Myths and Mysteries. Symbolism and Swiss Artists (extrait)

Myths and Mysteries Symbolism and Swiss Artists Kunstmuseum Bern 26 April–18 August 2013 Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Museo d’Arte, Lugano 15 September 2013–12 January 2014

Cover: Carlos Schwabe, The Wave, 1907, (cat. 36), detail Catalogue produced by Somogy éditions d’art Editorial coordination: Laurence Verrand, assisted by Astrid Bargeton and Céline Guichard Design: Nelly Riedel Translation from French into English: Barbara Mellor Translation from German into English: Steven Linberg Translation from Italian into English: David Stanton Copy-editing: Bernard Wooding Production: Michel Brousset, Béatrice Bourgerie and Mélanie Le Gros © Somogy éditions d’art, Paris, France, 2013 © Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, 2013 © Museo Cantonale d’Arte et Museo d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, 2013 For works by Cuno Amiet (fig. 11, cat. 198, 218, 219): © Peter Thalmann, CH-3360 Herzogenbuchsee For work by Edvard Munch (cat. 35): © 2013, ProLitteris, Zürich For work by Richard Riemerschmid (cat. 49): © 2013, ProLitteris, Zürich ISBN: 978-2-7572-0533-4 Dépôt légal: April 2013 Printed in Italy

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Exhibition Curator Valentina Anker Assistant Carole Perret Kunstmuseum Bern Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern Matthias Frehner Finance and administration Andrea Zimmermann Press and publicity Ruth Gilgen Hamisultane, Brigit Bucher, Aya Christen, Rosmarie Joss, Christian Schnellmann, Marie Louise Suter Shop Magali Cirasa Cultural outreach Magdalena Schindler, Beat Schüpbach, Anina Büschlen Registrar Ethel Mathier With the collaboration of Monika Schäfer Restoration Nathalie Bäschlin, † Béatrice Ilg, Dorothea Spitza, Myriam Weber Technical and installation René Wochner, Thomas Bieri, Jan Bukacek, Mike Carol, Andres Meschter, Martin Schnidrig, Simon Stalder, Roman Studer, Volker Thies, Peter Töni, Wilfried von Gunten Exhibition design Ulrich Zickler

Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Museo d’Arte, Lugano Director of the Museo Cantonale d’Arte and the Museo d’Arte, Lugano Marco Franciolli Coordination Cristina Sonderegger With the collaboration of Francesca Bernasconi and Maria Pasini Finance and administration Mara Massera, Floriano Rosa, Marco Schmid, Simone Solcà Press and publicity Benedetta Giorgi Pompilio, Anna Poletti, Vanessa Schäfer Cultural outreach Alice Croci Torti, Benedetta Giorgi Pompilio, Isabella Lenzo Massei, Viviana Rossi Registrar Bettina della Casa, Marie Kraitr Restoration Franca Franciolli, Sara De Bernardis, Graziella Chiesa Technical and installation Luca Bottinelli, Mario Cattalani, Fabio Frischknecht, Graziano Gianocca, Alessandro Lucchini, Luigi Molteni, Salvatore Oliverio, Danilo Pellegrini Visual communication CCRZ

Catalogue Conception and editing Valentina Anker Editorial assistant Carole Perret Publishers Kunstmuseum Bern Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Museo d’Arte, Lugano Contributions Valentina Anker, Geneva Michel Draguet, Brussels Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Paris Alexander Klee, Vienna Annie-Paule Quinsac, New York Pierre Rosenberg, Paris Introductory texts and illustration sections Valentina Anker, Geneva Marco Franciolli, Lugano Matthias Frehner, Bern Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Paris Sharon Latchaw Hirsh, Rosemont, Illinois Albert Levy, Paris Laurence Madeline, Geneva Cristina Sonderegger, Lugano Beat Stutzer, Chur Jacques Tchamkerten, Geneva Readers Valentina Anker, Carole Perret

Patrons Honorary patrons of the exhibition Alain Berset, Federal Councillor, Federal Department of Home Affairs (FDHA) Hans-J체rg K채ser, Member of the Cantonal Government, Head of the Cantonal Police and Military Department Alexander Tsch채pp채t, Mayor of the City of Bern

Acknowledgments Partners

With extraordinary support from the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva We would also like to thank all those who have, in various ways, helped us in our research and in the preparation of the catalogue and the exhibition: Evelyne and Maurice Aeschimann, Vania Aillon, Raphaël Anker, Diane d’Arcis, Monique Barbier-Mueller, Gabriella Belli, Editions Benteli, Virginia Bertone, Berhard Böschenstein, Margot Brandlhuber, Christian Bührle, Lara Calderari, Jean Clair, Marc-Antoine Claivaz, Guy Cogeval, Nicolas Crispini, Etienne Dumont, Jessica Ferin, Frédérique Flournoy, Liliane Flournoy, Hubertus von Gemmingen, Claude Ghez, Pat Goldblat, Emanuela de Gresti, Robert Hirt, Danielle Hodel, Irina Ivanova, Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Eberhard W. Kornfeld, Karin Koschkar, Hélène Levy, Pierre-André Lienhard, Dominique Lobstein, Victor Lopes, Angelo Lui, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Laurence Mattet, Cornelia Mechler, Thérèse and Jean-Paul Morhange, Laura Pedrioli, Philippe Perrot, Ghislaine Picker, Giovanna Rivara, Till Schaap, Letizia Scherini, Diana Segantini, Jean Starobinski, Urs Staub, Christine Stauffer, Alain Tarica, Richard Thomson, Jacqueline Wolf.

With grateful thanks to the memory of the great collector Mme Vera Neumann, who loaned magnificent works for these exhibitions.

We are also grateful to the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft (SIK-ISEA), to its Director, Roger Fayet, and especially to Paul Müller, Monika Brunner and Milena Oehy, as well as to Viola Radlach, Barbara Nägeli and Alice Jaeckel.

We offer our warm thanks to éditions Somogy, for their invaluable rigour and expertise, notably to their Director, Nicolas Neumann, and to their principal collaborators, Véronique Balmelle, Marc-Alexis Baranes, Michel Brousset, Florence Jakubowicz, Stéphanie Méséguer, Nelly Riedel, Laurence Verrand and Bernard Wooding, as well as to all the translators involved in this project.

Lenders We offer our grateful thanks to all those whose generous support has made this exhibition possible, and notably to all those lenders who wish to remain anonymous, and to those in charge of the following collections: Aarau, Aargauer Kunsthaus: Madeleine Schuppli, Director Ascona, Fondazione Monte Verità: Lorenzo Sonognini, Director; Andreas Schwab Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, Director; Nina Zimmer, Curator Bellinzone, Archivio di Stato del Cantone Ticino: Andrea Ghiringhelli, Director Bellinzone, Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri: Anna Lisa Galizia, Curator Bern, E. W. K. Collection Bern, Swiss Confederation, Bundesant für Kultur: Andreas Münch, Director of the Art Collections of the Confederation Bern, Gottfried Keller Foundation: Andreas Münch, Secretary Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern: Matthias Frehner, Director; Claudine Metzger, Keeper of the Graphic Collection Bern, Schweizerische Theatersammlung: Heidy Greco-Kaufmann, Director Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique: Michel Draguet, Director; Dominique Marechal, Curator Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum: László Baán, Director

Christoph Blocher Collection Chur, Bündner Kunstmuseum: Stephan Kunz, Director Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Archiv: Stephan Widmer Geneva, Association des Amis du Petit Palais Geneva, BGE, Centre d’Iconographie Genevoise: Nicolas Schätti, Curator Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève: Alexandre Vanautgaerden, Director Geneva, Collection of the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Genève: Jean-Yves Marin, Director; Laurence Madeline, Head Curator of Fine Arts; Christian Rümelin, Curator of Cabinet d’arts graphiques Geneva, Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Bibliothèque: Eva Aroutunian, Director; Jacques Tchamkerten, Bibliothèque Chief Librarian Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Collection Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts: Bernard Fibicher, Director; Catherine Lepdor, Curator Locarno, Fondazione Filippo Franzoni: † Pia Balli; Riccardo Carazzetti Locarno, Servizi Culturali: Riccardo Carazzetti

Lugano, Collezione Città di Lugano: Marco Franciolli, Director Lugano, Museo Cantonale d’Arte: Marco Franciolli, Director Luzern, Kunstmuseum Luzern: Fanni Fetzer, Director Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon: Sylvie Ramond, Director Neumann Collection Olten, Kunstmuseum Olten: Dorothee Messmer, Director Private Collection, Courtesy Lidia Zaza-Sciolli Art Advisory Saint Moritz, Segantini Museum: Beat Stutzer, Curator Sion, Musée d’Art du Valais: Pascal Ruedin, Director Solothurn, Kunstmuseum Solothurn: Christoph Vögele, Director Vevey, Musée Jenisch: Julie Enckell Julliard, Acting Director Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur: Dieter Schwarz, Director Zürich, Kunsthaus Zürich: Christoph Becker, Director; Philippe Büttner, Curator Zürich, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, MfGZ, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK: Christian Brändle, Director; Sabine Flaschberger, Curator

The Authors Valentina Anker, a specialist on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Swiss art, has taught at the University of Geneva.

She has curated numerous exhibitions and is the author of the catalogues raisonnés of the works of Alexandre Calame (1987, 2000), together with several books, including Le Symbolisme suisse. Destins croisés avec l’art européen (2009).

Michel Draguet, professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, director of the Centre de Recherche René Magritte and director of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, is the author of several books on Symbolism, including Le Symbolisme en Belgique (2004, 2010).

Albert Levy, architect, semiotician, doctor of urban studies and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, is the author of Les Machines à faire-croire.

I. Formes et fonctionnements de la spatialité religieuse (2003).

Laurence Madeline has been a curator at the Musée Picasso and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The author of numerous works and curator of a James Ensor exhibition (2009), she is currently head curator of fine arts at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève.

Marco Franciolli, Director-Curator of the Museo Cantonale d’Arte and the Museo d’Arte de Lugano, has curated numerous exhibitions and written numerous publications devoted to modern and contemporary art and photography.

Annie-Paule Quinsac, professeur emeritus at the University of South Carolina, specialist on the art of late nineteenthcentury Italy, notably Divisionism and the Scapigliatura, is the author of the catalogues raisonnés of the works of Giovanni Segantini and Daniele Ranzoni.

Matthias Frehner Matthias Frehner has been curator of the Oskar Reinhart ‘Am Römerholz’ Collection in Winterthur, secretary of the Gottfried Keller Foundation and arts editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

He is currently director of the Kunstmuseum Bern.

Pierre Rosenberg, of the Académie Française, Honorary President-Director of the Musée du Louvre, is a specialist in French and Italian painting and drawing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently working on the catalogue raisonné of paintings by Nicolas Poussin.

Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, a specialist on Symbolism, devoted his thesis to Carlos Schwabe. The author of several essays on the relationship between the arts, he curated the touring exhibition ‘Les Peintres de l’âme, le symbolisme idéaliste en France’ (1999).

Cristina Sonderegger, curator of the Museo d’Arte in Lugano, has curated exhibitions and published catalogues devoted to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Swiss art, particularly that of the canton of Ticino.

Alexander Klee is curator of works from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century at the Belvedere, Vienna. He is the author of Adolf Hölzel und die Wiener Secession (2006), and curated the Hans Makart exhibition in 2011.

Beat Stutzer, curator of the Segantini Museum in Saint Moritz, has also been director of the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur (1982–2011). He is the author of numerous publications and exhibitions devoted to Giovanni Segantini, and of Augusto Giacometti, Leben und Werk (1991; with Lutz Windhöfel).

Sharon Latchaw Hirsh, president of Rosemont College, Pennsylvania, is a specialist on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, in particular the work of Ferdinand Hodler. She is an exhibition curator and the author of several books, including Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (2004).

Jacques Tchamkerten has published a range of works on early twentieth-century Swiss and French music, including monographs devoted to Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Ernest Bloch and Arthur Honegger. He is chief librarian of the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire de Musique de Genève.

Word of welcome Night is one of the central themes of the exhibition ‘Myths and Mysteries.

Symbolism and Swiss Artists’ – night that spreads the cloak of oblivion over us; but also night that is inhabited by strange creatures never encountered during the day. Dark passions abound in the sunless hours of the Symbolists; fauns lurk in the woods, unicorns and centaurs roam through eerie dream landscapes, chimeras cross the species divide, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. The masterpieces by Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler, both entitled Night, which form the nucleus of works on this theme, show just how different views of night can be.

Symbolism is a melting pot of the principal 20th-century art movements, opening the way for encompassingSurrealism, Expressionism and abstract art.

The exhibition ‘Myths and Secrets. Symbolism and Swiss Artists’, comprising fifteen thematic sections in all, illustrates the diversity of the topics covered by Symbolism.

In addition to night, the exhibition focuses on a variety of different subjects, such as nature, time, power, death, angels and paradise. A total of 200 works are on display, demonstrating the breadth of this movement.

Such a wide-ranging exhibition would have been inconceivable without the collaboration of various national and international museums. Foreign museums such as the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique and the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, as well as national and international collectors, and numerous Swiss institutions and museums have all loaned works from their collections.

Credit Suisse has been involved in cultural and sports sponsorship for more than thirty years, and is a partner of the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Museo d’Arte Lugano. This collaboration with art museums is truly inspirational.

Time and again, it leads to exhibitions whose impact goes beyond national boundaries.

This applies to the theme of Symbolism in particular, to which the Kunstmuseum Bern regularly devotes exhibitions. This exhibition is the first to directly compare Swiss Symbolism with international Symbolism, and presents this artistic movement in all its astonishing breadth. We are therefore especially delighted to support this exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Museo d’Arte Lugano and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte. Credit Suisse would like to thank all the people and institutions involved, whose support has made it possible to explore the role of Swiss Symbolism in a wider, European context.

Foreword Symbolism was not so much a style as an approach in which the artist was given the role of a priest at an oracle. This international movement, which emerged in around 1890, signalled a rejection of the profane reality that characterised the materialistic everyday life of mass society in an industrial age marked by technology, urbanisation and anonymity.

The Symbolists penetrated beneath the cold surface of the rational world, behind which lay real life – that of the mysterious and the wonderful, as well as the uncanny and the sensual. Writers, composers and artists made it possible to experience all that was lost, secret, beautiful and true.

Refugees from civilization and the present revived the mysteries of religions, mythologies and literature as syncretistic sites of desire. These spheres of the merely intuitable and imaginable generated poetry, painting and music that continued the Romantic and Impressionist dissolution of form through the suggestive evocation of moods.

Claude Debussy, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon all explored this avenue. However, there were also artists who ventured into the realm of the visionary by employing strategies from realism and the depth of field of photography. One example is Ferdinand Hodler’s painting Night of 1889–90, which when first shown, in Geneva in February 1891, was deemed immoral and was removed from the Musée Rath just days before the exhibition’s official opening. As Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet had done previously in analogous situations, Hodler exhibited this scandalous painting at his own expense in a building nearby. After just three weeks he had made 1,330 francs profit, which enabled him to travel to Paris with Night and present it to the jury for the Salon du Champ-de-Mars. Night was one of the 243 works ultimately selected from among 2,070 submissions. The president of the jury, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, was particularly taken with the work, awarding Hodler membership in the Société Nationale des Artistes Français and its silver medal.

In this picture, Hodler’s first major work, sleeping at night was not a renewal of life energy to be experienced as positive, but the trigger of a life-threatening vision of horror.

The central figure, the artist’s alter ego, is, as in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, pursued in his sleep by an uncanny antagonist and finds himself in a mortal

struggle, like Laocoön wrestling with the snakes. In Night, Hodler summed up the existential angst of fin-de-siècle decadence in an inevitable confrontation with the ‘other side’ of the ideal bourgeois world. From one moment to the next, Hodler had become a famous, and infamous, artist and a focus of attention for one of the most colourful figures of Symbolism – Joséphin Péladan – who founded the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique et Esthétique du Temple et du Graal in 1892 and from 1892 to 1897 organised the Salon de la Rose+Croix at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. The work of other Swiss artists – Albert Trachsel, Eugène Grasset, Rodo de Niederhäusern, Carlos Schwabe and Félix Vallotton – was presented alongside that of Hodler.

Because there was no art academy in Switzerland until well into the twentieth century, and Swiss artists could find recognition in their own country only after achieving success abroad, they often developed greater interest in the avantgarde while living in the large centres of European art.

Symbolism thus appealed strongly to the general character of a whole generation of Swiss artists and their feeling of struggling in isolation. They sought neither virtuosic mastery of a pre-existing style nor reinterpretation of traditional subject matter, but rather the creation of visionary dream images. The Swiss, who like Hodler drew their artistic originality to a large degree from their own lives and their roots in their origins, produced new, autonomous motifs and images. For example, Hodler’s Night is significant less as an illustration of Guy de Maupassant’s novella ‘Le Horla’ than as a powerful image of the fear of death that afflicted the artist constantly throughout most of his life.

The man haunted by a nightmare is unmistakably a self-portrait.

This existential component is a defining feature that is also found in the work of other Swiss Symbolists such as Giovanni Segantini, and of course earlier in the work of Henry Fuseli and Arnold Böcklin, the great trailblazers for the artistic revival in around 1890. And it also demonstrates that in their search for the hidden, timeless laws that determined their individual lives, Swiss Symbolists were also able to interpret the landscapes of their homeland, with their mountains and lakes, in brilliant, synthesising, expressionistic ways.

The exhibition ‘Myths and Mysteries. Symbolism and Swiss Artists’ demonstrates that Symbolism was the first international

art movement in which Swiss artists played a leading role as innovators, both in their home country and in the artistic centres of Germany, France and Italy. Following the survey of an era ‘1900: Symbolismus und Jugendstil in der Schweizer Malerei’ (Kunstmuseum Solothurn, the Museo Villa dei Cederi in Bellinzona and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Sion in 2000), Valentina Anker’s epochal work of 2009, Der Schweizer Symbolismus, was the first to systematically raise the question of its significance in an international context. This perspective is also crucial to the present exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano. Symbolism is discussed as a current of innovation that passed through all areas of art.

For that reason, dance and music play an important role in our thematically organised show, alongside paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, architecture and photography.

It was a stroke of good luck that the partnership between the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano and the Kunstmuseum Bern was secure from the outset. With respect to Symbolism, the collecting emphases of the two museums complement each other perfectly. Both institutions are delighted that Valentina Anker agreed to curate this project. In contrast to her magnum opus of 2009, for our exhibition she has interwoven the achievements of Swiss artists with international developments. Our exhibition and its publication will thus transform scholarship on international Symbolism by putting the achievements of Swiss artists closer to the creative heart of the movement, unlike the pioneering exhibition ‘Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe’ in Montreal in 1995. We wish to thank Valentina Anker and her assistant very sincerely for their great efforts. Not only has Valentina Anker succeeded in fundamentally expanding research on Symbolism, but she has also managed, with admirable perseverance, to illustrate her questions with a wonderful string of pearls composed of unique masterpieces. It includes works that have not been exhibited for many years, as well as a few key new discoveries.

Our profound gratitude thus goes out to the lenders, whose support for this project has been very positive from the outset.

The Kunstmuseum Bern was able to organise this ambitious exhibition thanks to the support of its longstanding partner, Credit Suisse. Credit Suisse, which has made art part of the expression of its corporate identity, has supported our work on this exhibition in fundamental ways, and our foundation’s board and the museum management would like to express their deep gratitude. The second important partner in this exhibition venture is the Burgergemeinde Bern.

We offer sincerest thanks to the Burgergemeinde and its president, Rolf Dähler. The Kunstmuseum Bern was able

to obtain additional financial support from the Lotteriefonds des Kantons Bern. Again, the foundation’s board and the museum management express their deepest thanks to the Executive Council of the canton of Bern. This very elaborate project was also supported by the Stiftung Vinetum, to whose executive board we are profoundly grateful.

This exhibition, which enables the Swiss public to see an art rooted in German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland within the international context of its time, is fortunate to be placed under the patronage of the Swiss Minister of Culture, Executive Councillor Alain Berset. We also wish to thank Bern Executive Councillor Hans-Jürg Käser and the mayor of Bern, Alexander Tschäppät, for their co-patronage.

On behalf of the entire museum staff, I would like to thank Marco Franciolli and his curator Cristina Sonderegger of the Museu Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano for their work, which was outstanding and amicable in every respect. We wish to thank everyone in Bern who worked on the exhibition with such great dedication. Our exhibition designer, Ulrich Zickler, produced a design that is as evocative as it is intelligent, for which I congratulate and thank him. Profound thanks are also due to the registrar, Ethel Mathier, and the head of exhibitions, René Wochner, and his team: Thomas Bieri, Jan Bukacek, Mike Carol, Andres Meschter, Martin Schnidrig, Simon Stalder, Roman Studer, Volker Thies, Peter Töni and Wilfried von Gunten. I wish to thank Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler and Daniel Spanke for their critical reading of the German version of the catalogue.

I also wish to thank our conservators: Nathalie Bäschlin, Katja Friese, Dorothea Spitza and Miriam Weber. In addition, I extend my warmest thanks to Ruth Gilgen Hamisultane, Brigit Bucher, Anina Büschlen, Aya Christen, Rosmarie Joss, Magdalena Schindler, Christian Schnellmann, Beat Schüpbach and Marie-Louise Suter for their brilliant handling of all aspects of communications and education.

