15

SYMBOLISM AND THE DIALECTICS

OF RETREAT
MODERNISM VERSUS SYMBOLISM

words, the health and restorative forces that

see in the

country" (Letter 649).

THROUGHOUT

t:modern

artists

"The

CENTURY,

sought to assert their connection to the

by continually strengthening

Classical past

present:

NINETEENTH

THE

their links to the

true painter we're looking for,"

we have heard

who can snatch from the

and make us feel how great and

Baudelaire proclaim, "will be the one

life

of today

poetic

we

its

epic quality,

and our patent-leather boots."

are in our cravats

Modernism,

it

now

is

possible to state in

summary,

as

it

evolved in Europe and North America over the course of the

much

nineteenth century, was not so

European forms
to

as a radical (and

more or

keep the Classical tradition alive

we were

"All

authority.

a rejection

less last-ditch) effort

and imperial

in all its epic

after,"

really

the

Impressionist

Renoir declared, "was to try to induce painters

get in line

and follow the Masters,

if

painting definitely go by the board."

of older

in general to

this

modern

Van Gogh's primary genre

landscape

were

and hierarchies of

painting and

late

Renaissance and Baroque

Academic descendants. In

its

portraits of workers

and peasants were

physiognomy of

dawning twentieth century; by

employment of dissonance

Wagnerism
especially

had

among

gained

numerous

interests

and

portraiture

to the

adherents

the artists and writers

Paris,

in

who clustered around

Edouard Dujardin and Theodore de Wyzewa,

journalists

founders in 1885 of the Revue Wagnerienne. For this coterie

also included the painters

Gustave Moreau, Odilon

Wagner's

music rep-

resented the long sought esthetic and philosophical unity of

and

vie totale de I'univers."

intellection,

what Wyzewa called "/#

Van Gogh

too was infatuated by

Wagnerism, apparently believing

that

it

offered

him

vain attempt to learn music," he wrote to

Crows In

all

his

Chromo-luminarism and use

Van Gogh

in

the Wheatfields (1890) paid

such

paintings as

final

homage not

so

much

to

of 1888, "so

much

did

Theo in

the

means

made a
summer

to revitalize an otherwise stultified artistic tradition. "I

Van

Ruisdael. Indeed, for

their

the poets Jules Laforgue and Stephane Mallarme, and the

sensation, emotion,

cultural strategy.

efforts to reveal the

suggested the recent music of Wagner. Since the early 1880's,

which

Gogh

his

or chromaticism, moreover, they

Redon, and Henri Fantin-Latour

of Van

addition,

Flemish and Dutch Golden Ages of Breugel, Rembrandt, and

of "arbitrary" color,
312

landscape subject and facture implicitly criticized the Classical rules

The work

forms that harked back

traditional

expressed
times. His

they did not wish to see

revealed as clearly as any other the simultaneous conservatism

and revolutionism of

Gogh

work the revolutionary stamp and tenor of his

Despite his traditionalism, however, Van

in his

already feel the relation between our

colour and Wagner's music." Indeed, in

La Berceuse we saw

the landscapes of Seurat as to the rural allegories of Breugel:

Van Gogh's

"They

Van

progression through the introduction of color accidentals

1890 concerning these works,

almost to the point of abstraction. But this was an abstraction

are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies,"

Gogh wrote
"and

to

Theo

in July

did not need to go out of my

extreme loneliness.
to bring

them

to

you

hope you
in Paris as

think that these canvases will

304

way

will see

for

soon as possible, since

tell

and

that

was intended not

hope

save

it,

to express sadness

them soon

you what

modification of the normal harmonic scale

almost

cannot say in

of

that

human

is,

to

to destroy the art of portraiture but to

make it once more a

vehicle for the revelation

character, the recording of social station,

expression of feeling.

Van Gogh's

and the

project of reconciling

295

VINCENT VAN GOGH Crows

312

in the

19$ x 39i- (50.5 x 100.3)

Wheatfields 1890.

expression and representation, therefore, like the modernist

project as a whole,

was complex and fraught with

and engendered an anxiety: how could he keep

touch both with modern
falling victim to either

life

difficulty,

his

work

in

and with the masters, without

complete abstraction or historicism,

pessimism and disenchantment stemming from

artistic

symptom

of a structural

It

crisis.

was an inward-

directed art, antihistorical, intensely personal, and sometimes

even confessional. Not daily

life

but the arcadias of Puvis de

both of which signaled to him meaninglessness and the death

Chavannes

of

painter Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) inspired

art.

At

least

some of Van Gogh's contemporaries, including

the

(see p. 277)

and the funereal dreams of the Swiss

marked, therefore, the conclusion of

French Gauguin, Auguste Rodin, and Redon, the Belgian

tradition of representation

James Ensor, the Russian Mikhail Vrubel, the Norwegian

mimesis, and the end of

Edvard Munch, and the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler had much

American

less

anxiety about abstraction.

prerogatives of
society

To

modernism were

them, the subtle

critical

useless ingenuities

tumbling headlong into decay and perdition.

painting and sculpture might as well

become

"Symbolist" as imagination demanded, since

in

To them,

as abstract or

reality itself was

a capitalist

depression lasting nearly a generation, Symbolism was the

art

Elizabeth

period described by the

Gilmore Holt

"the

as

Yet Symbolism was not only

from representation and public meaning; by rejecting

triumph of art
retreat

Symbolism

it.

four-centuries-old

founded on Classical concepts of

a fifty-year

historian

for the public."

European mimetic

tradition,

it

also pioneered a

new

art

of

sensual liberation and personal expression founded in part on

non-Western "primitivism." As much

as

was an

it

any longer existed. Besides, they reasoned, had not an

engine of cultural criticism, political reinvigoration, and

or pattern

shown

was adequate

personal expression? "Art

to his friend the painter

to
is

that

form alone

convey

spiritual

meaning and

an abstraction;" Gauguin wrote

Emile Schuffcnecker

in

by doing

like

come of it. The only way

repeated by

many

Conceived

period

the pre-

between Classical rep-

resentation and critical modernity to a point of crisis; on the

nonrepresentation,

to rise

up

to

God

and. the spiritual as bases for art

conflict

horizon lay the irregular terrain of Cubism, the ab\ss of

the
is

was

others of this generation.

during

dominant nineteenth-century

more of

our divine master, by creating." Gauguin's

emphasis upon dreams

Symbolism accelerated

international perspective.

also an

August 1888,

"take from nature as you dream, and think

creation that will

earlier

line, color,

it

was

of

retreat,

generation of Romantics

decadence, and recondite meaning,

art

hopelessly degraded and no significant public sphere for art

of widespread

Surrealism. Symbolism was no! an avant-garde subculture

like

the

Societe
I

European

and the revolutionary dreamscape of

Pre-Raphaelite

Anonyme

ink pendants

ilues,

or

Brotherhood,

the

the

Xcoimprcssionist

structured societies with

Impressionist
Societe

membership

des
lists,

proscribed exhibition venues, and sectarian rules of

MODI.RMSM

RSI

SYMBOLISM

305

to

be able to place the development of the symbol

any

in

period whatsoever, and even in outright dreams (the dream

being indistinguishable from

our

art

is

life).

The

aim of

essential

to objectify the subjective (the cxtcrnalization of

the Idea) instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen

through the eyes of

Kahn's
tify

final

temperament).

pithy formulation, that the artist should "objec-

the subjective

instead of subjectifying the objective,"

which Naturalist writers and painters such

had done, was rapidly seized upon by
painters as well as poets as the essential
esthetics.

Thus, by 1891, the young

"Symbolism

article called

Zola and Monet

as
a

diverse array of

maxim of Symbolist
Albert Aurier, in an

critic

Paul Gauguin," was

in Painting:

able formally to codify a definition of Symbolist painting

under

five

terms:
>

unique ideal

1.

Ideist, for

2.

Symbolist, for

3.

Synthetist, for

its

be the expression of the

will

Idea.
it

will

it

express this idea by means of forms.

will

present these forms, these signs,

according to a method

which

under-

generally

is

standable.
4.

313

PALL GAUGUIN

Green Christ 1889. 36^

28H92

Subjective, for the object will never be considered as an

object but as the sign of an idea perceived by the subject.

x 73)
5.

(It

Decorative

consequentially)

is

painting in

its

decorative

for

proper sense, as the Egyptians and, very

probably the Greeks and the Primitives understood

inclusion and exclusion;

it

was an international cultural and

spawned numerous

esthetic direction that, however,

nothing other than a manifestation of art

local

subjective, synthetic, symbolic

and

at

it, is

once

ideist.

avant-gardes. During the final two decades of the nineteenth

century,

Symbolism became an

irresistible cultural tide that

swept across Europe and North America.

In practise, these recipes for Symbolist art were distilled by

French, and
critics,

first

what many regarded

of

all

as a

be recognized by

September

its

rhetoric. In

18, 1886, the

in

poet

Jean Moreas proclaimed the value of pure subjectivity and

He

representation of the "Idea."

endeavors to clothe the Idea

nevertheless,

in

wrote: "Symbolic poetry

form which,

sensitive

would not be an end

in itself,

but would be

subordinate to the idea while serving to express

it

art

can

derive from objectivity only a simple and extremely succinct

point of departure."

Kahn penned
upon the

A week later,

a response to

right of poets

the poet and critic Gustave

Moreas

and

contemporaneity and indulge

in

which he too

insisted

artists to disdain history

in a

at

306

to subject

and

world of dream:

matter we are tired of the quotidian, the near

hand, and the compulsorily contemporaneous;

RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

down

that theory of art

subjective states by

vocabulary of

Yet

if

historical

we wish

means of a

line, tone,

and

Symbolism had

to this

artists,

simple formula:

which ascribed the greatest

restrictive

and non-naturalistic

color.

accepted rhetoric,

a generally

and ideological significance was much

agreed upon.

To

less

its

widely

some, such as the painter Maurice Denis

(1870-1943) who, along with Paul Serusier, Edouard Vuillard

(1868-1940), and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), was a
of the avant-garde group called the Nabis (the word
for prophets),

Symbolism was

is

member
Hebrew

form of "Neotraditionism"

that stressed Christian values of quietism, piety, asceticism,

and hierarchical

stability.

In 1890, Denis described

how

the

Symbolist rejection of Naturalism and embrace of formal

abstraction was paving the
spirituality:

As

public

value to the representation of dreams, visions, or other

Symbolist manifesto, published

the Paris Figaro Litter aire on

European and American,

later other

a small

Symbolism was

THE RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

Symbolism may

and

way toward

new and earnestly felt

"All the sentiment of the work of art comes

unconsciously, or almost so, from the state of the

'He who wants

to paint the story

artist's soul:

of Christ must

live

with

,V4

Paul Gauguin

Yellow Christ 1889.

.ity

x 2X} (92 x 73)

Rill

TORK. OF SVMHOl. ISM

307

315

JAMES ENSOR The Entry

316

308

of Christ into Brussels

ODILON REDON

Ophelia

Among

RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

i88g 1888.

the Flowers 1905.

8'6 x 14'6 (260 x 430.5)

25 x 35f (64 x 91)

Christ,' said

313

Fra Angelico. This

is

a truism.

Our

impression of moral order opposite [Gauguin's] Green Christ

[1889] and the bas-relief

Be

Love and You Will Be Happy

in

cannot spring from the motif or motifs of nature represented,

but from the representation

To

itself,

forms and coloring."

chromed wooden Christ which

chapel of Tremalo near Pont-Aven in Brittany, the painting

was the term used by

the

size

who were

artists
a

at

painting was meant to synthe-

impressions and memories.

artist's

Gauguin

close to

During the

Feneon, Symbolism was an art of creative freedom and

Universal Exposition of 1889, an exhibition of Synthe'tisme

sensual liberation that furthered the growing impetus toward

was held and

Describing

anarchism.

revolutionary

Gauguin (1848-1903)

in 1889,

the

work

of Paul

he invoked the anarchist dream

of free and autonomous nations or communities living side by

side in cooperation

and harmony:

quite

removed from

it:

material furnished for

illusion,

he puts into a

him by

reality;

new

order the

he disdains

number, makes them

hierarchic;

and

within each of the spacious cantons formed by their

interlacing, an opulent

own

and

pride without in any

dence of

sultry color bleakly extends

itself.

upper

up

Braque from nearly

of Picasso and

Gauguin's landscape receives

intent

ideist

could hardly be more different from Denis's

middle right

to

background

is

left,

the stone wall and serpentine

path in the middle-ground are painted without tonal modeling,

and the crisp edge of the horizon

upper right

at

is

unrelieved by atmospheric perspective. Finally, and in sum,

the event

Gauguin represented

ary,

By

neither historical nor clearly

is

and the technique neither mimetic nor

these ambiguities the painting

marked by these opposing

ideological distinctions

interpretations.

The art of Gauguin

and remains today, the chief field on which the

Symbolist battle was waged; our survey of the movement

and end with him. In between, we

improbable

of the

Symbolism and

will

will briefly

of an

collision

the naturalist genre of land-

suggestion

described

the

to
it

is

The

and symbolist

that

lay

in

beyond

Octave Mirbeau

critic

evocativeness of the

in 1891 as

clearly abstract.

subjective

of an alternative reality

assented

antinaturalist

The trees are flat red clouds that zig-zag from

clearly manifest.

must take account of the complex

results

later.

somewhat more complex

the antinaturalist and decorative aspect

its

therefore begin

generation

compositional articulation than his figures, but here too the

objective knowledge or sight.

examine the

newspaper, but in any case

in

"moral order." Thus, any adequate definition of Symbolism

at the time,

perhaps the result of being

third,

description of it as an "unconscious" rendering of a traditional

was

1891.)

in

contemporary, the scene neither quotidian nor clearly vision-

Feneon's description of Gauguin's Symbolist painting as

political allegory

its

blotted with, or rolled

its

way threatening the indepen-

neighbors, and at the same time without

its

compromising

of newsprint on

all

even the illusion of atmosphere; he accentuates

lines, limits their

Groupe Synthetiste was formed

Indeed, examination of Yellow Christ reveals the impression

anticipating the "low-culture"-inspired pasted paper collages

Reality for [Gauguin] was only the pretext for a creation

when he

painting

"a rich, disturbing blend of barbaric

splendor, Catholic liturgy,

Hindu

reverie,

Gothic imagery,

and obscure and subtle symbolism."

Yet however esoteric

its

sources or syncretism, what

perhaps most noteworthy about

is

Yellow Christ and other

Brittany pictures by him, such as The Vision After the Sermon

(Jacob Wrestling With the Angel) (1888) and The Green

scape painting.

Christ
left

PAUL GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM IN

BRITTANY

and what

largely

pietistic,

reveals

them

to be

Symbolist

While no single artwork succinctly exemplifies

all

is

what

is

unpainted and unsaid. Gauguin's decorative,

and populist representations of Breton

spirituality

pointedly overlooked the modernizing transformations which

the people and their region were then undergoing.

314

is

purposely crude, populist or synthetist in aspect. (Synthe'tisme

Pont-Aven during 1886-90:

other critics, such as the Neoimpressionist apologist

the artist had seen in the rustic

of Aurier's

During the

1870's and '80's, Brittany experienced an economic

boom and

Symbolist preconditions, Gauguin's Yellow Christ, contem-

cultural redevelopment. Despite a nationwide reduction in

porary critics generally agreed, came close. Painted in Pont-

wholesale prices and extremely sluggish growth rates in the

Aven

generation following the (nearly worldwide) "crash" of 1873,

in

Brittany in September

of three Breton

women

889, the

gathered around

work depicts
a crucified

group

Christ (or

sculpture of Christ) planted in the gray rock of Golgotha.

shrill

The

yellow color of the divided fields of grain and of Christ's

body, the latter thickly outlined

in

Prussian blue like the

leading around the painted glass in medieval church windows,

creates an abstract

picture surface.

and therefore decorative pattern upon the

Inspired by an eighteenth-century poly-

Brittany, like

France,

some other formerly underdeveloped regions of

thrived.

Agriculture

was

becoming rationalized

(small landholders were dispossessed and the landless

into wage-laborers), fishing

and

tourism

rapidly

grew.

The

latter

development

especially significant for our account since, ironically,

the

touristic

marketing

of

made

and other industries expanded,

Breton

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

"primitiveness"

IN

BRITT

Wi

it

is

was
that

309

317
318

PAUL GAUGUIN
PAUL GAUGUIN

The Seaweed Gatherers 1889. 34i

x 48} (87 x 123)

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin 1889. 44^x36^(113x92)

many other artists to the region in the

The unique and picturesque Breton costumes, for

brought Gauguin and

first

place.

example, which we see represented

in

works by

artists

such as

Gauguin, Bernard, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, were not

residue of ancient Celtic culture, but rather a complex and

modern expression of
cultural aspiration.

social hierarchy, class mobility,

They permitted people proudly

their indigenous identities, while at the

and

to express

same time encourag--

ing touristic consumption. Yet Gauguin's representations of

what he called

in a letter to

Theo Van Gogh "savage" and

"primitive" Brittany, in pictures created between 1886 and

1890 and again in 1894, largely avoid any reckoning with

tourism or with the larger conflict there (and in

much

of rural

agrarian France) between traditional culture and what the

philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described as the forces of

"universalizing civilization," that
talism and

its

is,

modern

industrial capi-

colonizing mass culture.

Gauguin's strategy of evasion thus provides

preliminary gloss upon Symbolism.

considered below

and Hodler

The

painters

who

further
will

be

Gauguin, Ensor, Redon, Munch, Vrubel,

are Symbolist because their works share certain

formal features: flatness, decorativeness, reductiveness, and

abstraction; certain iconographic features: a concern with

dreams, visions, and the

spiritual;

and certain ideological

features: avoidance of contradiction, disdain for history,

flight

310

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

BRITTANY

and

from modernity. Symbolist painting, unlike previous

319

PAUL GAUGUIN Jug

Portrait 1889.

320

PAUL GAUGUIN

1889.

28J-

36J-

in the

Form of a Head,

Self-

Height 7{ (19.3)

Christ in the

Garden of Olives

(73 x 92)

(i

(il

1\ \\l) S\ \II!()1.IS\1 l\ 11RITT

WS

311


modernisms considered

book, was as Denis wrote, a

in this

form of "Neotraditionism" that upheld

hierarchical "moral order"

profound

transition.

"Myth

speech."

Symbolism was thus "mythical," funcdoes, to "de-politicize

today," wrote the mid-twentieth-century

Roland Barthes, "turns

critic

and

fills it

reality:

it is,

literally, a ceaseless

perhaps an evaporation,

[Its

function

in short, a perceptible

today in advertising, mass media, fashion,

decorative fanfare of

to

is]

absence."

embodied
and tourism

lies

amid the
art of

Gauguin, does not permit Denis and Barthes to have the

Feneon's words too must be remembered.

To

order;"

upon the anarchist

its at

Wandering Jew,

Garden

the

of Olives (1889) and the extraordinary and disturbing

Form of a Head,

the

himself as

a savior

martyr. "This painting

misunderstood," he said of the Christ

Van Gogh, "so

keep

shall

and

ideal,

pain that

human." What was crushed was the

community

artistic

wrote

Garden of Olives] represents the

to a journalist: "[Christ in the

crushing of an

Vincent

in a letter to

in

is

both divine and

ideal of establishing a

"savage and primitive"

Brittany in concert with his friends and followers Bernard,

Louis Anquetjn (1861

Schuffenecker (1851

Jacob Meyer de Haan (1852-95), and Paul Serusier (1865-

once

principles

1934),

Crushed too was the

1927).

selflessness with

Van Gogh

In Brittany as in the

at Aries.

South Seas, Gauguin's response

and alienation was

to pain

the creation of myths, both of the

1932),

mutual support and

ideal of

modern and of the primi-

Symbolism consisted

tive sort described above; his

according to him the art of Gauguin was anything but "de-

of a dialectic of avoidance and earnest expression of social

it

Perhaps instead of Barthes,

reality."

Levi-Strauss that we turn for

germaine

to

was "removed from

should be to Claude

it

a definition

of myth that

Symbolism. The function of myth

societies (those

is

(an impossible achievement

real)." Primitive

myths

if,

precisely

other Symbolist painters, such as Ensor,

simply denied modernity outright, finding solace

in fantastic

imaginings of an ideal past and Utopian future.

in "primitive"

without writing), Levi-Strauss writes, "is to

provide a logical model capable of overcoming

Many

contradiction.

contradiction

as happens, the contradiction

is

are valuable to their cultures not

ENSOR AND POPULISM

James Ensor was born

in

1860

at the seaside resort

northwestern Belgium, and died there

in

at the

of Ostend,

age of 89 in

because they mask or occlude contradictions, but because they

1949.

manage

avant-garde culture as he indulged his carnavalesque imagina-

or organize them. In so doing, they underline the

prevailing communitarian principle in primitive societies,

that, as the anthropologist writes, "self-interest is the

of

evil."

all

Gauguin's),

In

argue below, shares this "primitivist"

and Norway, Ensor was

European

new and compelling

modernity and

look at Gauguin's paintings, sculptures, and

The best works are subtly

marked by modern signs of artistic

and degrading

but forcibly

alienation, class division,

labor. After organizing in Paris an exhibition of

Impressionist and Synthetist art at the Cafe des Arts (also

as the Cafe Volpini, after the proprietor), adjacent to

the great 1889 Universal Exposition,

in

June of

that year

Gauguin returned

and soon

after

nearby hamlet of Le Pouldu. During the next

depicted such

modern

moved

six

to

to the

months, he

subjects as proletarian labor in The

Seaweed Gatherers (1889), subdivided and enclosed grain

312

Symbolist contemporaries
a

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

BRITTANY

art
is

Flemish

art since Breugel,

dead, truly dead.

artists

France, Switzerland,

in

self-imposed exile from moderniza-

and contemporaneity. "Long

tion

painting!" Ensor exclaimed in 1900:

culture.

politics.

Dutch and Flemish

Breugel, Rembrandt, and Rubens. Thus,

shall

fact, a closer

Pont-Aven

Van Eyck, Bosch,

like his

he remained aloof from urban,

tion in partial emulation of past

of the best Symbolist art (especially

ceramics from Brittany reveals that he did not entirely abjure

known

his life

Much

perspective, providing audiences with a

critique of

source

For most of

Long

was disdainful of modern

live

naive and ignorant

"Long

live the

peasant in

Bosch, Rubens and Jordaens

live free, free, free art!" If Ensor

artistic sophistication

and

feeling,

he was equally scornful of academicism: "All the rules,"

Ensor wrote,

"all the

canons of

art

vomit death

like their

bronze brethren."

For
his

all

his extravagance

artistic

training

and

however, Ensor began

vitriol,

conventionally

and enrollment

enough with private

in

1877

at the

Academy of Fine Arts. Although he

later

disparaged the

lessons in Ostend,

Academy

320

'"

fated to be

is

for a long time." Later he

it

7"/,'

Gauguin portrayed

Self-Portrait (1889),

and

318

which the

in

walk the earth. In Christ

to

889), a picture

of mutual respect alongside individual autonomy. Indeed,

politicized," despite the fact that

317

Realist painter represented himself as the

condemned

The Meeting (1854),

inspired by Courbet's

forever

final

harmonic and independent colors and forms anticipated, he

believed, a political future based

Yellow Christ and other landscapes, and himself as

kind of refugee in Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

him,

from Brittany represented not

"Neotraditionism" but a beckoning "new

fields in

harmonious

art.

Yet the complexity of Symbolism, and especially the

art

of

myth

similar forgetfulness lurks

much Symbolist

Gauguin's "synthetist"

it

empty

flowing out, a hemorrhage, or

Barthes argues that at the core of modern

an historical amnesia.

empties

reality inside out,

with nature.

history

say;

and

the midst of a society in

in

modern European myth

tioning, as

a conservative

Brussels

as "that establishment for the near blind," he

remained there nearly three years and even earned an award

319

for his

drawings after Classical busts. Between 1880 and 1885

he continued his studies on his

own by making dozens

Callot,

Watteau, Goya, Turner, Daumier, and others. Ensor's

complex assimilation of

321

this

mainly Northern European and

generally anticlassical graphic tradition

is

extraordinary and bizarre etching entitled

1st on,

ing the Stools

life

in

the

Pouffamatus,

of King Darius after the Batle of Arbela (1886).

subject of this work, very loosely based upon Plutarch's

of the Persian king Darius, of course satirizes the Classical

narratives usually assigned to enterprising

but

apparent

and Transmouff, Famous Persian Physicians Examin-

Cracozie,

The

of

Rembrandt,

copies and interpretations of master drawings by

its

Academy

style reveals an earnest effort to understand

Baroque

students,

and employ-

Rembrandtesque) conventions of hatch-

(especially

ing and chiaroscuro.

Yet even

the

at

level

of form,

tendencies could not be restrained.

Ensor's

iconoclastic

Rembrandt allowed every

contour line in his etchings an expressive independence, and

every section of hatching an articulate clarity and orderliness;
Ensor, in contrast, purposely confuses both hatching and

contour

lines,

lending his composition a peculiarly anarchic

and comic quality wholly consistent with

content. This mixture of emulation and

works

majority of Ensor's

departure

in

the

scatological

mockery of Northern

Baroque traditions

Renaissance and

its

apparent in

the

decade following

his

is

from the Academy, including the Bosch-like

Antony (1887). Here the red-cowled

Tribulations of Saint

hermit Antony
soldiers, frogs

is

and

tempted and tormented by

balloonists, angels

women and

and demons,

all

and continuing

1881

in

Arbela 1886.

% x 7 (23.7 x

1884 to be:

in

decades, Ensor regularly submitted etchings, drawings, and

contemporary

paintings like these to exhibitions in Brussels organized by the

his

avant-garde groups

La

Chrysalide, L'Essor, Les Vingt, and

La Libre Esthetique as well, on occasion,

to

Pouffamatus, Cracozie, and Transmouff, Famous

17.8)

works of art. Accordingly, they ambiguously stated

more than two

for

Iston,

Persian Physicians Examining the Stools of King Darius after the Battle of

painted

with the textures and hues of blood and feces.

Beginning

JAMES ENSOR

321

more conservative

"The
reality

study and the direct interpretation of

by the

nique." Although the organization became factionalized by

1886 between champions of an unambiguous

tion in art (Picard)

clearly uncomfortable about exhibition with the various rule-

matters of content as

yet

he was hardly more

enthusiastic about showing with the avant-garde organizations.

The

(Les Vingt)
artists,

Le Groupe des Vingt

Brussels fraternity called

is

Formed

a case in point.

and

writers,

critics

in

1883 by

that included

number of

Ensor, the self-

proclaimed Symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), the

Neoimpressionist

Theo Van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), and

Maus and Edmond Picard, Les

the critics and lawyers Octave

Vingt was an exhibition society that,

like its

Indcpcndants

to

in

France,

sought

counterpart Les

create

and

exhibit

progressive artworks exclusive of the constraints imposed by

Salon

juries.

At

first,

the group

embraced

tendencies and directions, claiming

several artistic

commitment

to the

creation of both explicitly partisan and disinterestedly pure

himself go freely in

artist, letting

temperament and [gaining] thorough mastery of tech-

venues, even including the Paris Salon in 1882. Ensor was

bound Salons des Beaux-Arts,

their goal

socialist direc-

and proponents of unfettered choice

well

as

Rodenbach and Khnopff, among

form

poet

(the

others),

in

Georges

subsequent group

exhibitions were clearly dominated by the latter Parnassian

tendency.

Ensor

initially

stance, but

shared Les Vingt's dichotomous

became

artistic-

distressed, after 1886, at the increasing

esthcticism and cosmopolitanism of the group's exhibitions.

He was

especially disturbed

membership

lists

Rcdon, Whistler, Rodin, and

was

vehicle

by the inclusion

of non-Belgian

for

"pauvre Belgique,"

artists,

others.

For him, the

the consolidation
as Baudelaire

in

Les Vingt

including Seurat,
a\

ant-garde

and rejuvenation of

had called

it,

in

the face of

seemingly insuperable national divisions of language and

ethnicity. In

November

1886, he wrote to Octave M.uis, the

group's secretary: "It would be with

ENSOR

much

WD

pain wore

I'Ol'l

1.

isw

to see

313

XX

Les

hy

their personality

lopers."

the group; he

who had

isolated

and claimed the status of an

already been exiled from

Ensor was granted

Although

from

adopt

all artistic

exile

rules

even from

official art.

luxury

the

to

Ensor rejected

internationalist perspective,

now saw himself as

institutions,

those

of the inter-

falling into the clutches

Thus, from the moment Les Vingt hegan

Pan-European or
and

and perhaps

lose their virginity, their nationality,

of a

small

retrospective of his best works at the 1886 exhibition of Les

Vingt, he was largely ostracized from his fellows two years

315

when he sought

later,

1889 (1888). This painting, Ensor's chef

Brussels in

into

d'oeuvre,

is

splenetic

to exhibit his prophetic Entry of Christ

by

a vast (nearly 10

that

affair

cacophonous, and

15 feet),

represents

conviction about the

his

decadence of his age. Accompanied by military bands, masked

marchers, historical and literary figures, urban bourgeoisie,
workers, and politicians of every political persuasion, Christ

enters Brussels in seeming triumph.

''''Vive

red banner exclaining

La Sociale" ("Long Live Socialism")

above the diminutive savior

who

is

suspended

is

mounted on

donkey

in

the upper center of the picture; to his right, above the serried

ranks of revelers, a poster announces "Fanfares Doctrinaires

Toujours Reussr
ceed"); to his

("Doctrinal Fanfares Always Suc-

[sic]

left

green reviewing stand offers various

322

JAMES ENSOR Old Woman With Masks

).

21J-X

18$(54x47)

clowns and dignitaries an ideal vantage point for watching the

spectacle below. In the fore and middle-ground, figures are

roughly stacked one above the other as

209

if standing

manner reminiscent of Courbet's Burial

several images d'Epinal

More

upon which

at

that

on

risers, in

Ornans and the

work was based.

extravagant and grotesque than Courbet's painting,

each face in The Entry of Christ

is

mask

each expression a grimace. These faces,

or a caricature and

and green. Though

every sense a history painting

in

created with a contemporary public in mind, The Entry of

was never exhibited

Christ into Brussels in 1889

lifetime;
it

making

a virtue of necessity,

he wrote

in

Ensor's

late in life that

remained "untarnished by exhibition."

into Brussels in 1889,

by recourse

to the grotesque

Ensor sought

and the

artistic

legitimacy

fantastic, genres rooted in

those ancient Flemish habits and traditions

called Breugelian

which

(1891),

whose rudiments survived

Yet

Ensor sought,

if

even
in the

today

Ostend

prominently

in

is

mood

ing project was

lators"
it,

doomed. Condemning the "mercurial specu-

who were

Ensor pleaded
life

and

ruining traditional Ostend by modernizing

in his writings

and

art for the re-creation of

for the cultural unities that are

it:

lipped prostitutes, ostrich plumes and

in his art.

filled

with characters and motifs that appear to be based on

contemporary

314

festivals

and Breugelian depictions of proverbs,

ENSOR AND POPULISM

fin-de-siecle

to

those which included great coats of arms and red-

wooden shoes." In

fact,

Ostend could hardly have been further from

Ensor's ideal

community.

presumed

"Let us re-establish our pure and natural

parades (held each year

middle 1880's included them

the inspiration,

of neurasthenia and anguish.

carnivals

in the

mature works

Indeed, Ensor himself appears to have believed his synthesiz-

have attended

Ensor's drawings, prints, and paintings from this time are

he

stands out most

his other

However carnavalesque

Ensor's pictures evoke a

company of

Lent, in June, and in August), and

What

not the expression of an integrated

Rousseau) frequented the Ostend carnivals, masques, and

at

marry

cultural whole, but rather a melancholic reckoning with a

times in the

beginning

to

art of easel painting,

The Entry of Christ and

of the 1880's and '90's

carnival

friend Ernest

manner of Courbet,

in the

popular traditions to the modern

Ensor cherished. Indeed, Ensor himself (some-

young Brussels

The Battle Between Carnival

cannot be said to have fully succeeded.

festivals that

his

recalls Breugel's

Man

and Lent (1559).

culture in ruins.

Rejecting both academicism and estheticism in The Entry

of Christ

Lent, as in Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged

like the picture as a

whole, are coarsely painted in discordant hues of red, white,

blue,

the seven deadly sins, or the battle between Carnival and

of a unified,
city

"pure and natural" Belgian

of 27,000 people, Ostend was one of the

chief bathing resorts in Europe, and during the

summer

its

population tripled. Ensor

knew

too well this modernized and

commercialized Ostend; for the

first

half of his

life

he lived in

an apartment near the beach above a small curio shop run by

his

grandmother, mother, and aunt

who

sold souvenirs,

Elisee Reclus. Indeed, Brussels

politics for

some

time, especially since a

tives called voohuit in 1874,

summer

peuple.

tourists.
artists

and Redon, among others

of the period

Hodler, Munch,

Ensor witnessed

precisely those romantic ideals he

the collapse of

most cherished. He prized

handicraft at a time of rapid industrialization, he exalted

familial

and communal bonds

structured

upon

society

increasingly

cash nexus, and he dreamed of a pure and

natural society in a
rest

in

Belgium increasingly structured,

like the

of Europe, on fashion and the commodity. Less admirably

(but in

common

women

with his antimodern polemics, as in his chauvinist

with the above

artists too),

remark about red-lipped prostitutes, and

Masks

(1889), in

which

his

Ensor targeted

had been

Edouard Anseele had established

including shells, costumes, and masks, to the throng of

Like other alienated

322

Demolder, and the noted French geographer and anarchist

By 1879

several

center of radical

young printer named

of worker coopera-

a series

and soon thereafter

progressive

parties

maison du

representing

social-democratic, Marxist, and anarchist factions of socialism had been formed, which in 1885

the umbrella of the Belgian

would be united under

Workers Party. The year 1886 was

development of the workers' movement

crucial to the

Belgium, to the

artistic

avant-garde and to Ensor

anarchist celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris

Commune

and

by coal miners led

a coincident strike

general strike on

March

25, followed

by

popular demonstrations that were halted only by police

violence and the proclamation of a state of siege.

