Just as no one today longs for the art of the 1990s, so the Symbolist art of the 1890s never fared well in the public opinion polls of the twentieth century. Such disdain is regrettable, because Symbolism’s reaction against nineteenth-century realism can be the missing piece of the puzzle to any full understanding of modernism. Symbolism’s embrace of literature, poetry, music, and criticism, not to mention the return of myth and narrative to paint, attempted to rise to Wagner’s much-quoted mandate for the “total work of art.” For a moment, Symbolism was art’s international answer to the rising tide of European nationalism and politicization, and it produced some of modernism’s most unusual and still unexamined works of art.
The new coffee-table-size book on Symbolism by Rodolphe Rapetti, the head curator and deputy director of the Musées de France, is therefore a welcome addition to our understanding of this diffuse, forgotten, even maligned period of art. Well-reproduced illustrations, matched to informative introductions, trace the beginnings of Symbolism through the Pre-Raphaelites, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Böcklin. Additional chapters explore the thematic manifestations of the movement (“Strange Beauty,” “Satanism and Mockery”), related artistic developments (Cloisonnism, Decadence, Neo-Impressionism, Synesthesia), the artists and writers of the period (Paul Gauguin, James Ensor, J. K. Huysmans, Odilon Redon, Stéphane Mallarmé, Félix Fénéon, the brothers Goncourt), and the cultural landscape of the fin de siècle (“Hysteria: A New Expressive Repertoire,” “The Subconscious and New Expressions of Ego,” “Chaos and Chance”). A selected bibliography, broken down by theme, region, and artist, makes this book an indispensable resource.
Most enlightening, however, is Rapetti’s insight into the twentieth century’s hostility towards this late nineteenth-century phenomenon. Rapetti begins his conclusion with an epigraph by Henri Mazel: “Poetries are like languages and religions—they never die a natural death, you have to kill them.” Dismissed by Communism and misappropriated by National Socialism, “Symbolism appeared suspiciously passé from the politico-aesthetic perspective that many historians brought to bear on the late nineteenth-century when they automatically associated the artistic avant-garde with social progress.” Meanwhile: “Valid links could be established between Symbolism’s pan-aestheticism and the far-right philosophy that, right from the early twentieth century, would turn its back on morality in the name of a state conceived as aesthetic absolute, D’Annunzio’s drift from neo-paganism into fascism being one of the most significant examples of this connection.” To this we might add the Nazi followers of the poet Stefan George, who founded the Symbolist journal Blätter für die Kunst in 1891.
Rapetti’s language, translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre, does not rise to the magisterial levels of Robert Goldwater’s Symbolism of 1979. Goldwater’s study was to Symbolist criticism what Huysmans’s A Rebours was to Symbolist literature: a total work of art. But for anyone who feels they could benefit from a Symbolist guidebook to reading Goldwater’s Symbolism, Rapetti’s Symbolism is it.