The exhibition is titled ‘Myths and Mysteries’ because the Symbolists wanted to demonstrate that in a disenchanted everyday world no society could survive without ideal values, without dreams and promises of happiness. In that sense, as well as providing an opportunity to appreciate great classics of fin-de-siècle art, the exhibition also addresses existential questions of our own era. The genre of fantasy, which is infinitely fashionable and widespread today, is nothing other than a late offspring of Symbolism. matthias frehner Director Kunstmuseum Bern

Foreword The Symbolist movement has fascinated both scholars and the public. If anything, interest in it has been on the increase recently. The reason for this probably lies in the great capacity for renewal that it contributed to the development of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, but the fascination with the ideas and aesthetic principles underpinning Symbolism can also be explained by the current Zeitgeist. The profound changes characterising the late nineteenth century – the period when this major artistic movement emerged – bore the signs of a destabilising yet epoch-making transformation that was, in some respects, similar to what is happening today. A feeling of uncertainty arose, causing writers, artists and musicians to express a deep distrust of science and the power of reason.

Albeit over a considerable period of time, Symbolism spread to areas that were culturally very different from each other. Thus, although the movement was mainly literary in character in the French-speaking area, it rapidly achieved international success, expanding to the German- and English-speaking areas, as well as Italy, the Slavic countries and Scandinavia, involving all the arts – literature, poetry, music, painting, sculpture and the decorative arts – in a current of thought that extended to the whole of Europe.

The typical characteristics of Symbolist works may be identified with a strong intellectual component, often accompanied by elaborate and complex forms of spirituality; but, generally speaking, what dominates is a taste for everything that is indefinite, mysterious and dreamlike.

The contribution of the Swiss artists was of fundamental importance in the figurative arts: suffice it to mention Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler, who produced great masterpieces that have become icons of Symbolist painting. South of the Alps, the Museo Cantonale d’Arte and the Museo d’Arte, both in Lugano, have pooled their resources to stage a remarkable exhibition devoted to Symbolism, entitled ‘Myths and Mysteries.

Symbolism and Swiss Artists’.

With the collaboration of the Kunstmuseum in Bern and thanks to the generosity of the other leading Swiss museums, it has been possible to mount a wide-ranging exhibition – devised and curated by Valentina Anker, an expert on Symbolism – that sets out to explore the nature of the contribution made by Swiss artists to the Symbolist aesthetic.

Arranged into thematic sections, the exhibition highlights the wide variety of styles characterising Symbolist art, with its extremely complex intellectual and artistic components, which still today make it difficult to give an overarching definition of the movement. In 2000 an exhibition curated by Christoph Vögele, Matteo Bianchi and Pascal Ruedin, significantly entitled ‘1900. Simbolismo e Liberty nella pittura svizzera’ (1900. Symbolism and Art Nouveau in Swiss Painting), investigated the character of Swiss art at the turn of the century, drawing on works from the collections of the museums in Solothurn, Bellinzona and Sion. It was thus able to provide an interesting comparison between artists from the different cultural areas of Switzerland, very effectively drawing attention to the tendency of many artists to idealise the landscapes of the Alps and lakes in paintings.

These were often characterised by stylised forms and the heightening of both light effects in natural phenomena and the spiritual significance of landscape.

The ‘Myths and Mysteries’ exhibition now offers an opportunity for further analysis of the movement, allowing visitors to compare the works of a number of particularly important artists influenced by Symbolism south of the Alps with those of artists in the rest of Switzerland and Europe. Edoardo Berta, Pietro Chiesa, Adolfo Feragutti Visconti, Filippo Franzoni, Luigi Rossi and Augusto Sartori are outstanding artists whose works are well represented in public collections in the Ticino canton and who, with their own specific qualities, compare very favourably with the leading exponents of Symbolism in other parts of Switzerland. Once again, it is evident that despite their Italian artistic and cultural background – this

generation of artists often trained at the Accademia di Brera in Milan – they then successfully added stylistic elements from north of the Alps. In the case of Feragutti Visconti, for example, his contacts with the Munich Secession and journeys to distant places were decisive, as the scholar Giovanna Ginex has pointed out in a recent monograph devoted to the artist.

Regarding Luigi Rossi, his contacts with the Swiss artistic associations and institutions were important; for Filippo Franzoni’s painting, the artist’s relations with Hodler were particularly significant.

With this exhibition, the Museo Cantonale d’Arte and the Museo d’Arte reassert their commitment to the study of the art of the Ticino canton, focusing attention on its most outstanding exponents, through critical writings making comparisons with other artistic milieux, both in Switzerland and in the rest of Europe. This is an approach that has highlighted the superimposition and blending of stylistic elements from different cultural areas, as may be seen in an exemplary manner in the works of the Ticinese artists included in this exhibition.

The exhibition ‘Myths and Mysteries. Symbolism and Swiss Artists’ is curated by Valentina Anker, who also edited the accompanying catalogue. She is the author of a seminal work on Swiss Symbolism published in 2009, Le symbolisme suisse. Destins croisés avec l’art européen.

Valentina Anker has accepted our invitation and, with great dedication and competence, has written a remarkable series of texts analysing the key works in this exhibition. I would like to express to her my deepest gratitude for having completed – together with her assistant Carole Perret, whom I also wish to thank – such a complex and difficult undertaking.

The collaboration of the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the support of its director, Matthias Frehner, were crucial to the success of the project to hold an exhibition on Symbolism in Lugano. The sharing of this project with one of Switzerland’s leading museums, which, in its

collections, has works of fundamental importance in the history of Symbolist art, was a sine qua non for the staging of the exhibition in Lugano. I would like, therefore, to express my sincerest thanks to Matthias Frehner for his generous collaboration and all the members of the staff at the Kunstmuseum who have contributed to the various stages in the realisation of this project.

Thanks are also due to the museums in Switzerland and the rest of Europe that, by agreeing to lend their Symbolist masterpieces – in some cases, in large numbers – enabled this exhibition to be as complete as possible. I am also truly grateful to all the private owners who have very generously consented to lend their valuable works.

The organisational coordination for the two venues in Lugano has been carried out very professionally and efficiently by Cristina Sonderegger, curator of the Museo d’Arte. My deepest thanks are also due to her and all the other members of the team who have helped to prepare the exhibition in the two museums.

Lastly, I would like to thank Credit Suisse, a partner over many years, Ginsana SA and Casinò Lugano SA for their generous and continous support for the exhibitions organized by our institutions. marco franciolli Director Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Museo d’Arte, Lugano

Contents 18

A Plea for Dreams and Escapism Pierre Rosenberg

59

At the Heart of Europe 21

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe Valentina Anker Fig. 1 to fig. 13

35

Paris: One Symbolism, Many Symbolists Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Fig. 14 to fig. 20

41

47

53

Brussels: Crossroads of Symbolism Michel Draguet Fig. 21 to fig. 26 Vienna and Munich: the Cosmopolitan Facet of Symbolism Alexander Klee Fig. 27 to fig. 33 Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice: Notes for a Map of Symbolism in Italy Annie-Paule Quinsac Fig. 34 to fig. 39

Exhibition Themes

Nocturnal Depths and Dreams Mysteries of the Night Valentina Anker Cat. 1 to cat. 15

79

Female Metamorphoses in the Artistic Imagination Women of Light, Women of Darkness Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Cat. 16 to cat. 45

115

Nature Symbolist Nature Valentina Anker Cat. 46 to cat. 70

145

Elsewhere: from Genesis to Exoticism Cat. 71 to cat. 73

151

Mountains Touching the Sky and Mirror Lakes Mountains Valentina Anker Cat. 74 to cat. 84

165

Animals and Hybrid Creatures, Strange and Disturbing Fauns, Mermaids and Centaurs . . .

Valentina Anker Cat. 85 to cat. 97

179

The Rosicrucian Influence The Salons de la Rose+Croix Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Cat. 98 to cat. 116

197

The Joyous Body: Dance The Joyous Body: Dance in the Work of Ferdinand Hodler Sharon Latchaw Hirsh Cat. 117 to cat. 122

269

An Allegory of Time The Ages of Life Cristina Sonderegger Cat. 186 to cat. 194

207

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze: Music and Rhythm Illustrated by Adolphe Appia and Frédéric Boissonnas Émile Jaques-Dalcroze Jacques Tchamkerten Cat. 123 to cat. 141

283

Death: Symbolist Figurations and Transfigurations Death Matthias Frehner Cat. 195 to cat. 202

295 227

Monte Verità: Artists’ Colony and Anti-Urban Utopia Monte Verità and the First Goetheanum Albert Levy Cat. 142 to cat. 148

Figures of Violence, from Oedipus to Cleopatra Figures of Violence Laurence Madeline Cat. 203 to cat. 207

303 235

The First Goetheanum, and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy Cat. 149 to cat. 161

243

An Aesthetic of Sickness Cat. 162 to cat. 163

The Demonic, the Wagnerian and Inner Demons The Demonic Marco Franciolli Cat. 208 to cat. 213

311

From India to the Planet Mars Théodore Flournoy and Hélène Smith Valentina Anker Cat. 164 to cat. 167

From the Earthly Paradise to the Angel of Life Angel and Paradise Beat Stutzer Cat. 214 to cat. 227

327

The Cosmos and Infinity, Enigmas and Keys to Understanding The Cosmos and Infinity Beat Stutzer Cat. 228 to cat. 236

247

253

Dance and Hypnosis Émile Magnin and Magdeleine G. Valentina Anker Cat. 168 to cat. 179

261

The Time-Honoured Legend of the Wandering Jew and the Roaming Spirit The Wanderer Valentina Anker Cat. 180 to cat. 185

338 342 344 350

Appendices Artist biographies Select bibliography List of illustrations Index

A Plea for Dreams and Escapism P ierre R osenberg of the Académie Française Honorary President-Director of the Musée du Louvre

It is always a good thing when the hypotheses put forward in a work of art history find confirmation in an exhibition and its catalogue. In a book, the images on which the text leans will invariably be photographic reproductions of the originals (of variable fidelity, especially when in colour), selected by the author from those that he or she judges to be most representative, that best illustrate and illumine their argument and support its relevance. The rules for an exhibition are altogether different. First of all there is the question of size – some works are simply too large to be borrowed – then there are the inevitable refusals, the budgetary constraints, the unknown whereabouts. On the other hand, you have the works themselves, in their true dimensions, and not massaged into uniformity by the process of reproduction. Here they are, the very works, in their true colours, brought head to head in a confrontation that for some of them will prove unforgiving, and for others a revelation. While a book unifies and imposes uniformity, an exhibition unites and (or perhaps but) creates a hierarchy. It offers us an opportunity to re-examine reputations; it may reveal the true qualities of artists who have been undervalued, or on occasion it may encourage a more sober assessment of those who have been overvalued.

This exhibition is long awaited. When it appeared in French and English in 2009, Valentina Anker’s book Le Symbolisme suisse, for which I was honoured to write the preface, whetted our thirst. Its full significance could not emerge until this exhibition was mounted to support its conclusions.

What are those conclusions? The first is beyond argument. There is such a thing as Swiss Symbolism. Or, to be more precise, several Swiss Symbolisms. It would be too reductive to speak of a Swiss German Symbolism, a Symbolism of French-speaking Switzerland, or a Symbolism of the Grisons or the Ticino, so varied were the artists in each of these groups; so widely did their ambitions vary; so different were their intellectual ideas and the means they chose to give them visual expression; so far removed from each other, in short, in their aspirations and in their work, were artists such as Carlos Schwabe and Félix Vallotton, Giovanni Segantini and Ferdinand Hodler. But there is a family resemblance that distinguishes Swiss Symbolism from its great models (or rather its great contemporaries) in Belgium, Germany, Italy, France and Britain, and it is this that we need to define, or attempt to define. It is to be found in nature, a nature that is more mystical than mysterious; in the mountains, with their particular spiritual quality; and in its permeability to foreign influences, without at the same time abandoning or betraying its own discrete identity.

This exhibition adopts a thematic approach. Here a chronological approach would be neither possible nor practical. Instead, the subject is explored around themes evoking the features that make it distinctively Swiss. By setting these within an international context, the exhibition highlights these characteristics that are so specifically national.

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To illustrate its argument more effectively, and in a departure from Valentina Anker’s book, it also mingles (or more accurately brings together) artists from the Swiss cantons with others from different European countries. Thus in the opening section, appropriately called ‘Nocturnal Depths and Dreams’, we find Henry Fuseli (the Swiss-born Johann Heinrich Füssli), Hodler, Arnold Böcklin and Auguste de Niederhäusern, known as Rodo, alongside the Belgian Xavier Mellery, the German Hans Thoma and the Italians Gaetano Previati and Umberto Boccioni, not forgetting their French counterpart Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. And in another revealing and highly original section, entitled ‘Animals and Hybrid Creatures, Strange and Disturbing’, Böcklin, Giovanni Segantini, Eugène Grasset (born in Lausanne, as we too often forget) and Albert Trachsel rub shoulders – surprisingly but pertinently – with Auguste Rodin, Odilon Redon and Jean-Joseph Carriès (we might also have expected Gustave Moreau, who is well represented elsewhere).

The section documenting ‘The Rosicrucian Influence’ treads more familiar ground, especially as Swiss artists played such a large part in the Salons de la Rose+Croix (it was Schwabe who designed their first poster in 1892); but those that explore the work of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (with startling designs by Adolphe Appia), the artists’ colony at Monte Verità, near Ascona, and the Goetheanum at Dornach, near Basel, offer the visitor happy and intriguing surprises.

There is no good definition of Symbolism. And in truth, what do Böcklin and Vallotton (is he still a Symbolist, and would he approve of our calling him one?), Schwabe and Cuno Amiet, Fuseli and Paul Klee have in common? We can try to define it by what it is not. Symbolism is anti-academic (at their best, Couture, Cabanel, Bouguereau and Gérôme were ‘Symbolists’), anti-Neoclassical (pace the Girodet of Ossian), anti-classical (Ingres, and yet . . .), anti-Romantic (Delacroix, but also occasionally Horace Vernet), anti-Impressionist, anti-Realist and anti-naturalist.

Yet at the same time we know exactly (or almost) what we mean. In certain artists, in certain countries, and more especially at a certain time, there was a desire not only to avoid the ordinary, which is perfectly natural, and to seek out its opposite, but above all to escape, to flee the petty, everyday concerns of a world that was stifling, that did not offer them enough. Every Symbolist artist did it in his or her own manner. In Bern and Lugano, visitors will make discoveries, will find their own favourites among these masterpieces by artists who are now – at last – being recognised and celebrated internationally: not just well-known names such as Segantini and Vallotton, but also less familiar ones such as – to take a handful at random – Albert Welti, Filippo Franzoni, Léo-Paul Robert, Auguste Baud-Bovy and Alexandre Perrier. They will discover another, different Switzerland, a land of dreams and escapism.

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Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe Va l e n ti n a A n k e r

Symbolism spread towards the end of the nineteenth century: the name made its first appearance in Paris in 1886, in an article by Jean Moréas,1 and again the following year in Brussels in a text by Émile Verhaeren.2 Difficult to define or even simply to characterise, it was – like all art movements – a complex phenomenon.

It unfolded throughout Europe in the age of nationalism: on the one hand it brought fresh inspiration, on the other it became integrated into different artistic cultures which, while leaving its fundamental characteristics unchanged, nonetheless still modified it in different ways. For the sake of simplification, we could adopt the description of art historian Hans H. Hofstätter: ‘Symbolist art, by definition, proposes images that run counter to visible reality and scientific investigation, in order to demonstrate the existence of a hidden reality that we can at least imagine, even if we cannot acknowledge that it really exists.’3 Symbolism developed between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a time marked by mourning for the death of one age and hopes for the beginning of a new one (fig. 1). It existed within belief systems that could hardly have been more diverse, in a world in which the creationist myth had been shaken to its foundations, in which psychoanalysis had revealed the complex depths of the human psyche and shifted the boundaries between sickness and health, and in which astronomy had dislodged the earth from its place at the centre of the universe.

The sensation known as coenesthesia4 was characteristic of the difficulty involved in grasping the notion of Symbolism. The body was portrayed according to its sufferings and maladies. Figures in some works seemed quite simply to respond to our vague feeling of ourselves, independently of any help from our senses: this was the sensation of coenesthesia, highlighted by Jean Starobinski, notably in his reading of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. Jean Clair describes Symbolism thus: ‘In the end, it is the quest, at the frontiers of the normal and the pathological, for those states at the limits of consciousness that bring with them an awareness, beyond any dissolution or evanescence of the sensitive or cognitive subject, of that irreducible kernel of our being that we call the “spirit”, “soul” or “imagination”.’5 Soul and imagination were two words of key importance that were to resonate throughout the Symbolist movement; they were also words whose meaning was hard to pin down, but it was precisely in this borderline area that Symbolist artists created their work. And it is through these works that we can approach Symbolism, with its remarkable ability to suggest that which cannot be said.

The aura of spirituality surrounds human beings, lending them lightness, transparency and luminosity: the ‘soul’ – that forgotten word, safely positioned between inverted commas – now regained its place outside the boundaries of religion, as in Arnold Böcklin’s Sacred Wood, 1882 (cat. 52). Dreams broadened the artistic canvas, transforming reality into the inexpressible, as in the magic circle of The Rainbow, 1916 (cat. 231), by Augusto Giacometti, in which two figures contemplate the world.

Symbolism ventured into the furthest recesses of the soul, of the sacred, of nature, of human beings and of the animal world, exploring good and evil by turns, embracing

(opposite) Arnold Böcklin The Island of the Dead (first version), fig. 2

1. Jean Moréas, ‘Le symbolisme’, Le Figaro, 18 September 1886.

2. Émile Verhaeren, ‘Un peintre symboliste’ [Fernand Khnopff], L’Art moderne, 24 April 1887.

3. Hans H. Hofstätter, ‘L’iconographie de la peinture symboliste’, in Le Symbolisme en Europe, Paris, Grand Palais, May–July 1976, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1976, p. 11.

4. The term ‘coenesthesia’ is derived from the Greek koinè (common) and aisthesis (sensation).

5. Jean Clair and Pierre Théberge (eds.), Paradis perdus: l’Europe symboliste, exh. cat., Montreal, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 8 June–15 October 1995, Paris, Flammarion, Montreal, Musée des BeauxArts, 1995.

Fig. 1 Charles Gleyre The Flood, 1856 Oil and pastel on canvas, 98.5 × 197 cm Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne Acquired by public subscription, 1899 Inv. 1243

6. Stéphane Mallarmé’s response to the ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’ carried out by Jules Huret, published in L’Écho de Paris, 3 March–5 July 1891.

7. Synaesthesia: phenomenon in which more than one sensation is experienced simultaneously, from the Greek syn (with) and aisthesis (sensation).

8. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, Paris, GarnierFlammarion, 1978 (first published 1884).

9. Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art, Paris, Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1887.

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madness, the demonic and visions of paradise, including earthly paradises such as that of Cuno Amiet, 1899–1900 (cat. 219), and opium heavens, as alluded to in Night, 1870 (cat. 1), by Böcklin, and Solitude, 1890–91 (cat. 43) by Fernand Khnopff. Music and poetry were the hidden surge that had transformed pre-existing cultures through the strength of their desire to see beyond visible reality, to reach towards the expression of an invisible reality. The music of Wagner and his conception of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, broadened the arts towards a new concordance. The poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé provided the keys: ‘To name an object is to destroy three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which lies in divining, little by little: to suggest, this is the dream. This is the perfect use of the mystery constituted by the symbol: to evoke an object little by little in order to depict a condition of the soul, or conversely to choose an object and to draw from it, through a series of decodings, a condition of the soul.’6 Veiling and unveiling an object, finding it and losing it, hearing its intimate resonance, drawing near to its profound and irreducible mystery, discovering and using correspondences between sounds and colours, as in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances’: this was how Symbolism expanded the frontiers between sensations. Music and perfumes heightened the visual awareness of painters, found correspondences in colours, and burst into their paintings; everything converged towards a new entity, dubbed synaesthesia.7 An entity, certainly, but also a dissolving of boundaries, of definitions, of all certitude. Like des Esseintes, the anti-hero of J.K. Huysmans’ cult novel À rebours (Against Nature; 1884),8 people could now distance themselves from ‘reality’ in order to experience rare sensations and new pleasures, to the point of hallucination or madness. The boundaries of sensations grew wider: artists took an increasing interest in sicknesses of the soul, in the power of the hysterics whose images were published by Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer,9 in melancholy, in hypnosis, in the discoveries of psychology and psychoanalysis, and in illness in general. Our vague notions about ourselves were highlighted by artists including notably Ferdinand Hodler and Edvard Munch.

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

With its burning desire for an ‘elsewhere’, Symbolism crossed the boundaries and invaded the rules governing the quests of naturalism and Impressionism. This was the elsewhere of Mallarmé’s ‘Windows’;10 the elsewhere of Böcklin’s Island of the Dead, 1880 (fig. 2), or his Island of the Living, 1888; the elsewhere of music and the theatre. An elsewhere that opened the doors to abstraction, to Surrealism and to Expressionism – for, as has been seen, Symbolism was not an inward-looking movement: it withdrew inwards only in order to give more of itself. Swiss Symbolism, Belgian Symbolism, French Symbolism, Italian Symbolism, Austrian and German Symbolism – each became inscribed within their individual country’s history, but were all united through the works of their artists.

Swiss Symbolism Swiss Symbolism developed in all four Swiss cultures, German, French, Italian and Romansh. Until recently, Swiss art was pigeonholed under the heading ‘Mitteleuropa’.