"Now

review articles in L' Art moderne dedicated to books by the

task of art

woman; her painted

facilitating the

mask, the picture argues,

behind which lurks the hollowness of death.

first

overall pattern of his resentments,

it

is

not

The Brussels home of his friend Rousseau which

he

entered in 1879, was a center for progressive politics and

culture, frequented

by the iconoclastic Belgian

Rops (1833-98), the

radical

author

and

and

literature,

artist Felicien
critic

Eugene

now

the

he believed, to serve "in preparing or

accomplishment of

too, the political

surprising that Ensor took a keen interest in the radical politics

of his day.

the

been

anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Jules Valle. It was

Given the

is

time to dip our pens into red ink," wrote Picard in 1886 in

mockery. Lifeless yet leering carnival masks surround the old

a

to a

sequence of massive

turned into an arena for childish doodling and misogynist

is

in

an

Old Woman With

a portrait of a family friend has

face too

alike:

historical destiny."

Now,

schisms within the Brussels avant-garde,

described above, were too great to be overcome by broad

esthetic manifestos or vague statements of

common

purpose.

Ensor's engagement with Belgian socialism during the

turbulent decade between 1885 and 1895

is

reflected in his

artwork. His vitriolic satires of King Leopold, such as Belgium

in the

Nineteenth Century (1889), his inclusion in The Entry of

**

323 JAMES ENSOR The Gendarmes 1892.

14 x 21f (35.5 x 55)

ENSOR

WD

I'OI'l

I.

ISM

315

t^ir

324

JAMES ENSOR

Christ of banners proclaiming

Anseele et Jesus"
323

(later

My

"Vive

Portrait in lgbo 1888.

la

l\ x 4J (6.9 x 12)

Sociale" and "Vive

painted out by the

artist), as well as his

depiction of strikers and strike victims, such as The Gendarmes

sympathies clearly enough.

(1892), reveal his general leftist

Yet the precise

political significance of these

Even The Entry of

difficult to establish.

slogans,

may

Christ, with all its

be interpreted as a satire and not a celebration of

socialist politics.

McGough

artworks remains

In his book on the painting, Stephen C.

has very plausibly interpreted Ensor's painting as

an attack upon
tive doctrines,

all

"fanfares doctrinaires"

and upon

all

upon

institutions, either

all

manipula-

governmental

or religious, that restrict individual freedom. Indeed, Ensor's

frequently

expressed

disdain

for

bourgeois

society

simultaneous rejection of any compromise of his

own

artistic

he was sympathetic to socialism, but only

liberty suggest that

to socialism of an antiauthoritarian or anarchist kind.

shocking character of his art

vulgarity

conforms

intellectualism,

its

vehemence, anti-

and masculinism of fin-de-siecle anarchism.

Unlike Marxists

first

The

independence, violence, and

to the impetuosity,

who proposed

that the seizure

was

stage in the creation of a classless, egalitarian

society, anarchists

such as Reclus generally argued that any

revolution that permitted the maintenance of a state (even

provisionally)

was authoritarian and bourgeois. Disdaining

revolutionary elites (but at the same time necessitating

by stressing individualism and

voluntarism),

them

anarchists

constantly sought ways to bring the masses into the revol-

utionary process. In order to do so,

many

believed they must

purge themselves of greed and corruption and be united with

the people in

316

body and

soul.

The famous

ENSOR AND POPULISM

idea that he was enjoying

is

more than

his fair share of sunshine,

one extreme form of this exaggerated

and purity.

parallel fanaticism

may

stress

upon populism

be detected in the art of

Ensor. His vocabulary of grotesque and caricatural forms, his

comedy and

his scatology, his

misogyny and

his intransigence,

reveal at once an effort to unite with the popular classes of past

and present Belgium, and

to strike the

a voluntarist desire

hammer blows

single-handedly

that will bring

and

edifices of bourgeois propriety

down

the twin

avant-gardist elitism.

In the art and ideas of Ensor are thus found populism and

megalomania

in equal mixture. In 1931, the 70-year-old artist

my

wrote: "I have no child except light,

and

daughter; light, one

indivisible, light, bread of the painter, light, the painter's

mie, light,

Animate

queen of our senses,

us, reveal to us the

light, light, illuminate us!

new paths we must

joy and happiness." Ensor's rich imagination

follow toward

may

be seen as

the inversion of Cafiero's madness; he wished to absorb

all

the

light, to absorb and retransmit to posterity the lessons of the

by the

industrial proletariat of the institutions of the state

necessary

and

madness by the

anarchist Carlo Cafiero (1846-92), driven to

case of the Italian

Dutch and Flemish masters and

the popular culture of the late

Middle Ages. Yet because of Ensor's nearly messianic

regard, he had, as
art, like

much

beginning.

It

he himself admitted, no

real

self-

progeny; his

other Symbolist production, was an end not a

was based on the

still-born

dream of a modern nation dressed up

and phantasmagoric

in the epic

garb of a pre-

industrial age. Ensor's art thus resembles nothing so

much

as

the bones, shells, and fossils sold in his mother's curio shop,

which were

his

chief motif;

his

paintings represent the

desiccation of Romantic imagination

the reduction to

mere

bone of the once embodied hopes of Delacroix and Ingres,

Constable, Turner, and Friedrich for an organic society in

which

artists created art as naturally as trees

Ensor was preoccupied with

his

own

produced

failure to achieve

fruit.

such

transcendence, and depicted his impotence, marginality, and

324

decay

literal

in the

macabre etching

My

Portrait in 1960

(1888).

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING:

MUNCH, REDON, MONET, AND HODLER
The

issue of

of what

may

Symbolism's renunciation of modern society

Kahn

called "the compulsorily

(or

contemporaneous")

be illustrated by examining the movement's position

within the history of landscape painting. Since

its

origins in

the late Renaissance, landscape painting has represented not

just the physical

appearance of land but the social relations

between humans

in nature.

such

painters

as

Claude

During the seventeenth century,

Lorrain

and

Nicolas

Poussin

represented the Italian countryside as a pastoral realm of

peace and plenty, recalling

by the

Roman

a Classical

Golden Age described

poets Virgil and Ovid. In

The

Netherlands,

landscape painting was similarly idealizing and inspiring,

although

its

permitted

it

greater
to

verisimilitude

and contemporaneity

function as an ideological support to an

economic order that depended upon

rationality, productivity,

and expansionism. By the beginning of the nineteenth

century,
art

we have seen, during

the

Romantic period, landscape

(and nature generally) often served as

supposed unnatural intrusions into

capitalism, urban living,

a protest against

social

life

industrial

and the money economy. Yet

these cases, including of course such art

in all

movements

as

325

Arnold Bocklin

'ita

Somnium Breve

M x45(180x

114.5)

Realism and Impressionism, the relations between nature and

society or country

and

city

were intensely

the mythic stability of the one

dialectical

depended upon the

that

stability

is,

of

326

Arnold Bocklin

Island of the

Dead

1880. 31Jx571-(80x 150)

SI

MHOl.lS

I.

\\1)S( VPE

PAINTING

317

327

Edvard Munch

47x46H119.4x

328 Christian

Krohg

4QJ-X23J- (103.5x51.4)

the other,

the

measure of the one revealed the hidden

dimensions of the other. In

a progressive

this

way, nature continued to serve

function for society, offering itself up as a

measure against which both human accomplishments and

failures could

be gauged.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the

dialectical relation

between nature and society was severed

in

the literature and art of Symbolism. During a period of

wrenching economic expansion and contraction, colossal

urban and industrial growth, and the

final

eradication in

Europe of the remaining pockets of premodern community,

nature came to be considered by
inviolable sanctuary

some

and not simply

Unlike Caspar David Friedrich, who

writers

and

artists as

a standard of

an

judgment.

in the first quarter

of the

century depicted nature as a locus for spiritual fulfillment and

social reconciliation,

325

Somnium Breve
326

Arnold Bocklin represented

it

in the last

three decades as a place of escape or eternal rest.

[Life

is

1888, and Island of the

Vita

Short], an allegorical landscape of

Dead

(1880), for example, are siren

songs in praise of blissful solitude and easeful death. In 1937,

the Frankfurt School critic

Leo Lowenthal described

this

generational sea-change in the representation of nature in his

essay about the popular fn-de-siecle

Norwegian

Hamsun:
318

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

novelist

Knut

Sick Child 1885-6.

11">)

Sick Girl 1880-81.

329

Edvard Munch

The Voice 1893. 34^x42^(87.6x108)

Knut Hamsun

However, with the coming of doubt and even despair about

novels of

personal fulfillment within society, the image of nature was

and nature

no longer

a basis for a

alternative.

new

Nature was increasingly envisaged

fantasy.
reality,

his

His soul, inviolable

in

could find solace in such

at

peace

a "thing," like the tree or the brook,

surrender than

manmade

forces.

This

man's imagery of

his

in
is

at least

submission; frustrated

attempt to participate autonomously

this

man
in

ideology but outraged in

a

world, he could join the world of nature.

in

the

as

ultimate surcease of social pressure. In this context,

feel

and

in

in

the societal

He could become

find

more pleasure

hopeless struggle against

the most significant change in

environment

portray this antinomy of society

an extreme form.

became an

perspective, but

could submit to nature and

in

to take place in the

closing decades of the nineteenth century in Europe.

The

As Lowenthal's remarks
watershed

period

in

indicate,

the

the fin-de-siecle was a

representation

literary

of the

antinomy between society and nature, but examples from the

visual arts are in fact

Classical rhetorics

as the Virgilian pastoral

thrall.

more

vivid since only there had the

which defined the landscape genre

The Symbolist

and georgic

such

continued to exert their

painters of landscape, in short,

and understood the former paradigms of landscape

arl

knew

and

set

out to destroy them. In so doing, they destroyed as well anj

critical

engagement with modernity and created instead

.1

mythic landscape of dreams.

The Norwegian Edvard

Munch

SYMBOLIST LANDS(

(1863

^PE

(
1

H4) began

PAINTING

his

;i

career in the circle of Christiania (Oslo) anarchists that

Hans Jaeger and the

Krohg (1852-1925). Munch's

Hamsun

"The

wrote:

(1894),

naturalist painter Christian

stared into that clear sea, and

327

Sick Child (1885

328

sister's

6),

is

memories of

inspired in part by

death from consumption and

Girl( 1880-81),

in part

his

by Krohg's Sick

an angry and vivid study of the ravages of a

degenerative disease.

By

its

content, large size, and scraped

and battle-scarred surface, Munch's Sick Child was

clearly an

indictment of a perceived social and cultural sickness as well as

of a tubercular epidemic.

by contemporary

critics

The work was

upon

its initial

bitterly

condemned

drawing

at

Leon

Bonnat's conservative academy, and returned in 1891,

'oice

by the

six called

among

(1893), a painting included

artist

all

as

if

open and

tensely against

Jealousy (1890),

it,

and

at

Munch

home

my

heart beating

depicted his simultaneous fear and

of superior and omniscient natural forces.

forgotten and

human

womanly

society

is

listory

is

powerless before the onslaught

and the eternal feminine.

of nature, destiny,

The French

to

there." In The Voice, as in

longing to submit to what he saw as the magical,

thrall

clean.

were lying face

painter and graphic artist Odilon

(1840-1916) similarly articulated the

fin-de-siecle

Redon

antagonism

between nature and society by portraying humans

as passive

and powerless objects acted upon by uncontrollable natural

confirmed Symbolist.
In The

sky was

seemed

it

face with the uttermost depth of the world;

Munch

exhibition;

soon thereafter retreated to Paris to study

329

on earth that has such beautiful; lingering twilight." In Pan

included the journalist and activist

"The

Frieze of Life,"

Among

Redon

group of

forces. In Ophelia

Munch

depicted

meditation upon Shakespeare's irrational Opjielia, seduced by

the Flowers (1905),

created a

the physical charms of nature.

The uniqueness

resort at Asgardstrand. Starkly dressed in white, she thrusts

image may be judged by

comparison with the Pre-

her chin forward and keeps her hands behind her back; she

is

Raphaelite Millais's widely reproduced and

moonlight

at

Ophelia of 1851 (Redon

a lone

young woman standing amid

as rigid as the trees

right.

This

paintings:

and

trees near the shore of the

as ghostly as the shaft of

how Munch described

"The frieze is intended
is

pictures, which, gathered together,

life.

Through them

beyond

it

all

Hamsun

with

seen

much

exhibited

during his

visit to

as a series of decorative

represent the fully stretched out figure of Ophelia, but only

would give

a picture

of

'life,

with

all

its

on." Like his compatriot

whom he was often compared, Munch

nature alone a world of sentiment and pathos.

walked along the shoreline and listened

found

"Have you

to the sea?"

in

ever

Munch

in

1895).

her head and shoulders. "Native and indued unto" nature, as

Shakespeare wrote, Redon's Ophelia

tion

is

artist

her. Indeed, the heroine

the ghostly

of no place

woman

in

Munch's The

Roger and Angelica

(ca.

330

1908),

endowed by

Voice, she

Redon

is

the

flora; like

identified

created a field of

technique he called "mutual

John Everett Millais

30 x 40 (76.2 x 101.6)

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

is

with the irrational and irresistible forces of nature. Similarly,

glowing hue by means of

know

barely visible; atten-

with no greater personality than the ambient

how

is

primarily drawn to the clouds of abundant flowers

which surround

in

the evening light dissolves into night?

330

Unlike Millais, Redon chose not to

asked a friend about Asgardstrand: "Have you ever noticed

P.O

it

London

the sea, while under the trees,

joy, carries

may have

of Redon's

the significance of the six

there winds the curving shoreline, and

complexity of grief and

316

Ophelia 1851.

331

331

Oimi.on

Rkdon

Roger and Angelica a.

1908.-

36J-

x 28} (92.7 x 73)

1
!

\i

noi. si'
1

1.

\\DS(

\im

I'

\i\ riNG

121

exaltation of colors."

The

marine water and sky

is

dazzling luminosit] of the ultra-

intensified by orange

complements,

purple and gray-blue adjacents, and the judicious introduction of white or black accents

induces

a feeling

and highlights. The

result

of disorientation and phantasmagoria.

Created during the twilight of a career marked by isolation

and public incomprehension, Ophelia Among

the Flowers

and

Roger and Angelica eschew the unnatural and assaultixe

grotesques found

in

Rcdon's early

noirs ("blacks"),

such as the

nightmarish charcoal The Eye (1882) and the lithograph The

Smiling Spider (1885). In these

late

works

Redon

in color,

instead focused a pantheistic vision on the minutiae of the

my

natural world: "I cannot say what have been

wrote

in 1903, "I love

nature in

all its

forms;

sources," he
love

it

in the

smallest blade of grass, the humblest flower, the tree, the

ground and the rocks

selves,

more than

ted the novelist

in the

all

things for their character in them-

ensemble." In 1904, Redon instruc-

Andre Gide: "Enclose yourself in nature," ex-

pressing that desire to

"become a

"like the tree or the brook,

thing," as Lowenthal writes:

and find more pleasure

render than in a hopeless struggle against

A
332 ODII.ON RF.DON The Smiling Spider
333

Mikhail Vrubf.l Pan

334 ODII.ON

322

REDON

1899.

1885. 10} x 8f(26x

the

surrender before nature

sophisticated

and

is

manmade

represented

idiosyncratic

Russian

forces."
in

works

painter

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910). Rejecting the

48|x4i|(i24x

The Cyclops lqos. 25} x 20

21.5)

by

parallel

in this sur-

106.3)

(64.1

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

x 50.8)

populism and sentimentality that characterized paintings by

the earlier peredvizhniki (Wanderers) group

who included

332

335 Cl.AUDE MONET Waterlilies 1905.

35^x36^(89.2x92.7)

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy (1837-87) and his student Ilya

the confrontation between the

Efimovich Repin (18441930)

nature signified the limitless potential for

Vrubel embraced

the stance

of the European Symbolist esthete. Possessed, as he wrote, by

a

"mania"

for technique, his paintings are densely

broad

with

impastoed

planes

of color,

packed

anticipating

the

nonobjective works of the early twentieth-century Russian

avant-garde. Indeed, Vrubel was conversant with

same

musicians, and authors

artists,

He

generation.

333

who

many

of the

influenced the later

read the works of Tolstoy and Nietzsche,

development,

landscape

for

nature

painters,

passive and private pleasure.

Monet,

volition, a space

especially the

immersed

The

in a fantastical

and

paintings of Bocklin, Degas, Monet, Moreau, Whistler, and

seasonal, the result of natural forces.

many

remarks are illuminating:

others through their reproduction in the pages of the

Russian journal Mir Iskusstva {The World of Art). VrubtTs

( 1

899),

which uncannily anticipates Rcdon's painting The

Cyclops. (1905),

was inspired by Anatole France's story Le

Saint Satyre.

depicts a kindly satyr

pan pipes
earth.

in

The

It

hand

who appears

crescent

moon

rising

to

with cloven hoof and

have emerged from the

on the horizon echoes the

shape of the creature's horns and wisps of hair and beard; the
cool aqua color of the water at middle right and
in

left is reflected

the blue pools of Pan's gentle eyes. Like the Cyclops in

Rcdon's painting, the Pan

product of nature

Whereas

for

in

VrubtTs

who must soon

Romantic

is

an autochthonous

return to

artists, like

its

native bourn.

Friedrich and Turner,

light.

in

designed for

apparent

in

works made

at

similar vitalism

Giverny, such as Waterlilies (1905),

spectator are

is

which the

artist

and

world of water, color,

only changes that occur in Monet's garden are

Once

again, Lowenthal's

Nature's timetable replaces the timetable of history.

Whoever

or

wholly "other," an entity

is

independent of human society or

the late paintings of

human growth

Redon, Vrubel, and other Symbolist

designed stage sets for Rimsky-Korsakov and knew the

Pan

334

social

autonomous individual and

senses and accepts these rhythmic patterns as

fundamental has
rational effort.

full

knowledge immediately and without

At the same time, the endless reproduction

of natural phenomena, the cyclic order of nature, as

opposed

to the

apparent disorder and happenstance of all

individual and historical lads, testifies to the powcrlcss-

ness of humans.

It is

the extreme opposite of

human

self-

assurance before nature.

Such

conception of nature

in

the

work of these

.utisis

arose from the desire to evade social contradiction, history,

sniiioi.isTi.wnsi \n

\i\ ri\(i

323

US

and contemporaneity,

to evade, that

of "universalizing civilization."

and society

moment

that

is

when

The antagonism

of nature
at

the

the colonization and commodifica-

and society had progressed so

dialectic conception

trace of the

the dispiriting forces

described here occurred specifically

in history

tion of nature

is,

far that the earlier

was ideologically unsustainable. Not

modern, the quotidian, or the insouciant could be

permitted to invade painted landscapes for fear of shattering

the

Romantic dream of plenitude and thereby admitting the

threatening

nightmare

The Symbolist

and

of alienation

powerlessness.

opposition of nature and society

more compellingly

than

revealed

nowhere

landscapes

the

in

is

of

independent peasantry,

disappearance of an

the

erosion of cantonal autarchy, the loss of a rich and vivid "folk"

culture,

and the concommitant

rise

of a tourist industry were

the factors that led to the artistic segregation of

humans and

Hodler increasingly devoted

4),

painting.

In

he

1897,

his

discussed

talents

the

"The Mission

precepts of that art in a lecture called

to

essential

of the

Artist," delivered to the Society of the Friends of the Fine-

Arts in Freiburg.

lis

address repeated

many

Symbolist tenets of the day, but added

whether

Parallelism,

whether

it

it is

used to

is

the main feature of the picture or

set off"

produces

a feeling

very high

fir

the

the innumerable

left,
.

trees,

an element of variety, always

of unity. If
I

go

for a

walk

in a forest

of

can see ahead of me, to the right and to

columns formed by the

Whether those

of the prevailing

new one:

tree-

tree trunks stand out clear

against a darker background or whether they are silhouetted against a deep blue sky, the

impression of unity,
Hodler's

first

parallel

main

note, causing that

the parallelism of the trunks.

is

landscape was probably The Beech

more than

nature in the Symbolist landscapes of Ferdinand Hodler

Forest

(1853-1918). Indeed, the duration of Hodler's

coincided

exposition of the theory, but

it

with a crucially important period of modernization and

series of paintings depicting

Lake Leman, Lake Silvaplana,

industrialization, not to say commodification of Switzerland.

Lake Thun, Lake Geneva, and the summits of the Alps

Apprenticed
tourist

in

pictures

life

1867 to Ferdinand Sommer,

in

the

village

of

Thun

in

painter of

Bernese

the

Oberland, Hodler was witness to and participant

in

the

(1885),

parallelism

painted

came

to

dominate

was only

his art.

decade

before

after 1900, with the

that

Lake Geneva Seen From

Chexbres (1904) consists of an arc of land in the foreground

embracing

parallel

bands of blue,

violet,

and pink water. The

clouds at the horizon resemble identical puffs of smoke from

marks Hodler's mature landscape art from the 1880's and

after

locomotive passing from right to

traces of the touristic.

The

a series

the elimination of nearly

all

rhetorical justification for this erasure

is

found

in

Hodler's

After achieving considerable success and celebrity in the

1890's with the exhibition in Paris of such disturbing and

dreamlike figure paintings as The Night

336

324

Ferdinand Hodler

The Night

\%<>\.

( 1

89 1 ) and The Chosen

45frx9'9J (116x299)

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

the clouds at the top are

of parallel and interlocked chevrons. In 1908, Hodler

traveled to the Schynige Platte in the Bernese Oberland, a

region he had

Symbolist theory of "parallelism."

left;

known and

number of mountain
style; the

loved in his youth, and painted a

landscapes, including Eiger,

Jungfrau Above the Fog

in a still

mass of the mountains

more
is

342

the

explosive growth of the Swiss tourist industry. Yet what

is

336

landscape

trunks.

Hodler.

