael Krüger Jean
Le Gac Peter
Lindbergh Robert Longo
Rosa Loy David
Lynch Jonathan Meese Richard
Meier Annette
Messager
Jean-Michel
Meurice Fran
ois Morellet Herta Müller Paul Nizon Pierre Nora
ois Morellet Herta Müller Paul Nizon Pierre Nora
Richard Peduzzi Elizabeth Peyton Jaume Plensa
Christian de Portzamparc Arnulf Rainer Neo Rauch
Yasmina Reza Daniel Richter
Gerhard Richter François Rouan Thomas Ruff Boualem Sansal Sean Scully
Jean-Jacques Sempé Cindy Sherman Kiki Smith Philippe Sollers Botho Strauß
Hiroshi Sugimoto Sam Szafran Gérard Titus-Carmel Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Tomi Ungerer Mario Vargas Llosa Jacques Villeglé Nike Wagner Martin Walser
Wim Wenders Erwin Wurm Yan Pei-Ming