Today this is no longer the case. Over the last two decades, Swiss art historians, researchers and museums and galleries have endeavoured to deepen our knowledge of this period in the history of Swiss culture. Furthermore, prices fetched on the art market by Symbolist works have risen substantially. Recent events have also contributed to making Swiss Symbolism more widely known. In 2000 and 2001, the exhibition ‘~1900: Symbolisme et Art nouveau dans la peinture suisse’ took place at the Kunstmuseum, Solothurn, the Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Sion. In 2009, my book entitled Le Symbolisme Suisse. Destins croisés avec l’art européen was published. And now, in 2013–14, the major exhibition ‘Myths and Mysteries. Symbolism and Swiss Artists’ is taking place at the Kunstmuseum, Bern, the Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, and the Museo d’Arte, Lugano. But honour is due above all to Harald Szeemann, who in the 1980s restored life to Monte Verità, and who through his work has made it known internationally.

In order to gain a better understanding of this art movement, it may be helpful to recall a few landmark events in Swiss history. The fall of Napoleon I put an end to Swiss dependence on France, and on 7 August 1815 the federal treaty was signed; the Swiss Confederation was composed of independent cantons, and the constitution was proclaimed in 1848. From this point on, Switzerland became a centrally governed federal state, but continued to call itself a Confederation. The cantons were no longer independent but rather ‘sovereign’, or autonomous. This explains in part the lack of any framework for exhibitions at a national level, and the necessity for artists to go abroad to study. Two works of fundamental importance in the development of Swiss modernism illustrate this. In the first, The Modern Le Grütli Oath, executed

by Hodler in 1887 (fig. 3), a number of figures from the worlds of art and politics are shown shaking hands in an urban, bourgeois setting. Among them are three of Hodler’s friends: Carlos Schwabe, Auguste de Niederhäusern, known as Rodo, and William Vogt (son of Professor Carl Vogt). The handshakes are no longer the raised arms in the painting of the oath at Le Grütli in 1291 by Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli),11 nor is nature the witness here, but rather a modern town square. The significance of this is important. In 1898, the cultural policy in force, linked to political and economic interests, decided to build a Swiss national museum, to save the country’s endangered national heritage: the ‘federal decree on the promotion and recuperation of Swiss art’ had come into law in 1888. In 1890, the Gottfried Keller Foundation came into being, its profits intended for the acquisition of ‘national and international works of art of importance’, as well as, exceptionally, contemporary works.12 The second of these paintings, Hodler’s Wilhelm Tell, 1896–97 (fig. 4), is the embodiment of a cowherd in whom the Swiss people could recognise themselves, while at the same time presenting the image of the type of human colossus who has personified power since Antiquity.13 This painting earned Hodler fame in Switzerland and a reputation as the country’s ‘national painter’. It was shown at the Vienna Secession in 1904,14 at which

Fig. 2 Arnold Böcklin The Island of the Dead (first version), 1880 Oil on canvas, 110.9 × 156.4 cm Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel On loan from the Gottfried Keller Foundation, 1920 Inv. 1055

10. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Les Fenêtres’, in Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, 1961, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ collection.

11. Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), The Oath at Le Grütli, 1779–81, oil on canvas, 267 × 178 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, on loan from the canton.

12. Oskar Bätschmann, ‘Arte nazionale. Descrizione di un problema’, in Christoph Vögele, Matteo Bianchi and Pascal Ruedin (eds.), with Simona Martinoli and Franz Müller, 1900: Symbolisme et Art nouveau dans la peinture suisse, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Civica Galleria d’Arte, Villa Cedri, Bellinzone, Musée Cantonal des BeauxArts, Sion, 2000–01, Zürich, Lausanne, Institut Suisse pour l’Étude de l’Art, 2000.

13.

Bernd Nicolai, ‘Hodlers Monumentalität.

Zur Neuformulierung von Historienmalerei und tektonischer Kunst um 1900’, in Hodler, Internationales Symposium, Bern, 17–18 April 2008, Oskar Bätschmann, Matthias Frehner and Hans-Jörg Heusser (eds.), Ferdinand Hodler. Die Forschung – Die Anfänge – Die Arbeit – Der Erfolg – Der Kontext, Zürich, Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft (SIK-ISEA), 2009, pp. 263–76.

14. XIX. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs. Secession Wien. JanuarFebruar 1904, exhibition catalogue, Wiener Secession, 1904, p. 13ff.

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Hodler’s presence was a triumph, with thirty-one works in the main gallery and more in the two foyers. Hodler’s reception in Vienna paved the way for an equally enthusiastic response in Germany, so giving rise to the idea that he was a German artist. Echoes of this aspect of Swiss art in exhibitions in German-speaking countries gave rise in turn, and from the outset, to a degree of ambiguity regarding the status of Swiss culture, which was viewed as part of German culture, or even – later on – of National Socialism.15 Hodler was the dominant force in contemporary Swiss art. Swiss Symbolism was therefore not considered as a movement initially, but rather as the work of friends of Hodler, and thus of the dominant force of modernism and internationalism (fig. 5).

Fig. 3 Ferdinand Hodler The Modern Le Grütli Oath, 1887 Black lead, charcoal, stump, pen, black ink and black lead fillet around drawing on white paper, 32.5 × 44.7 cm Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques, Geneva Inv. Hod. 009

Fig. 4 Ferdinand Hodler Wilhelm Tell, 1896–97 Oil on canvas, 256 × 196 cm Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn Bequest of Mme Margrit Kottmann-Müller in memory of her husband Walther Kottmann, 1958 Inv. A I 410 15. Oskar Bätschmann, ‘L’art national. Description d’un problème’, ~1900, Symbolisme et Art nouveau dans la peinture suisse, 2000, pp. 22–23. Laurent Langer, ‘Art nouveau et symbolisme en Suisse: état de la recherche sur la peinture. 1890–1914’, Perspective, la revue de l’INHA, Paris, 2006–2, pp. 227–46.

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Swiss Symbolism was founded on two basic characteristics: a love and understanding of nature, and a tendency towards introspection. It carried within it, inherited from the eighteenth century, a conception of the grandeur of nature, which – with the theme of forests and the world of stars – was to extend to the worlds of the fragile borderline between health and sickness. It was based on readings of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of the private journal of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, on the teachings of Barthélemy Menn, and on the major breakthroughs in psychology and psychiatry achieved by Théodore Flournoy, Eugen Bleuler, Carl Gustav Jung, Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud. Swiss Symbolism was also characterised by its in-depth research into the workings of the body, with the aid of the eurhythmics of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, dance at Monte Verità and all the areas of learning that linked the body and soul together, from the theories of Helena Blavatsky Petrovna to those of Rudolf Steiner, as well as their practical work in the villages and communities of Monte Verità and Dornach.

Body and soul The body is one of the most profound and mysterious of protagonists, and was also one with the most powerful presence, thanks to the new and hidden forces that Symbolist artists were able to express through it. There are bodies bound together by weariness, as in Hodler’s Disappointed Souls, 1892 (cat. 100), or yearning for and reaching out towards other worlds, as in Communion with Infinity, 1892.16 And there are hybrid bodies, as in Böcklin’s large, magnificent and sensual siren in Calm Sea, 1886–87 (cat. 90), depicting woman as man-eater; in Clara von Rappard’s Brahman Soul (after Goethe), 1885 (cat. 91), embodying the wanderings of the soul. Head of a Faun by Jean-Joseph Carriès, 1890–92 (cat. 97), depicts the disenchantment of a faun, a hybrid of man and beast. Eyes closed in impenetrable slumbers, he is at once animal-like and a dreamer, linking simultaneously with the theme of the primitive, of humanity before history, and with the orgiastic theme of the drunken gods of classical Greece and Rome. More hybrid bodies appear in Battle of the Centaurs, 1872 (cat. 92), in which Böcklin delves into the universal ‘savagery’ of both man and beast, setting the scene on the summit of a snowy peak, which serves as dramatic stage for this fight to the death. Symbolism was very open to theatre, and saw itself as a ‘dramatic’ art, setting its hybrid figures in disparate scenes that came together to form dramas and tragedies on a universal scale.

Hodler was also sensitive to illness, to the sickness of the soul that destroys the body, as well as to the sickness of the body that destroys the soul. While still very young, he had seen many members of his family succumb to tuberculosis.

In later life he had to watch his mistress die from cancer, and throughout his life he paid tribute through his work to mortality and suffering, while also expressing joy through dance, as in his Woman in Ecstasy, 1911 (cat. 121 and 122). Hodler and Schwabe in Switzerland, as well as many European artists such as Khnopff, painted the depths of the soul’s sufferings: Symbolism had turned the spotlight on an ‘aesthetic of illness’.

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

In France, these years saw a number of photographs of spiritualist trances, as well as the Iconographie de la Salpêtrière.17 Charcot and his assistants had transformed therapeutic care into a veritable theatre of sickness, organising and exaggerating – with their patients’ complicity – the drama of hysteria with all its shrieks and imprecations.

This is clearly the inspiration behind Schwabe’s masterpiece, The Wave, 1907 (cat. 36).

The subject has been explored on a number of occasions, by Jean Clair in his exhibition at the Grand Palais,18 and by Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, whom I cite freely, notably in his ‘Peinture, hystérie et opera: les révoltées tragiques de Carlos Schwabe’.19 In Switzerland, Jaques-Dalcroze (cat. 136 and 138 to 141) used eurhythmics to explore a new relationship between the stimulation of the muscles of the body and the mind, dissociating voluntary reason from the subconscious. He established close links between music and movement, noting at a performance of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in Vienna, for instance: ‘In the final scene, Elektra sings her triumph in a magnificent crescendo, then when she can sing no more she dances!

And at that point one becomes aware how much more expressive the body is than words, even when those words are sung.’ In 1868 he conceived ‘a form of musical education in which the body itself would act as intermediary between sound and thought, and become the direct instrument of our feelings’.20 Monte Verità (cat. 142 to 148), at Locarno, was a vegan colony founded in 1905, derived from the Lebensreform (reform of life) movement that had developed from a loathing of the paralysing nature of contemporary life, and whose members sought ways of escaping from it. ‘Regeneration’ of the body meant that all the labours of the land and cultivation could be carried out in cadence, or rhythmically. Sunbathing was viewed as a therapeutic remedy, and artists found inspiration in contemplation of the sun.

The unity between spiritualism and bodily rhythm brought dance to Monte Verità, and in 1909 Jaques-Dalcroze was a guest there. Laban set up a dance community there, calling it the ‘Temple vibrant’ or ‘Cathédrale de l’avenir’ (cathedral of the future).

Among his first dancers were Mary Wigmann, Suzanne Perrottet and Sophie Tæuber.

Loïe Füller, Sada Yakko and Isadora Duncan were all influenced by this movement.