The

One (1893

Mbnch and

radically simplified

rendered with thin

oil

343

337

Ferdinand Hodler The Monch With

Clouds 1911. 25^x36

(64.5x91.5)

338

EDVARD MUNCH Madonna

1895-7. 23J x 17H60.6 x 44.5)

washes of gray and blue, while the three summits are precisely
337

outlined in blue, green, and red. Finally, in The

Clouds (1911), Hodler was

at his furthest

Monch With

remove from the

busy tourist pictures of his early career. Here he has depicted

the massif and

summit of the second of the

the Bernese Oberland

appears as

a steel-blue

three great peaks of

near Grindelwald.

The mountain

pyramid with pasty white excrescences;

serpentine clouds, recalling the spermatazoa that enframe

338

Munch's lithograph Madonna (1895-7),

parallel the picture

surface and rectangular borders, lending by contrast a

still

greater mass and stability to the rock.

The

late parallel

landscapes of Hodler are visions of a world

frozen in time and space. Evacuated and dreamlike, they

conform

to

no conventional rules of landscape painting and,

unlike the paintings of his exact contemporary

Van Gogh,

lack

bravura facturc and cxpressionistic color contrasts. Most

striking of

all,

however, Hodler renounces the integration of

figures or even buildings in his landscapes, a practise essential

for

Van Gogh

in his

representation of agrarian Utopias in Aries

and Auvers. Neither arc Hodler's landscapes much

like the

S\

\l

HOI. 1ST

LANDSCAPE

\1\

TIMi

125

PAUL GAUGUIN Manao

339

paintings of Cezanne,

would seem

tupapau (The Specter Watches Her) 1892. 28} x 36}

whose Mont Sainte-Victoire (190406)

to offer the closest analogy to

The Munch With

Clouds. Both artists sought completeness and stability in their

art,

but where the

latter

included

in

his

paintings

the

unavoidable elisions or lacunas of vision, the former carefully

excised

all

that

was fragmentary, untidy, or uncontrollable;

where Cezanne captured temporal

brushwork,

a juxtaposition

of

flux

warm and

through energetic
cool colors,

and

(73 x 92)

the principle of parallelism.

you see everybody walking

occasions,

they

are

represents an idea.

grouped

Walk

If there

same

in the

is

a public festival,

direction.

around

speaker

who

into a church during a religious

service: the feeling of unity will impress you.

gathered for a happy occasion,

disturbed by a dissenting voice. In
it is

On other

When we

we do not
all

like

to

is at

The work

multiplicity of outlines, Hodler's images are largely static,

same time

often built of adjacent hues of a single temperature, and of

reveals

newly apprehended order of things and

repeated shapes or outlines in accordance with his theory of

beautiful because

parallelism.

In

"The Mission of the

If we

Artist,"

Hodler

compare these decorative instances

nature] with occurrences from our daily

326

arose from

[of parallelism in

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

we again

it

the

of art
is

expresses a general harmony.

Hodler's theory of parallelism and the landscape art that

stated:

life,

decorative parallelism.

be

the examples given,

easy to see that the parallelism of the events

are

find

it

much as a
To represent nature and society by

articulated a social or political as

compositional imperative.

means of a system of decorative

parallels

was

to

make the unity

340 Paul GAUGUIN The Meal,

Bananas 1891. 28^x3^(73x92)
341

PAUL GAUGUIN

Vahine no

of the Mango) 1892. 28$ x 17

or

The

te vi

{Woman

(72.7 x 44.5)

and wholeness of the work of

art

substitute

completeness and social integration lacking

in addition, to

endow the artist with

at will the

harmony and order presumed

dominated by

religious faith. Like

was,

to characterize an

popular democracy, and

Maurice Denis's arcadian April (1892),

Munch's haunting The

(1891), Hodler's The

it

heroic powers to re-create

earlier age

festivals,

the

for

in real life;

and Monet's

Voice,

Poplars

lyrical

Monch With Clouds displays a

344

decorative

balance and hierarchism quite unlike earlier Impressionist or

Realist works. Yet the "general

harmony" of which Hodler

spoke was only the mirror image of a terror that was equally

omnipresent
artist

in his art;

it is

seen in The Night in the face of the

shrinking beneath the black-shrouded figure that squats

over his loins, and in Valentine

his lover in the

would argue,

in

Agony (1915)

hours before her death.

in the jagged profiles

in the face

of

It is visible as well,

of frigid rock that Hodler

painted in the Oberland. Symbolist art reveals those feelings

of powerlessness and fear that preoccupied a generation.

Gauguin too experienced

fled

this alienation

and

and he

fright,

Europe because of it.

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN TAHITI

In an effort to restore his fading ideals, health, and finances,

Gauguin resolved
and move

to

the

in

1890 to abandon both Brittanj and Paris

French island colony of Tahiti

in

the

Polynesian archipelago. In September, he wrote to Redon:

(I

(,l

l\

WD S>

\lHOI.IS\l 1\

Mil

345

342

FERDINAND HODI.ER The

Beech Forest 1885. 39}

x S1J (101 x 131)

F Htik* v>

343

328

FERDINAND HODLER Lake Geneva

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

Seen From Chexhres 1904. 27}

IN TAHITI

x 42^ (70.2 x 108)

Maurice Denis

344

April 1892.

i4fx24

(37.5x61)

345
191

Ferdinand Hodi.er
5.

The

Valentine in

Agony

23} x 35f (60.5 x 90.5)

reasons you give

me for remaining in Europe are more

flattering than they are convincing.

although since
plans.

want

Madagascar

to

is still

go to Tahiti and

that the art

My

returned to Brittany

which you

made

up,

weeks

have modified

my

described the Tahitian night in a letter to his wife Mette:

mind

is

too close to the civilized world;

my existence there.

finish

like so

much

of what will be created

down

state of primitiveness

and savagery.

today

there, as

metaphor, to the originary innocence of humanity. Three

is

believe

only the germ

cultivate in

myself a

after his arrival at the colonial capital Papeete,

Such
the

a beautiful night

same as

Gauguin sought

longing to "go back,

my

far

to indulge fully his primitivist

back ... as

far

back as the dada from

childhood, the good old wooden horse." As his words

suggest, Tahiti for

Gauguin represented both

artistic regression.

To

return to his

go and

own childhood

live

and,

among
in

personal and

indigenes meant to

the familiar Rousseauisl

do

it is.

this night;

Thousands of persons

these people

are doing

abandoning themselves

living, leaving their children to

village,

In Tahiti,

Gauguin

grow up quite

alone. All

roam about everywhere, no matter

no matter by what road, sleeping

in

to sheer

into what

any house,

eating etc., without even returning thanks, being equally

ready to reciprocate.
.

the\

They

And

these people are called savages!

sing; they never steal;

do not

kilt

\'wn

mj door

Tahitian

is

words describe them:

lorama (good morning, good bye, thanks,

Oinitu

(I

don't care, what does

GAUGUIN

WD S\

it

never closed;

etc.)

and

mailer, etc.) and the) arc

\lHOl ISM l\

Mill

329


called savages!

heard of the death of King Pomarc with

The

keen regret.

Tahitian

and the old order

soil is

hecoming quite French,

Our missionaries have already introduced a good deal of

he would regain his mastery.

Munao tupapau (The

Gauguin depicted
identified as

spectator.

She

and

above

race. ...

should

memory

have your

like to

to learn

violet,

Specter

1892),

whom

he

bed, facing the

on yellow-white sheets, shaded with blue

lies

bedspread printed

and flowers. The background

the language quickly, for very few here speak French.

Watches Her,

young Tahitian woman

Tehura, lying on her stomach on

Protestant hypocrisy and arc destroying a part of the

country, not to mention the pox which has attacked the

whole

named La Nouvelle Cvthcrc),

(Tahiti had indeed once been

In

gradually disappearing.

is

blue with yellow

in

orange, and blue,

violet, pink,

is

fruit

illuminated with white and green sparks or light-bursts.

As

was

his letter indicates, Tahiti

and

reality

once

at

profound disappointment

dream-becomc-

to

Gauguin;

he-

observed native selflessness giving ground to European greed

and

freedom

sexual

traditional

surrendering

to

cash

economy, and responded with nostalgia and bittersweet

imaginings. Childhood and native innocence were frequent
subjects in Gauguin's Tahitian art at this time, appearing, for

example,
340

Te Hare farani (The Flowers of France, 1891) and

in

The Meal, or The Bananas (1891). In the

shown behind an overlarge

children are

latter

work, three

table covered with

white paper or canvas and an assortment of still-life objects

bananas, lemons, a knife, a half-eaten guava, a gourd and

ceramic bowl, and

wooden bowl

with water.

filled

The odd

disjunction of scale between the table and children

appear to be

at least

(who

on the verge of adolescence) and the

simple tripartite division of the composition

attempt to represent the meal from

else to reconstruct childish

a child's

and native

may

be an

point of view, or

seeing.

women, which

Gauguin's depiction of young native

Above and

from

his art

his arrival in Tahiti in 1891 until his

death in 1903, seems to arise from some of the same personal

and cultural impulses

One day

women

were associated

in

Gau-

guin's mind, as in the collective colonialist imagination, with

natural

fecundity

and beneficence,

as

drop

of successive

Teha'amana

in

colonial

and demographic

in its birth rate since the

well, the acquisition

vahines

Vahine no

te vi

a successful

in

epoch of

and depiction

(Woman of the Mango,

as

1892),

for a powerlessness before

stockbroker,

to the caprice of patrons

"House of Pleasure"
Marquesas

in 1871

Gauguin was

left

Union Generale

1882 to the legitimate demands of his wife, Mette

Gadd, and

330

vigor:

women), such

(wives,

vulnerable by the spectacular collapse of the

bank

to Papeete.

o'clock in the morning.

saw

[her].

Tehura

had promised to

didn't get

When

home

till

(as

and

critics.

he called his

Islands), in this land of

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

last

Now,

house

in his

in

the

"amorous harmony"

IN

TAHITI

one

opened the door ...

down on

lay motionless, naked, belly

the bed;

she stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear, and she

seemed not

to

know who

moment,

was. For a

too

felt a

strange uncertainty. Tehura's dread was contagious:

seemed

to

me

staring eyes.

that a phosphorescent light

had never seen her so

it

poured from her

lovely;

above

all, I

had

never seen her beauty so moving. And, in the half-shadow,

which no doubt seethed with dangerous apparitions and

ambiguous shapes,

feared to

make

ment, in case the child should be

.

Perhaps she took me, with

those legendary

The

demons

the slightest

terrified out

move-

of her mind.

my anguished face, for one of

or specters, the Tupapaus that

the sleepless nights of her people.

picture,

and the

artist's

description of

veritable encyclopedia of primitivism

young native woman

mind" by

is

it,

appears to be

and misogyny. That the

portrayed as "terrified out of her

"specters," suggests that she

ruled by emotion

is

stereotypes of native peoples as mentally inferior to West-

was a means of compensating

modernity. Once

go

means of

Napoleon. For Gauguin as

341

to

thought, a characterization consistent with widespread racist

for a vanished military

a significant

was obliged

as a whole, the acquisition of colonial

France had suffered an ignominious defeat by Prussia

and

first

and mysticism and incapable of disinterestedness and rational

possessions (Tahiti was only annexed in 1881) was a

compensating

with the

oiManao

and sexual prerogative.

restoration of male political authority

For the French nation

well

as

return that evening, but ...

filled

innocence, so indigenous

the genesis

published in 1897:

as in his paintings of children. Just as

children represented a lost and earnestly sought natural

Gauguin described

black robe and cowl.

tupapau in Noa Noa, his Tahitian diary and novel,

dominated

to the left stands a figure in profile dressed in a

erners.

