This work describes the concepts of Symbolist art used for this study and presents a sequence of the works and writings of five artists - Washington Allston at the beginning of the century, John La Farge and William Rimmer at mid-century, and George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder at the end. These five were selected after a lengthy survey of 19th and early 20th century American art. Although a broader selection might have been made, these particular artists successfully developed, at one point or another in their careers and with more or less clearly defined objectives, highly articulate visual art in the Symbolist mode, as well as writings about their Symbolist intentions (without using the term itself). In many instances, their words, as well as their art, recall those of artists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, although predating the Europeans by several decades. The Symbolist works of these five Americans are analyzed along side their writings about art, as well as writings by the few major critics who understood their aesthetic intentions at the time, such as James Jackson Jarves, Charles de Kay, and Roger Fry. Not a survey, but rather a highly selective and suggestive

The Symbolist art movement of the late 19th century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from conflicting definitions. In this book, Michelle Facos offers a comprehensive description of this challenging subject.

Presents the development and the aesthetic theories of the symbolist movement in art and literature

The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period—the problem of subjectivity in particular. In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop presents a groundbreaking reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century associated with the Symbolist movement. For Pop, “symbolist” denotes an art that is self-conscious about its modes of making meaning, and he argues that these symbolist practices, which sought to provide more direct access to viewers and readers by constant revision of its material means of meaning-making (brushstrokes on a canvas, words on a page), are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. The symbolists saw art not as a social revolution, but as a revolution in sense and how to conceptualize the world. The concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, who were dissatisfied with the strict empiricism dominant in their disciplines, which made shared knowledge seem unattainable. The problem of subjectivity in particular, of what in one's experience can and cannot be shared, was crucial to the possibility of collaboration within science and to the communication of artistic innovation. Pop offers close readings of the literary and visual practices of Manet and Mallarmé, of drawings by Ernst Mach, William James and Wittgenstein, of experiments with color by Bracquemond and Van Gogh, and of the philosophical systems of Frege and Russell—filling in a startling but coherent picture of the symbolist heritage of modernity and its consequences.

Symbolic art - Romanticism and Symbolism - Symbolist movement in France - Gustave Moreau - Redon and Bresdin - Puvis de Chavannes and Carriere - Gauguin, Pont-Aven and the Nabis - Edvard Munch.

First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism, and served to introduce the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Symons' interest in writers such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature; but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for over 50 years, and includes the essays that Symons added to the expanded edition of his book in 1919. It also includes an introduction, chronology and notes, together with appendices presenting the full text of Symons' essay The Decadent Movement in Literature' and a selection of his translations of poems by Verlaine and Mallarmé.

Scottish painter John Duncan (18661945) established his early style with paintings based on Arthurian legend; then he applied himself to Celtic myths and legends to create a series of paintings that are unique among early-twentieth-century Scottish art. While the Symbolist movement was probably his most important source of inspiration, his paintings were imbued with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and he spent much of his life experimenting with various compositions of tempera in order to obtain the precise density of color and smoothness of surface that characterize his work. In this book, a revised edition of the first full-color monograph ever published on Duncan (Pomegranate, 1994), author John Kemplay outlines Duncan's technical, intellectual, and spiritual development as an artist and his close association with Patrick Geddes, the botanist and socialist who was devoted to a renaissance of Celtic art and who was instrumental in Duncan's commitment to the same. Duncan eventually created a unique body of work rich in Celtic legend and ornament and steeped in the tradition of the Byzantine style. He came to have a vital influence on the art of Scotland and left behind an unparalleled legacy of painting. Kemplay used as his principal resource for this book a series of Duncan's notebooks donated to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh by the artist's daughter, as well as letters written by Duncan, Geddes, and others, also in the collection of the Library. He also accessed materials from the Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, the University of St. Andrews, and the University of Strathclyde.

How does museum location shape the interpretation of an art object by critics, curators, art historians, and others? To what extent is the value of a work of art determined by its location? Providing a close examination of individual works of American art in relation to gallery and museum location, this anthology presents case studies of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and other media that explore these questions about the relationship between location and the prescribed meaning of art. It takes an alternate perspective in that it provides in-depth analysis of works of art that are less well known than the usual American art suspects, and in locations outside of art museums in major urban cultural centers. By doing so, the contributors to this volume reveal that such a shift in focus yields an expanded and more complex understanding of American art. Close examinations are given to works located in small and mid-sized art museums throughout the United States, museums that generally do not benefit from the resources afforded by more powerful cultural establishments such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Works of art located at institutions other than art museums are also examined. Although the book primarily focuses on paintings, other media created from the Colonial Period to the present are considered, including material culture and craft. The volume takes an inclusive approach to American art by featuring works created by a diverse group of artists from canonical to lesser-known ones, and provides new insights by highlighting the regional and the local.

For the artists, writers and musicians of the Symbolist Movement of the turn of the century, true art, an extension of one’s “soul” or unconscious, was often regarded as dark, mysterious and unreliable – the world of Dionysus. Such artists, writers and musicians searched for symbols to express or suggest psychological pathologies manifested in exaltation, madness, and other extreme mental states. Mental Illness in Symbolism inquires into the mysteries of the Symbolist psyche through essays on works of art, literature and music created as part or extension of the Symbolist Movement.