Symbolism

The result of over ten years of research, this work offers a new analysis of European Symbolist art. It situates the Symbolist artistic movement in its historical context-industrial Europe at the end of the nineteenth century-and retraces its links with the evolution of ideas, particularly in literature. This work includes new, rare, and previously unpublished archival documents among its sources, alongside a large number of iconic and lesser-known Symbolist images, all carefully analyzed and beautifully reproduced in color.Symbolism had a huge impact on the arts and literature of its day, but also prefigured numerous aspects of modern art from Abstraction to Surrealism. Symbolist artists sought to merge the cultural spheres of art, painting, and poetry through color and line. Works by key figures-including Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustav Moreau, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and Paul Gauguin-illustrate the Symbolists' fascination with eroticism, perversity, mysticism, religion, and the occult.

Library Journal

Impressionism is popularly considered the wellspring from which all subsequent avant-garde "isms" flowed. Rapetti (head curator & deputy director, Musee d'Orsay in Paris & Musees de Strasbourg) boldly contends that another late 19th-century movement, symbolism, was equally influential. In this well-illustrated collection of thematic essays, Rapetti concurs with the prevailing view of the symbolist aesthetic as introverted, mystical, antinaturalistic, and darkly psychoanalytic, but he aims to dispel the notion that symbolism was a decadent, reactionary dead end. He also agrees that the symbolists-Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Gustav Klimt among them-revolted against the Industrial Revolution and its inherently materialist/positivist basis. But Rapetti argues that until now, art historians focused too narrowly on symbolism's formal characteristics, decrying its lack of a unified pictorial style and thus misconstruing its formative role in shaping later 20th-century avant-gardes. This intriguing revisionist study is highly recommended for academic libraries. Of books still in print, Robert Goldwater's Symbolism (1980) and Edward Lucie-Smith's Symbolist Art (1985) remain standards against which to judge newcomers, while Michael Gibson's Symbolism (1999) is a colorful coffee-table choice for all libraries.-David Soltesz, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Rodolphe Rapetti is the director of the Musée Henner in Paris and the author of numerous works on 19th-century art.