The bodies of actors and dancers created a new type of performance space in the work of the stage designer Adolphe Appia (cat. 125 to 127), in which the use of shade and shadows was suggestive, in a Symbolist manner, of the potential of the subconscious, and through which he contributed to the wonder and preservation of the phenomenon of the occult while also putting it on stage.

Symbolist artists such as Piet Mondrian were impressed by the theories of Rudolf Steiner, in which body and mind were treated together. The Goetheanum (cat. 149 to 157) was built according to the theory of curves (right-angles were banished as being too vigorous): ‘The rounded forms applied to buildings long ago were a response to a spiritual condition reigned over by the feeling of the presence of a living and allencompassing god, embracing the natural world, humans, animals, plants and minerals.’21 The natural world: from scientific observation to metaphysics to symbols In 1812 the Geneva pharmacist Henri-Albert Gosse built the Temple of Nature on the Petit-Salève, the mountain closest to Geneva, which became a gathering spot for artists and scholars. In this rustic-style temple were placed busts of the great Swiss naturalists and of Carolus Linnaeus. It was there, on 6–7 October 1815, that Gosse and his friends founded the Société Helvétique des Sciences Naturelles. ‘One wondered if some patricians did not tend by preference towards the natural sciences, so often did the latter serve to support their belief that nature, and by extension society, conformed to a pre-established and immutable order.’22 Augustin Pyramus de Candolle confirmed this thesis: ‘Do we not seek in the study of flowers an opportunity to admire, through an example on a reduced scale, a universal world order?’23

Fig. 5 Unknown artist Poster for ‘The Night’ (exhibition in the Palais Electoral, Geneva, 1891), 98 × 67 cm Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern Inv. P 1983.240

16. Ferdinand Hodler, Communion with Infinity, 1892, oil on canvas, 159 × 97 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.

17. Jean-Martin Charcot, Paul Richer et al. (eds.), Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, Paris, Masson et Cie, 1888–1918; Georges DidiHuberman, Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, Paris, Macula, 1982.

18. Jean Clair (ed.), L’Ame au corps: Arts et sciences. 1793–1993, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 19 October 1993–24 January 1994, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Gallimard, Milan, Electa.

19. Genava. Revue du Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, Geneva, October 1996, pp. 111–25.

20. Alfred Berchtold, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze et son temps, Lausanne, L’Âge d’homme, 2000, 2005, p. 100.

21. Hans Hasler, Le Goetheanum, Dornach, Verlag am Goetheanum, 2005, pp. 80–81.

22. Cléopâtre Montandon, Le Développement de la science à Genève aux xviiie et xixe siècles, Vevey, Delta, 1975.

23.

Quoted by Jacques Trembley (ed.), Les Savants genevois dans l’Europe intellectuelle du xviie au milieu du xixe siècle, Geneva, Éditions du Journal de Geneva, 1987, p. 80.

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If the scientists of the eighteenth century influenced its artists, due attention should also be given to another voice, that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who marvelled at the savage beauty of the natural landscapes of the Swiss Alps, while also lamenting that even in their wildest depths, the influence of humans could not be escaped: ‘There is nowhere in the world apart from Switzerland that displays this combination of untouched nature and human industry.’24 In the face of this unexpected juxtaposition of the wild and the civilized, of nature and culture, Rousseau experienced feelings that were a mixture of pleasure and sadness. Emmanuel Kant, who remained within the Augustinian or Cartesian tradition by which pleasure derives from suffering, defined this feeling as ‘the sublime’. In the nineteenth century, Swiss landscape artists frequently depicted the destructive power of the mountains, in the form of avalanches, rockfalls and storms that destroyed any structures built by humans. In 1839, Alexandre Calame painted the most famous tempest in Swiss Romantic painting, Storm at Handeck (fig. 6). For Calame, such natural disasters were a manifestation of divine power, of the wrath of a terrible God, and ‘filled the soul with a feeling of the sublime’.

This ‘strong God’, the ‘All-Powerful’, as Calame liked to call him, was the God of armies, of the Old Testament, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as also exalted by Pascal and Calvin. This was the harsh, jealous and vengeful God of strict Jansenists and rigid Protestants alike. The God who tested the patience of Job was the same God who uprooted the solitary fir tree on the mountainside. The fir tree symbolised man buffeted by the tempests of life and the forces of nature. This Romantic theme par excellence, as in Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Eugène Delacroix,25 is here transposed to a natural setting, trees subjected to terrible ordeals being a favourite subject for Calame throughout his career. With his sense of the pettiness of man in the face of creation, Calame was seeking through his paintings to convey the grandeur of God. In his works the human figure was always insignificant, before vanishing completely.

It was left to Symbolism to reintroduce man into nature, and especially to Auguste Baud-Bovy and Hodler. To the colossal grandeur of the mountains they contrasted monumental human figures in Hodler’s case, and Alpine herdsmen in Baud-Bovy’s.

24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, pp. 132–34. See also Valentina Anker, Alexandre Calame, Vie et œuvre, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Office du Livre, Fribourg, 1987.

25. Eugène Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1861, oil on canvas, 750 × 485 cm, church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. See also Valentina Anker, Alexandre Calame (1810–1864): dessins: catalogue raisonné, Benteli, Bern, 2000.

26. Auguste Baud-Bovy, Lioba (Oberland Herdsman Calling his Cattle), 1886, oil on canvas, 130 × 98 cm, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.

27. See note 16.

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The human figure in nature: from minuscule figures to giants In 1886, in the village of Aeschi, Auguste Baud-Bovy painted The Heroic Deeds of the Herdsman, 1886–90. In Lioba, 1886,26 he placed his herdsman ­– a disproportionately large figure in relation to the mountain landscape – in a heroic pose on a mountain peak, looking out to the mountains and the void, above the swirling mists in the valley below. A call of Neolithic origins, found among cowherds in different cultures, the lioba is music in its most pristine form, the yodel that cuts through and tames the great silence and roar of nature. This call to cattle scattered over mountain pastures is both a pact with nature and a mark of man’s dominance over it.

The young man walking along a path in Hodler’s Intimate Dialogue with Nature, c. 1884 (cat. 54) is naked as nature intended. He simply is: there is no question, no separation. In Communion with Infinity27 it is a female figure who is naked and large in scale. The attitude to nature has changed completely since Romanticism.

Largely turning his back on painting from life, Böcklin opened the door to dreams, Antiquity and the world of the imagination. Nature was the countryside of the Roman Campagna, as well as the mysterious landscapes of the Island of the Dead (fig. 2) and the Sacred Wood, 1882 (cat. 52), and the drama of Ruin by the Sea, 1880 (cat. 6), envisioned by Böcklin on each occasion in a different and unique way.

This was the nature inherited from Romanticism, certainly, and also from the Düsseldorf School, but it was observed in a new way. Often it was a refuge, and island, as in Sea of Mist (Moonlight at Miazzina), 1895 (cat. 7), by the Italian artist and dealer Vittore Grubicy de Dragon. The artist engraved a spider’s web on the painting’s frame and wrote by hand on the canvas: ‘Having placed my forehead against the cold glass

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

Fig. 6 Alexandre Calame Storm at Handeck, 1839 Oil on canvas, 190.2 × 260 cm Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva Inv. 1839-0001

of my window, I contemplated with sadness the countless miseries that teem ceaselessly beneath this sea of cloud – this funeral shroud – that blanketed the plain while the mountain was suspended serenely above in the moonlight sky, limpid and pure.’

The artist viewed the purity of a moonlit night in the mountains, through a window, just as Calame, Auguste Baud-Bovy and so many others had done. But it was not just the landscape that counted, but also the idea, the thought of which it was the vector, and the musicality that it brought in its wake. Vittore Grubicy had three ‘obsessions’: the idea underlying a painting, its musicality and its light. Words give explicit form to the idea that is often expressed in the world of Symbolism, notably in Mallarmé’s ‘The Windows’: I flee, and cling to all the window panes Where a man can turn his back on life28 Across cultures: Arnold Böcklin, Ferdinand Hodler, Giovanni Segantini Before addressing the situation regarding exhibitions of Swiss artists in Switzerland, let us briefly review the position of three great artists.

Katharina Schmidt writes of the memorial service held for Böcklin in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence: ‘The Swiss, German, Austrian and Italian flags recalled the lands where he was born, where he enjoyed his successes, and where he lived.’29 Four flags evoking a nationality that went beyond the centuries of different nationalisms, a nationality that presaged a crossing of cultures that was a phenomenon of the modern world. Böcklin divided his life between Switzerland (especially Basel, where he was born, and Zürich), Germany (Düsseldorf and Munich), Austria (Vienna) and Italy (Rome and Florence). The four flags magnified the four cultures of Switzerland, extending them and opening up their boundaries: the Swiss cantons were here scaled up to form a culturally united Europe. In the scale of his reputation, Böcklin was the paradigm of the European painter – and he was a Swiss painter.

Hodler lay at the heart of Swiss Symbolism, and lent his features, moreover, to the powerful figure of Wilhelm Tell (fig. 4) rending the clouds (a painting he showed in Munich in 1903 and 1904). Hodler was born into an impoverished family in Bern, on which death and illness took a heavy toll: ‘It seemed to me that there was always a dead body in the house,’ he once said, ‘and that this was how it was meant to be.’30

28. Stéphane Mallarmé, Les Fenêtres, op. cit., p. 33.

29. Katharina Schmidt, ‘Une introduction à Arnold Böcklin. Non omnis moriar’, in Katharina Schmidt, Bernd Lindemann, Christian Lenz and MariePierre Salé (eds.), Arnold Böcklin, 1827–1901, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 19 May–26 August 2001; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1 October 2001– 13 January 2002; Munich, Neue Pinakothek, 14 February–26 May 2002; Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001, pp. 11–21.

30. Alfred Berchtold, La Suisse romande au cap du xxe siècle. Portrait littéraire et moral, Lausanne, Payot, 1964, new edition 1980, p. 264.

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Fig. 7 Eugène Grasset Half-title page for voice and piano score for Esclarmonde by Jules Massenet, 28.5 × 20 cm Paris, G. Hartmann, no date (c. 1889) Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Bibliothèque, Geneva Fig. 8 Eugène Grasset Frontispiece for the title page of the voice and piano score for Esclarmonde by Jules Massenet, 28.5 × 20 cm Paris, G. Hartmann, no date (c. 1889) Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Bibliothèque, Geneva Fig. 9 Edward Loevy Frontispiece for the title page of the voice and piano score for the opera Le Mage

by Jules Massenet, 28 × 19 cm Paris, G. Hartmann, no date (c. 1891) Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Bibliothèque, Geneva Fig. 10 Edward Loevy Frontispiece for the voice and piano score for the opera Le Mage by Jules Massenet, 28 × 19 cm Paris, G. Hartmann, no date (c. 1891) Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Bibliothèque, Geneva

In 1872 he left Oberland, which he would always continue to paint, for Geneva, where he copied Calame’s Storm at Handeck (fig. 6) and became a pupil of Menn.

He was to remain in Geneva until his death. He experienced his first successes in Paris, at the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, and above all at the Munich, Vienna and Berlin Secessions, and he was considered by many international critics as a German artist.

But in 1914 Hodler signed the ‘Protest against the bombardment of Reims Cathedral’

by German artillery, and was immediately excluded from the German societies who had hitherto carried him aloft in triumph.

Segantini was born into an Italian family in Italian Trentino, then under Austrian domination, and lived in Switzerland, where he did his finest paintings. A rebel artist, nomadic in his lifestyle, passionate in his beliefs and a practising spiritualist, Segantini continues, after more than a century, to arouse admiration with his work, and controversy over which country he belonged to. Born in Arco in Trentino, he studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, from where he set off on foot for Switzerland, via Brianza, and in 1886 settled in Savognin. In 1894 he was on the move again, settling at Maloja in the Engadine. Here, the Swiss Alps were to form his ideal country; he made the light of this land – which was to become the light of his masterpieces – his own. Between 1879 and 1896, Segantini exhibited throughout Europe, at shows organised by the brothers Alberto and Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, dealers from Milan, who aimed at the pinnacles of the contemporary art world, the Munich, Vienna and Berlin Secessions, the Venice, Paris and Brussels Biennales, and so on. In a letter written in 1896, Segantini asked Alberto Grubicy to intervene on his behalf so that he might show his paintings at the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva: ‘As for myself, I would accept the Zürich invitation, for having given my youth, my heart and my intellect to the Swiss Alps, I know that for years now I have been carrying their peaks and valleys with me throughout the world, and I am hardly known in that country. An Exhibition will shortly open in Geneva.

I tend to believe that it would not be completely devoid of interest if this Swiss National Exhibition could grant a room to my paintings, which more than any others depict this Swiss land.’31 In the event, the exhibition included not a single work by Segantini.

How and where did Swiss artists exhibit their work in the late nineteenth century?

In the nineteenth century, Swiss artists exhibited at the Paris salons, the Secessions, the Venice Biennale and the Salon de la Nouvelle Critique in Brussels, while dealers distributed their work abroad. Some dealers, such as Durand-Ruel, also published collections of prints to publicise their artists’ paintings. Until midway through the century, Calame had three important dealers available to him, including Negri in St Petersburg, with the Russian tsars on his doorstep; van der Donckt in Brussels, selling chiefly to Holland; and others who exported to Germany. Among the Symbolists, Böcklin had his dealer Gurlitt in Munich, and Segantini had the Grubicy brothers in Milan. Before Symbolism, the artists often entered their paintings in lotteries in Berlin, Lyon, Leipzig and elsewhere. In the late nineteenth century, there were very few possibilities for exhibitions and sales in Switzerland. There were the national exhibitions and the ‘Turnus’; the Salon Wolfsberg opened officially on Bederstrasse in Zürich in 1911; and in German Switzerland Joseph Mueller in Solothurn and Oscar Miller in Biberist, both of them great collectors with sound judgment, were the guiding spirits behind the region’s artistic life.

31. Letter from Giovanni Segantini to Alberto Grubicy, 14 April 1896, in Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini: Trent’anni di vita artistica europea nei carteggi inediti dell’artista e dei suoi mecenati, Oggiono, Lecco, Cattaneo, 1985, no. 493, p. 392.

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a) 1892: the Salon de la Rose+Croix, Paris The first Salon de la Rose+Croix took place at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris from 10 March to 10 April 1892, with sixty-nine exhibitors. No women artists were allowed to take part. The Salon acted as a catalyst for Swiss Symbolism, with participants including Hodler, Albert Trachsel, Eugène Grasset, Rodo, Schwabe and Félix Vallotton (who refused to be called a Symbolist). Hodler exhibited The Disappointed Souls (cat. 100); Trachsel Looking into Infinity; and Schwabe designed the poster (cat. 98) and showed sixteen

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

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Fig. 11 Cuno Amiet Giovanni Giacometti in their Shared Lodgings in Paris, 1889 Oil on canvas, 40 × 32 cm Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern Gift of the artist Inv. 1538

32. Edward Loevy (1857–1911), a Polish artist who had settled in Paris, illustrated the Encyclopédie Larousse and Contes juifs by Leopold von SacherMasoch.

33. Carl Albert Loosli, Ferdinand Hodler, Leben, Werk und Nachchlass, Bern, R. Suter, 1921–24, vol. 1, p. 111.

34. Albert Levy, ‘Le chalet, lieu de mémoire helvétique’, in Serge Desarnaulds (ed.), Le Chalet dans tous ses états: La construction de l’imaginaire helvétique, Geneva, Georg, 1999, pp. 85–121.

35. Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1984–93, 3 vols.

36. Arnold Böcklin, Freedom (Helvetia), 1891, oil on wood, 96 × 96 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

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works, including illustrations for his Gospel of the Childhood of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Émile Zola’s The Dream (cat. 102). Rodo exhibited five works, including his Verlaine.

Grasset, meanwhile, had three exhibits, including woodcuts and a composition entitled Ahura-Mazda, after the Zoroastrian god of life, light and supreme goodness, locked in eternal combat with Ahriman, lord of the dead and the dark regions. Although Ahura-Mazda is now lost, it is important to highlight the contribution of Grasset’s illustrations to the musical scores published by Georges Hartmann in Paris.

Grasset only produced an initial design for Jules Massenet’s opera Le Mage in 1891, telling the story of the life of Zarastra and combining the spirituality of ancient Persia with freemasonry and Rosicrucian esotericism. Le Mage was also illustrated by Edward Loevy,32 1891 (figs. 9 and 10). In 1889, Grasset illustrated the piano and vocal score for Massenet’s Esclarmonde (figs. 7 and 8), in which Esclarmonde, Queen of Byzantium, lures the chevalier Roland on to the moon, where a series of fantastical scenes unfolds. In around 1890, Grasset designed the cover for Massenet’s Enchantment (cat. 99), in which an enchantress uses her magic wand to exorcise the forces of evil from a star-studded sky.

All these illustrations bear witness to the importance of the collaboration between Grasset and other artists and the Paris music publisher Georges Hartmann, and above all to the essential nature of the relationship between artists of the Rose+Croix and music.

In 1888, Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Rose+Croix (see ‘The Salons de la Rose+Croix’, pp. 179–80), contributed to the review L’Initiation, regularly attended meetings of the Theosophical Society and read Helena Blavatsky Petrovna’s Secret Doctrine (1888), which was to influence Steiner and above all Monte Verità, as well as a number of artists, including notably Filippo Franzoni. The majority of non-French artists who exhibited at the Rose+Croix were Swiss or Belgian painters who were happy to gain access to the French market. The first Salon brought Swiss artists international recognition. ‘Two more exhibitions like this and I shall be seriously under way in Paris, solidly enough to make me independent of Switzerland,’ wrote Hodler in September 1892 of his success at the Salon de la Rose+Croix.33 b) The Swiss Exposition Nationale of 1896: the Swiss Village The Swiss Exposition Nationale of 1896, at which Auguste Baud-Bovy’s Panorama of the Bernese Alps of 1892 was shown, took place in Geneva. A mountain and a Swiss Village were built in the heart of the city, with miniature Alps and chalets coming into the urban landscape in a movement that was the inverse of the classic tourism and artists’ Grand Tour of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

As Albert Levy has observed, two versions of Switzerland were here juxtaposed: contemporary Switzerland, with its modern industry and cutting edge technology; and traditional Switzerland, rural and craft-based, typified in a reconstruction that mingled different actual villages and a variety of disparate styles.34 At the end of the nineteenth century, Switzerland found itself facing an industrial revolution that drew it into an accelerated process of urbanisation, overturning its rural economy and threatening the extinction of the main element in its social fabric: the peasantry. In 1848, the new federal constitution had established twenty-two cantons, with four different languages and two religions. Its founding values, based on its rural and pastoral character, were in decline; it was time to invent a new narrative of identity, with places that would bear witness to this past and be invested with these memories under threat, this civilization that was in the process of disappearing; places that would be, as Pierre Nora put it, ‘les lieux de mémoire’.35 In their different ways, all European societies have been faced with the loss of a collective memory linked to age-old traditions. It was in this vacuum between tradition and the invention of a new world of the imagination that Symbolism came into being.

The construction of this national symbolism also took in the heroic foundation myth, as witnessed by Hodler’s Wilhelm Tell (fig. 4) and Böcklin’s Helvetia, 1891.36 In his Réflexions

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

à propos de l’art suisse à l’Exposition nationale de 1896, followed by Quelques vœux au sujet du développement de l’art suisse,37 Trachsel was to seek to invent a national architecture. But his true – and more influential – invention was his architecture of the imagination, in the form of an architectural ‘poem’, for a ‘human race of the future’ in an extraterrestrial world, diametrically opposed to the Swiss chalet: Les Fêtes réelles.38 Once its evolution was complete, a human race in its ideal form would find its ideal setting in Slow March at the Temple of the Being of Beings, c. 1892 (cat. 110), The Palace of Night, c. 1906 (cat. 107), The Sower, c. 1906 (cat. 108) and The Palace of Joy, c. 1906 (cat. 109).

Les Fêtes réelles are not in any sense plans intended for actual construction.

They allude to the wisdom and skills of an ancient culture, more Assyrian or Egyptian than Christian, and to the mysteries of the cycles of nature. These are projects for a culture based on the past or the future: they leave the present as a vacuum; they are dreams. c) Exhibition in the Swiss Village From the special catalogue for the XXIV group39 it can be seen that ‘modern’ art made up 365 works of the thousand on show. No distinction was made between different movements and tendencies, with paintings of Ruralist inspiration rubbing shoulders with others drawing on history or prehistory, such as Hippolyte Couteau’s image of the lake-dwellers on the Lac de Neuchâtel: At Evening They Return to their Huts Laden with the Spoils of the Day, 1896.

Hodler renewed the national theme, with a vigour to his images that was surprising in its violence. But angry works such as The Wrestlers’ Processsion, 1882 (no. 252) and The Angry Warrior, 1883–84 (no. 253) hung alongside deeply spiritualist compositions such as The Disappointed Souls, 1892 (no. 254) (cat. 100), The Chosen One, 1893–94 (no. 255) (cat. 187) and Eurhythmy, 1895 (no. 256) (cat. 124). d) Musée Rath, Geneva, 1896: a stone’s throw from the Swiss Village, the ‘other exhibition’, organised by Auguste Baud-Bovy, shows works

by Auguste Rodin, Eugène Carrière and Camille Claudel This exhibition caused a scandal with its modernism. While the Swiss Village in the Exposition Nationale received over 1.1 million visitors, the Musée Rath show in the same year was less popular in terms of visitor numbers, but was hugely significant in spreading awareness of modernism, and especially of French Symbolism. The exhibition mixed sculpture, paintings, prints and photographs, and featured works by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Carrière and Camille Claudel (who was not mentioned on the front cover of the catalogue).40 Most of the works appear to have belonged to the artists, but seven of them were owned by Mathias Morhardt, one by Roger Marx, two by Jean Dolent and two by Édouard Rod,41 the influential critics who championed Symbolism from the outset and who formed part of the Baud-Bovy circle. Auguste Baud-Bovy and his son Daniel played an important role in communications between Geneva and Paris.