"The Tahitians

are veritable children," Henri

le

Chartier wrote in his 1887 book on the French colonies of

Polynesia, "[and of a marked] fickleness.
trait

of their character

forest,

is

But the principle

superstition: the solitude of the

the darkness of the night and especially spirits

tupapaus

frighten them." Moreover, Gauguin's association

own rekindled desire

women "long to be taken,
Noa Noa. At the same time,

of the young woman's dread with his

affirms the misogynist canard that
violently," as

Gauguin wrote

Gauguin's own Oedipal

in

fear of losing mastery, control, or

even bodily integrity before the body of

his

young lover

suggested by his discussion and representation in

is

Manao

tupapau of "half-shadows," "dangerous apparitions," "am-

39

346 ODILONREDON "Death: My Irony

Exceeds All Others," from To Gustave Flaubert
1889.

Ityx7}

(26.2 x 19.7)

biguous shapes," "demons," and "specters." For Gauguin, as

for other

Symbolists such as Redon and Munch,

alternatively blessed virgins

women were

and femmes fatales whose

ent sexuality portended castration and death. Like

346

tupapau, Redon's lithograph "Death:

My

insist-

Manao

Irony Exceeds

all

(ca.

and seized by demons or

a skeleton. Fugit

1887), a small independent bronze derived

Amor

similar figural groups on the right-hand panel of the Gates,

depicts the pair of adulterers described by

the

Second Circle of

Hell.

As

in the

Dante

as inhabiting

drawing entitled De

Have

Profundis Clamavt (Out of the Depths

and Munch's etching The Kiss (1895) represent those unholy

Flowers of Evil, the sculpture represents, as a critic in 189S

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) also depicted themes of male

dominance

in

his colossal

and uncompleted Gates of Hell

(1880-1917), and his twenty-two illustrations for Baudelaire's

Flowers of Fvil (1887
sculpture,

women

portal, twisting

8),

among

and writhing

and orgasm. In the

in

latter ink

I Cried)

wrote, the "dangerous enigma" of the feminine:

from The

"She

flics

along, listless and disdainful, her lips curling with a smile of

victorious witchery."

Like

the

paintings

and

prints

contemporaries

of his

other works. In the former

mentioned above, though unlike the anodyne sculpture The

from the Dantesquc

IValtZ (1891) by his lover C.amillc Claudel (1864 1943),

veritably cascade

simultaneous death shudder

drawings,

women

are

shown

dead and dying, luring and repelling male embraces, entwined

350

from two

Others," from his album entitled To Gustave Flaubert (1889),

unions of lust and death that threaten masculine authority.

347

in lesbian love

Rodin based many of

his

works on cliched themes of sexual

violence and the Jem me fat ale. Yet there

erotic

extremism

(i

\l (,l

in

IN

is at

the

same time an

some of Rodin's works, such

WD si

\lliOl

[SM IN

as in the

Mini

34 (

>

347

332

AUGUSTE RODIN

The Gates of Hell 1880^1917-

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN TAHITI

22'3| x 13'U x 33i (680 x 400 x 85)

348

AUGUSTS RODIN
Height

ca. 1890.

349
18x

/to, Messenger

of the Gods

37J- (95.3)

CAMILLE CLAUDEL The Waltz

1905.

13 x 1\ (46.4 x 33 x 19.7)

350

AUGUSTE RODIN

15 x

18Jx 7^(38x48x20)

Fugit

Amur

ca.

sculpturally raw and genitally frank

Iris,

.Messenger of the Gods

348

(ca. 1890), or in the several masturbation drawings, that would

appear to permit

one which,
"allows

very different interpretation of sexuality,

as the art historian

women

Anne Wagner

to possess their bodies."

has written,

Something of the

same dichotomy between masculine control and dispossession,

believe,

women and

is at

work

in

Gauguin's treatment of Tahitian

of the cultural construct called "the primitive."

Indeed, the question of Gauguin's primitivism and attitude

toward

women

is

much more complex

than

initially

by Manao tupapau. In depicting tupapaus and

the Tahitian

language

in

his

title,

in

suggested

employing

Gauguin was

celebrating aspects of the native culture that

in

fact

the French

colonial authorities were attempting to suppress in the

name

of "assimilation," the stated policy of subjecting the islands

and

their inhabitants to

French

legal

and economic obli-

gations and cultural controls. Instrumental to this policy was

the effort of Catholic and Protestant missionaries to eradicate
local religious beliefs

religion

and instruct the natives

in

Christian

and the French language. Gauguin's depiction of

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN TAHITI

333

339

35i

PAUL GAUGUIN Mahana

native "superstition" in
title

no atua (Day of the

Manao tupapau and

must therefore be seen

to assimilation

God)

1894. 26J x 36 (68.3x91.5)

use of a Tahitian

in the context of native resistance

and what the

the colonial

artist later called

"reign of terror." Absent from Gauguin's picture

hypocritical

is

any of the

smugness or ignorant condescension found

in

Chartier, quoted above, or in the travel writer Mativet,

argued

in his

who

1888 guide to La Nouvelle Cy there that tupapaus

nightmares,

and

reality.

Gauguin, by contrast,

appears to have recognized that spirits (Mo'a) played a crucial

role in Tahitian culture

the

tupapaus

and

religion. Indeed, spirits

form one half of the basic

antithesis" (as the anthropologist

secular, wordly, or

human.

constant interaction with

sharks,

334

pigs,

horses,

"conceptual

is

be in almost

which can take the form of

dogs, cats, and birds.

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

among
of his

inevitability

is

Noa Noa

called

is

one

others, of his frank recognition of the

own

separation as a

European from

Polynesian spirituality.

Thus Gauguin's
ally, is

trism.

phenomenon gener-

While nineteenth-century primitivism

was mostly notable

peoples were
it

primitivism, like the

not reducible to simple masculinism and Eurocen-

fit

for its

(or exoticism)

naked assertion that non-European

only for conquest, conversion, or extirpation,

also at times fostered critical reflection

upon the

differences

between Western and non-Western cultures, and upon the

failures of the former. In the letter to

Gauguin

clearly

engaged

Redon

already cited,

in this primitivist dialectic:

Noa, meaning

To be a Tahitian is to

spirits,

such as

Douglas Oliver writes) of

Polynesian culture, the other half of which

indication,

Le

were simply the result of indigenous confusion between sleep,

dreams,

Gauguin's Tahitian diary novel

Indeed, that

IN TAHITI

Gauguin

is

finished here, and no one will see

Yet you know that

photographs

and

am

an egoist.

drawings,

whole

him anymore.

carry with
little

me

world

in

of

comrades that bring

of all you have done.
star; in

."] is

pleasure; of you,

have memories

my mind

also have in

my case to Tahiti,

the image of a

do not dream

promise you, but on the contrary of eternal

not death

death with
.

following this, in

of death,
life

me

its

in life

but

serpent's

upward among

phrase of Wagner that explains

the practitioners

enveloped in a

My

[Redon's "Death:

tail

inescapable, but in Tahiti,

roots pushing

Europe, that

in death. In

life

it

Irony

must be seen with

the flowers. ...

my thought:

its

recall a

"I believe that

of great art are glorified, and that,

melodious concord, they

of rays, perfumes and

tissue

celestial

will

be restored for

the breast of the divine sources of

all

eternity to

harmony."

green mandorla, her loins are accented by

calves are

below.

Here

is

The

Redon conforms

his letter to

that sanctioned violence

women and men

and the feminine

in

Eurocentrism

to the reigning

upon the bodies of

real

Tahitian

during the 125 years since their "discovery"

On

by Captain Samuel Wallis.

the other hand, however,

water constitutes the lower third of the painting.

seen a jigsaw-puzzle pattern of colors that bears only

Here, the sensuality of color has

Mahana
upper

illusionistic,

direction

European manner seen

in the

two

of liberating

color

from

the

slavish

labor

of

illusionism, thereby paving a road that leads to the nonrepre-

new twentieth-century

and Mondrian,

as well

appreciation of the esthetic

achievements of non-Western and especially indigenous

peoples.

In

Mahana

no atua, as in

many

of his other Tahitian works

such as Faaturuma (Reverie, 1891), Te Faaturuma (Silence, or

To Be Dejected, 1891), Fatata

the

te miti

We

Going? (1897), Gauguin admits profound

own

cultural heritage

and posits the

instrumentalism and hierarchism that sanctioned European

By

exploitation.

jettisoning the "death in life" of Europe

and

embracing the culture of Polynesia, Gauguin was expressing

an internationalism that was as rare as

it

was potentially

352 PAUL GAUGUIN Te faaturuma

36x27(91.2x68.7)

(Silence, or I'n

Be Dejected)

subversive in an age of empire. Indeed, Gauguin was a

consistent supporter of indigenous rights, jeopardizing his

own

life

the

in

Marquesas by protesting

in

support of

Polynesian rights in February 1903 (two months before his

death) in a letter to the French colonial governor: "This
hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality,
nity

under the French

on

flag takes

respect to [native] people

who

and Frater-

a singular irony with

no more than

are

tax fodder in

the hands of despotic gendarmes."

351

In Gauguin's

Mahana

no atua (Day of the God, 1894), he

has juxtaposed, without hierarchy or favor, several religious

and

pictorial traditions. In the

women, men, and children

upper third of the painting,

are

naturalistically

depicted

beneath an azure sky streaked with white clouds. Behind them

are a line of breaking waves, yellow sand, and a distant village

with houses, a horseman, and boaters. In the middle of this

zone stands the monumental statue of a god inspired

at

once

by Easter Island megaliths, Buddhist figures from the temple

of Borobudur

in

Java, and the feminine Tahitian deity Hina.

In the middle third of the painting are three figures, sitting or

reclining

on pink sand.

To

the

left, a

child lies facing us with

head resting on hands, legs bent, and toes touching the water;
to the right,
fetal

another child facing away from us,

posture; in the center a

woman

graceful contraposto: her upper torso

is
is

is

folded into

facing us, posed in a

framed by

kind of

GAUGl

IN

352

(Near the Sea, 1892) and

monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We?

uncertainties about his

very

would mirror.

century painter progressed further than Gauguin in the

Western cultures was an

of the

it

own way; the lower third of

Cezanne, no other nineteenth-

Besides

registers.

Where Are

criticism

its

no atua thus represents the abstract, Polynesian

antipode to the

Gauguin's Utopian embrace of the natural "harmony" of nonexplicit

red pareu and her

phantasmagorically colored water

sentational achievements of Kandinsky

the one hand, Gauguin's vulgar association of the

primitive, the non-European, the natural,

in the

the merest resemblance to the upper world

as to the

On

immersed

\ND NYMHOl ISM

1\

TAHITI

(35

353

353

PAUL GAUGUIN Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We

value of a

new

syncretic and international culture. In these

works, Western illusionism

is

juxtaposed to non-European

Going? 1897. 54x 12'3J (139x 374.5)

lists

and

was the

to their friend Levi-Strauss, "primitive" art

expression of an equilibrium between

humans and nature

abstraction and patterning, Christian deities are paired with

which aboriginal cultures had achieved but which capitalism

Hindu, Buddhist, or Tahitian gods, and European narratives

destroyed.

of

fall

and redemption are transformed into parables of

The

goal of the Surrealist

movement,

Breton wrote, "was the elaboration of

therefore, as

myth

collective

healthful eroticism and natural abundance. Moreover, native

appropriate to our time" that could resurrect a primitive

women

balance between nature and society, albeit at a

are depicted in the works cited above as intellectual

and contemplative people

much

Europeans,

less

(a relative

novelty in depictions of

Polynesians),

and possessed of

powerful and independent sexuality.

and

at

times

even

Gauguin anticipated the stance of the

Breton

who wrote

realism

is

with

them

against
.

all

wholly

Surrealist author

first

because

it

Andre

has sided

forms of imperialism and

and secondly because of the profound

between surrealism and primitive thought."

