Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2014
Realism to Surrealism: European art and culture 1848-1936
Symbolism: myth and melancholy
Dr Georgina Cole
5/6 March 2014
Lecture summary:
This lecture examines Symbolism, the international avant-garde movement that spread across
Europe and America from the 1880s to 1910s. Reacting against the dominance of Realism and
Impressionism, the Symbolists rejected narrative and naturalism in favour of the subjective
representation of an idea or an emotion. The talk sketches out some of the characteristics of
Symbolism as it developed in France in the work of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Puvis de
Chavannes, looking briefly at some of the Symbolists working outside France, such as Khnopff,
Böcklin and Munch.
Slide list:
1. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
2. Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, 1897-98, oil on
canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
3. Frans Van Mieris, Boy Blowing Bubbles, 1663, oil on panel, Mauritshuis, The Hague
4. Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, 1892, Lithograph, Art
Institute of Chicago
5. Edouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay
6. Eugène Delatre, Portrait of J K Huysmans, 1894, etching and aquatint
7. J K Huysmans, À Rebours [Against nature or Against the grain] (Paris: Charpentier, 1884)
8. Paul Gaugin, Portrait de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891, Etching, drypoint and engraving
9. Odilon Redon, illustration for Mallarme’s A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, 1897,
lithograph, Bibliotheque nationale de France
10. Berthe Morisot, Woman knitting, c.1883, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
11. Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
12. Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
*13. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
14. Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele, 1895, oil on canvas, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris
15. Gustave Moreau, Salome dancing before Herod, 1874-76, oil on canvas, Armand Hammer
16. Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876, watercolour, 72 x 105 cm, Musée du Louvre
17. Odilon Redon, Araignée, 1887, lithograph, British Museum
18. Odilon Redon, Mystery, c. 1910, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
*19. Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, plate one from To Edgar
Poe, 1892, Lithograph, Art Institute of Chicago
20. Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890; Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
21. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1891, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art
*22. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum
of Art
23. Puvis de Chavannes, The Dream, 1883, oil on canvas, 102 x 82 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
*24. Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself, 1891, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
25. Arnold Böcklin, The Island of the Dead, 1880 (third version), oil on wood, Alte Nationalgalerie,
Berlin
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Slide list continued
26. Edvard Munch, Self portrait with skeleton arm, 1895, lithograph, Munch Museet, Oslo
27. Edvard Munch, Dance of life, 1899, oil on canvas, Munch Museet, Oslo
28. Edvard Munch, The Vampire, 1895, 91 x 109 cm, Munch Museum, Oslo
*29. Edvard Munch, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), 1893, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine
Arts Boston
Reference:
Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolits art (New York: Praeger, 1972)
Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (Berekely: University of California Press, 1989)
William H. Robinson, “Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘Summer’ and the Symbolist Avant-Garde”, Bulletin of
the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 1 (1991): 2-27
Jennifer L. Shaw, “Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of
France”, Art Bulletin 79, no. 4 (1997): 586-610
Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “The balloon as metaphor in the early works of Odilon Redon”, Artibus
et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 195-206
Images:
Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c.1880, oil on wood, 85.5 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, moves toward infinity, plate one from To Edgar Poe, 1892, Lithograph, Art
Institute of Chicago
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself, 1891, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Edvard Munch, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), 1893, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston