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"The book places this painting in the historical context of Khnopff's times and social milieu and traces the advent of Symbolism as a literary and artistic movement. An analysis of the portrait itself is supported by an array of related paintings, details, and technical photographs. Finally, the author uses Khnopff's portraits as a taking-off point for a broader discussion of Symbolist art."--BOOK JACKET.
This book is the first full-length study of the art and writings of Jean Delville. As a member of the younger generation that emerged during the end of the nineteenth century, he was a dynamic leader of a group of avant-garde artists who sought to establish a new school of Idealist Art in Belgium. He was one of the most talented painters of his generation, producing a vast body of works that, in both scale and technical accomplishment, is unsurpassed amongst his contemporaries. In his extensive writings in contemporary journals and books, he pursued a singular vision for the purpose of art to serve as a vehicle for social change, as well as to inspire individuals to be drawn to a higher, spiritual reality. Delvilles thinking is heavily indebted to the hermetic and esoteric philosophy that was widely popular at the time, and his paintings, poetry and writings reformulate the main tenets of this tradition in a contemporary context. In this regard, his aesthetic and artistic goals are similar, if not identical, to those found in the writings and art of Kandinsky and Mondrian during the early twentieth century.
The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.
The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, but this symbol is different from the way it was used and understood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck defined its essence in an article that appeared on April 24, 1887, in L’Art moderne. He wrote that the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract to the concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from the concrete to the abstract, from “what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and sensed to the evocation of...
With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist a...
The identification of reading with translation has a distinguished literary pedigree. This volume, comprising many individual but conceptually interrelated studies, sets out to multiply perspectives on the concept of translation.
This volume of edited essays is the first one in English to offer a critical overview of the specific features of Belgian modernity from 1880 to 1940 in a multiplicity of disciplines: literature and poetry, politics, music, photography and drama. The first half of the book investigates the roots of twentieth century modernity in Belgian fin de siecle across a variety of genres (novel, poetry and drama), not only within but also beyond the boundaries of Symbolism. The contributors go on to examine the explosion of Belgian culture on the international scene with the rise of the avant-gardes, notably Surrealism: and the contribution made in minor genres, such as the popular novels of Simenon and Jean Ray, and the Tintin comics of Herge.
"In a career spanning over six decades, the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) contributed substantially to the advancement of modern art. At his eponymous gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street, he showed several now legendary artists for the first time outside Europe. The collection--paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Balthus, Bonnard, Chagall, Derain, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Magritte, and the dealer's own father, Henri Matisse, among others--was donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004 by the foundation established by his widow. These extraordinary artworks are presented with informative entries addressing the circumstances of each work's creation and the dealer's relationship to the artist. In the introduction, the story of Pierre Matisse's early struggles in New York is told for the first time and illustrated with previously unpublished archival photographs."--Provided by publisher.
French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as “the painter-writer,” he drew on the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé for his subject matter. And yet he concluded that visual art has nothing to do with literature. Examining this apparent contradiction, The Brush and the Pen transforms the way we understand Redon’s career and brings to life the interaction between writers and artists in fin-de-siècle Paris. Dario Gamboni tracks Redon’s evolution from collaboration with the writers of symbolism and decadence to a defense of the autonomy of the visual arts. He argues that Redon’s conversion was the symptom of a mounting crisis in the relationship between artists and writers, provoked at the turn of the century by the growing power of art criticism that foreshadowed the modernist separation of the arts into intractable fields. In addition to being a distinguished study of this provocative artist, The Brush and the Pen offers a critical reappraisal of the interaction of art, writing, criticism, and government institutions in late nineteenth-century France.