336

unsuccessful),

years after Gauguin's death: "Sur-

with peoples of color,

allied

brigandage

fifty

ness.

Gauguin's

much

higher

achievement and global interconnected-

art

and

thought,

finally

conceived

generation before Freud, Levi-Strauss, and the Surrealists

In this radical ethnographic endeavor (admittedly partial,

contradictory,

level of technological

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

To

white

affinities

the Surrea-

IN TAHITI

lack this progressive notion of an aujliebung, or transcendence

to a historically higher level.

In

common

with the other

Symbolists, Gauguin sought refuge from modernity in a

remote and unspoiled land;

like

them, too, he was frightened

by, and yet accepted (at times even revelled in), his

own

powerlessness and marginality. Unlike them, however, he

posited in his art a primitive alternative to the European social

and cultural order.

The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886. The

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986.
Perspectives on Morisol, ed. and introduced by T. J.

New

Edelstein.

Daniel

Disorder,

c.

Meyer Schapiro, "The Nature of Abstract Art,"

Collected Essays.

New

York, 1978.

Anne Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of

the Second Empire. New Haven, CT, and London,
1986.

Chapter
Adelyn

Breeskin,

Mary

Cassatt:

New

Eakins.

York, 1974.

New

York,

1986.

Modern

Life. Princeton, 1983.

Jackson Lears, No Place oj Grace: Anlimoderthe Transformation of American Culture,

1880-1920. New York, 1981.
J.

msm and

David M. Lubin, Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent,

James. New Haven, CT, and London, 1985.
Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt. New York,

Art, 1985.

Chapter

1989.

with B. S. Shapiro,
Prints.

New

Mary

Cassatt:

The Color

1984): 86-103.

London, 1970.
Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings,
Drawings, Sketches. New York, 1980.
Vincent and Theo Van Gogh: A Dual Biography.
Ann Arbor, MI, 1985.
Japomsme in Art: An International Symposium, ed.
Society for the Study of Japonisme. Tokyo, 1980.
Tsukasa Kodera, "Japan as Primitivistic Utopia: Van
Gogh's Japonisme Portraits," Simiolus, 3: 4 (1984):
189-208.

Griselda Pollock, "Artists, Mythologies and Media:

York, 1989.

New York, 1986.

Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings,
Watercolors.

(December

The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Greenwich, CT, and London, 1979.
J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His
Paintings and Drawings. 4 vols., Amsterdam and

Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent, His Portrait.

Drawings,

14

Klaus Berger, Japomsme in Western Painting from

Whistler to Matisse. Cambridge, MA, 1992.
Albert Boime, "Van Gogh's Starry Night: A History
of Matter and A Matter of History," Arts Maga-

Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of

Elizabeth Johns,

T.

John Rewald, Post-Impressionism: From Ian Gogh to

Gauguin. 3rd edn., New York and London, 1978.
Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper, Pissarro: His Life
and Work. New York, 1980.
Jean Sutter (ed.), The Neo-Impressiomsts. New York
and London, 1970.

zine

and Work of Thomas

Patricia Hills (ed.),John Singer Sargent.

Hayward Gal-

lery, 1981.

1982.
Life

Critical

and

Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On

Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Chicago, 1987.
William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism. New
York, 1984.
Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins. 2 vols., Cambridge,

MA,

in

London, 1968.

Catalogue

Raisonne of the Oils, Pastels, Watercolors,

Drawings. Washington, D.C., 1991.

Gordon Hendricks, The

Essays

Richard Thomson, Seurat. Oxford, 1985.

Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries: Posters of
the Belle Epoque. Los Angeles Countv Museum of

12

Dohme

Negations:

Theory, trans. Jeremy T. Shapiro. Boston and

Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903. London:

York, 1990.

Faces of Degeneration: A European

1848-c. 1918. Cambridge, 1989.

Pick,

Marcuse,

Herbert

London and New York,

Genius, Madness and Art History," Screen, 21: 3

(1980): 57-96.
,

Modern Life and Urban

Van Gogh's Drawings of the Hague 881

"Stark Encounters:

Work

in

Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and

Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American
Painting and Literature. Chicago, 1982.

(September 1983): 330-58.

"Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves: Images of Rural
Labour as Modern Art," Art History, 11: 3
(September 1988): 408-32.
and Fred Orton, Vincent Van Gogh: Artist of His
Time. Oxford and New York, 1978.
Odilon Redon, To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and
Artists, trans. Mira Jacob and Jeanne L. Wasserman. New York, 1986.
Vincent: Bulletin of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van
Gogh, Amsterdam, 1-4(1970-76).

Chapter

Chapter

1970.

Griselda Pollock,

Mary

Cassatt.

London, 1980.

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:

Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York,
1982.

H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: NineteenthCentury American Painters and Their French
Teachers.

The Art

New

York, 1991.

13

"The Grande-Jatte

3," Art History, 6: 3

,

a la

Jacques de Caso and Patricia B. Sanders, Rodin's

Sculpture: A Critical Study of the Spreckels Collec-

Studies, 14: 2 (1989), ed.

at

Susan F.

Rossen.
Albert Boime, "Georges Seurat's

Norma Broude
wood

Un Dimanche

tion.

Henri

Henri Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat: L'Oeuvre

peint, biographic, et catalogue critique. Paris, 1959.

Erich

Franz and Bernd Growe, Georges Seurat:

Chartier, Tahiti

John Gage, "The Technique of Seurat. A Reappraisal," The Art Bulletin, 69: 3 (September 1987):
448-54.
Joan Ungersma Halperin, Felix Feneon: Aesthete and
Anarchist in Fm-de-Siecle Paris. New Haven, CT,
and London, 1988.
Cesar de Hauke, Seurat el son wuvre. 2 vols., Paris,

colonies franchises de la

Polynesie. Paris, 1887.

of the Art

(1987): 2
,

The

Museum

oj Princeton

University, 46:

York:

el

The

al.,

Georges Seurat, 1859 1891

Metropolitan

Museum

of Art;

London: National Gallery, 1991.

Alan Lee, "Seurat and Science," Art History,
(June 1987): 203 26.

10: 2

Monchoisv [Mativet], La Nouvelle Cythere.

Paris,

1888.

Colin Newburv, Tahiti Nut: Change and Survival

French Polynesia, 1767-1945. Honolulu, 1980.

in

Douglas L. Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society. Honolulu, 1974.

Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, "Les Donnees

bretonnantes: la prairie de la representation," Art
History, 3: 3 (September 1980): 314-44.
Griselda Pollock, Avant-Carde Gambits 1888-1893:
Gender and the Colour of Art History. London and

New

York, 1993.

Solomon-Godeau, "Going Native," Art in

America (July 1989): 119-28 and 161.
Anne M. Wagner, "Rodin's Reputation," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt. Baltimore and London, 1991.
Abigail

Chapter

16

Theodor W. Adorno, "Commitment," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato

New

York,

1977; Oxford,

Paul Cezanne: Letters: Revised and Augmented Edition, ed. John Rewald. New York, 1984.
John Elderfield, "The World Whole: Color in
Cezanne," Arts Magazine, 52: 8 (April, 1978):

Lawrence Gowing et al., Cezanne: The Early Years

1859 1872. London: Roval Acadcnn of Arts; Nct

Mary Louise Krumrine, Paul Cezanne: The Bathers.

Basle: Kunstmuseum, 1989; New York and London, 1990,

Marv Tompkins Lewis, Cezanne'* Early

oj

Redon: Biography,
the Noirs of Odilon Redon.
Saint

Imagery.

Berkele) and London, 1989.

jack Lindsay, Cezanne:

17.

Temptation

I lis

life

and Art. London,

1969.

Ideology, and Style in

Chicago and London, 1992.
and Oskar Batschmann, Ferdinand Hodler: Land-

Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and

scapes. Zurich, 1987.

Maurice Mcrlcau-Poim Sense and Xon-Scnsc. E\an/ licit

Theory.

London, 1955; New

York, I960,

by

liigusle

Rodin

ston, IL, 1973,

William Rubin

John David Farmer, Ensor.

Guggenheim Museum,

Sm ml

Rise ni

the

Albert E. Elsen, The Gales

Stanford, 1985.

1961.

Robert Herbert

Critics. New York, 1979.

Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work. NewYork and London, 1987.
Aline Isdebskv-Pritchard, The An of Mikhail Vrubel.
Ann Arbor, MI, 1982.
S. Kaplanova, Vrubel. Leningrad, 1975.
Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years.
Princeton and Guildford, 1985.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning. London,
New York, and Toronto, 1978.
Louise Lippincott, Edvard Munch: Starry Night.
Malibu, 1988.
Leo Lowenthal, "Knut Hamsun," in The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt. New York, 1977; Oxford, 1978.
Stephen Charles McGough, James Ensor's "The
Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889". New York
and London, 1985.

York, 1988

el les

Stephen F. Eisenman, "Allegory and Anarchism in

James Ensor's Vision Preceding Futurism," Record

Drawings. Boston, 1984.

New

San Francisco, 1977.

le

Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914.

London, 1987; New York, 1989.
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (ed.), The Triumph of Art for
the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and

148 53

Cliffs, 1980.

(ed), Seurat in Perspective, Engle-

Cliffs, 1978.

don, 1991.
E. J.

1978.

Grande-Jatte and the Scientific Approach to

History Painting," Histonenmalerei in Europa
(Mainz am Rhein), 1990, pp. 303-33.

Institute of Chicago,

Museum

1984.

Susan Hiller (ed), The Myths of Pnmitivism. Lon-

and Eike Gebhardt.

15

The Art of Paul Gauguin, with essays by Richard

Brettell et al. Washington, D.C., 1988.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies. New York, 1977.
Ruth Butler (ed), Rodin in Perspective. Englewood

100,"

Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, ed.

Maurice Malingue, trans. Henry J. Stenning.
London, (1948); Cleveland and New York, 1949.
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, trans. O. F. Theis. New
York, (n.d.). See also Noa Noa: Gauguin's Tahiti,
ed. and with text by N. Wadley. Oxford, 1985.
Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work. London,

New

York: Solomon R

1976.

Paul Gauguin: 45 l.ettrcs a I incenl, Theo et 7" ' <'"

Gogh, ed. Douglas Cooper Lausanne: Rijksniu-

seum Vincent Van Ciogh,

1983.

York:
J. -P.

(ed.),

Museum

Ol

Cezanne:

I'he

/.,;/,

II

o,k

Modern An, London,

Sartre, Baudelaire.

New

1'iTT

London, 1964; New ^>rk,

I'M,:

Judith

Wechsler

wood

Sill

(ed

Jiffs,

II

I)

l
l

),

Cezanne

Perspective

'75

HIUI.IOCiR \l'in

367