This exhibition was the first time that Rodin’s work had been shown on such a scale outside France. Rodin made a gift to the city of Geneva of his Poet (later to become The Thinker) and his Crouching Woman, 1890 (later The Tragic Muse), rejected by Théodore de Saussure, director of the Musée Rath. The controversy that greeted Rodin’s work encapsulates well the contrast between the Musée Rath exhibition, showing the work of Symbolist artists who represented a movement that was international and modern, and the public response to the Exposition Nationale, in which all movements were represented.

Solitary retreats: artists’ villages and colonies Aeschi, Savognin, Maloja, Stampa, Savièse, Oschwand, Sagno Auguste Baud-Bovy began his life as an artist at the Château de Gruyères, the familistery of the Bovy and Darier families among others, where Menn and his pupils Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet were frequent visitors. It was there

Fig. 12 Giovanni Giacometti Cuno Amiet in their Shared Lodgings in Paris, 1890 Oil on canvas, 41 × 32.5 cm Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern Inv. 1531

37. Albert Trachsel, Réflexions à propos de l’art suisse à l’Exposition nationale de 1896, Geneva, Impr. suisse, 1896, and Albert Trachsel, Quelques vœux au sujet du développement de l’art suisse, Geneva, impr. Ch. Zoellner, 1899.

38.

Trachsel embarked on Les Fêtes réelles between 1885 and 1886. A dozen watercolours intended for this series were exhibited in 1892 at the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, and were published as an album in 1897: Albert Trachsel, Les Fêtes réelles, Paris, Mercure de France, 1897.

39. Exposition nationale suisse, Genève, 1896, Group XXIV, Art moderne, Catalogue illustré par Fréd. Boissonnas, photographe, Geneva, 1896.

40. Catalogue de l’exposition au Musée Rath d’œuvres de MM. P. Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste Rodin, Eugène Carrière, Geneva, 1896, Geneva, impr. Jules-Guillaume Fick (Maurice Reymond et Cie), 1896. See also Valentina Anker, Auguste Baud-Bovy (1848–1899), Benteli, Bern, 1991.

41. Four art critics played a crucial role between Geneva and Paris: Mathias Morhardt, Charles Morice, Jean Dolent and Roger Marx. Mathias Morhardt, French writer on art and journalist on Le Temps, wrote for L’Idée libre, founded in 1892 and extant until 1895, together with Édouard Schuré, Auguste Baud-Bovy and Émile Besnus; Schwabe designed the first cover.

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42. Giovanni Segantini, Triptych of Nature: Life or the Future, 1896–99, oil on canvas, 190 × 322 cm; Nature or Being, 1898–99, oil on canvas, 235 × 403 cm; Death or Disappearing, 1896–99, oil on canvas, 190 × 322 cm, Segantini Museum, Saint Moritz, on loan from the Gottfried Keller Foundation.

43. Letter from Giovanni Segantini to Alberto Grubicy, 17 October 1894, in Annie-Paule Quinsac, op. cit., no. 405, p. 331, note 2.

44. The critic Paul Seippel coined this name in an article about an exhibition of painters from Savièse at the Athénée in Geneva, in the Journal de Genève of 20 February 1891.

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that he was introduced to the ideals of Charles Fourier and utopian socialism.

He lived in both Geneva and Paris before settling in Aeschi, in the Bernese Oberland near Lake Thun, of which – like Hodler – he painted the view from Leissigen (cat. 82).

There he sought a form of society that was pure and uncorrupted, and infused the mountains with spiritual meaning, as in The Mountain (the Niesen from the Suld Valley), 1895 (cat. 80). There he also painted the Heroic Deeds of the Herdsman, 1886–90. The act of illustrating the life of the cowherds distanced him from them, as he sought to resolve the pictorial problem of subordinating the landscape to the figures; he depicted them, he identified with them, but he did not become one of them. Some critics and some of his friends in Paris held him up as an example: in turning his back on the evils of civilization and going to live in a chalet in a mountain village, he had become the antithesis of evil. Yet few of them made the journey to see him at Aeschi. In the last letters he wrote to his son Daniel, BaudBovy described how in this chalet he had felt claustrophobic, cut off from the world.

Segantini, the great wanderer, also lived in mountain villages, first at Savognin, then at Maloja in the Grisons. Becoming part of village life, he went out hunting eagles with the villagers, and painted in the high mountains, where he improvised makeshift studios. With his strange and unusual character, filled with inspiration and fantasy, he made sense to both mountain people and villagers. His Triptych of Nature42 is an epic of human life and of the spiritual power of the mountains. Always Italian at heart, 43 Segantini is now universally considered within Switzerland as a Swiss icon.

The Segantini Museum lies a few kilometres from Maloja, in Saint Moritz.

Giovanni Giacometti (fig. 12) lived in the village of Stampa, to which he himself, his sons Alberto and Diego and his cousin Augusto Giacometti always returned, and where they frequently entertained Amiet (fig. 11), who was from Solothurn, and their friend Segantini, who lived at nearby Maloja. The valley and Mountains in Val Bregaglia, 1901 (cat. 75), were a mythical, secret place, and were also where Segantini sought refuge when it was too cold or dark in Maloja. The valley became a port of call for all these artists on their way to Milan, Munich, Paris and Pont-Aven.

After his studies, and against Hodler’s advice, Amiet made his home in his garden, both literally and figuratively, in the little village of Oschwand, a paradise that he painted on many occasions, and in the summer in the nearby artists’ colony of Hellsau. Hodler, who had initially influenced Amiet in his work, had suggested that they should share a studio in Geneva. Realising that they were following different paths, Amiet refused and settled in Oschwand, where he spent the rest of his life painting his garden and his earthly paradise. But he had nothing in common with the artists of rural primitivism.

Instead of seeking the past through the lives of the peasants, he used nature to inspire a powerful symbolic palette of colour that was vibrant and musical. In his paintings, reality is transfigured by the dynamics of colour, which endows them with the power of ‘feeling’.

The Ticino region was home to large numbers of artists’ villages, including Sagno, where the poet Francesco Chiesa and his brother the painter Pietro Chiesa lived in their old family house that appears in Village Celebration, 1901–03 (cat. 194). Both had lived in Milan and were part of Milanese life, like Luigi Rossi, who lived in the village of Tesserete but was described as ‘Swiss-Milanese-Parisian’. Pietro Chiesa and Rossi were close to Milanese humanitarian socialism, were friends of Luigi Maino, and frequented the Umanitaria di Milano. In 1895, it will be recalled, Rossi had illustrated Gottfried Keller’s fine tale A Village Romeo and Juliet. Generally speaking, the artists who worked in the Ticino region at this time had trained at the Accademia di Brera.

Mountain villages in the Valais region where artists chose to live, or to have their summer studios, included Savièse, Vercorin and Chandolin. A number of these painters had links with the School of Savièse, 44 including Marguerite Burnat-Provins who, after studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, had become Swiss by marriage.

It was in 1898 that, through her friendship with the painter Ernest Biéler,

Swiss Symbolism at the Heart of Europe

she discovered Savièse, which for her was a ‘paradise lost’ from which she would be expelled by the narrow-minded reaction of the local people to her ‘scandalous’ relationship with Paul de Kalbermatten. After training in Paris between 1880 and 1892, Biéler remained torn right up to the First World War between two different ways of life and two different aesthetics. He never gave up his dream of pursuing a career as a Symbolist painter in Paris, nor did he devote himself exclusively to rural primitivism.

Mysteries revealed retain their mystery There can be no denying that in the great age of nationalism, Symbolism was an international movement, as artists were more or less obliged to seek openings for their works in one or more foreign countries. Swiss artists naturally turned to neighbouring countries, where art schools and opportunities for exhibiting work were more developed and efficient.

Swiss Symbolism is distinguished above all by its calm and grandiose approach to nature, the deeply rooted heritage of preceding centuries. The theme of the island, as developed

by Böcklin perhaps more powerfully than any other artist, clearly became an icon of Symbolism as a whole, without recourse to words. Silence was also one of the secrets of Symbolism, leading it to the intensification of mysteries and towards the depiction of introspection and dreams. As early as the eighteenth century, Fuseli had captured the power of dreams in The Nightmare, 1790–91, of which a parallel theme was explored in one of the key works of Swiss Symbolism, Hodler’s Night, 1889–90 (cat. 2).

Dreams and the attraction of stars and the cosmos ventured beyond the bounds of astronomy to explore the imaginary regions of another life, of a journey of the soul, of the hope of a better humanity.

Symbolism, both Swiss and international, sometimes depicts our fragility, and sometimes takes flight to other worlds, in which a humanity that has overcome its destructive instincts is able live a different kind of life. The thread of Melancholia stretches from Dürer to Böcklin (cat. 41) and now on to Lars von Trier. It is only in opening up our minds, in allowing ourselves to be carried away by what Symbolism calls our soul, that we can envisage a new kind of progress: a progress that Symbolism detected and sought in cataclysms of the soul and the natural world, in the dreams and fragility on which it had looked with the clear gaze of Melancholia.

The Symbolists surveyed heaven and earth (fig. 13), drawing from them so many themes that it is both fascinating and challenging to follow them.

Their approach was not linear, but rather was closer to contemporary thinking: you can say one thing and also its opposite. Linear thought becomes impossible, as do the Cartesian and Darwinian models of the universe. Caught up in an alternative conception of the world, very close to our own today, Swiss Symbolism exerts a pull of fascination over us. Let us now enter its world.

Fig. 13 Unknown artist The Planet Mars, the Earth Visible in the Background, no date Digital composition Getty Images | World Perspectives Augusto Giacometti Phaeton under the Sign of Scorpio, cat. 229

Arnold Böcklin Melancholy, cat. 41

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Paris: One Symbolism, Many Symbolists J ea n - D avid J umeau - Lafo n d

Complex and many-stranded, the Symbolist movement straddled all the arts, including painting, the graphic arts, sculpture, the decorative arts, music and architecture. But it first appeared in literature and poetry, sometimes encouraging critical opinion to label it generally – and too hastily – as a ‘literary’ phenomenon, despite the fact that its chief protagonists proclaimed the abolition of genres and aspired to a form of expression that could go beyond and unify all forms of creation. Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon countered these ‘accusations’1 in scathing fashion, but it has to be recognised that, for reasons that were both chronological and doctrinal, French Symbolist artists did indeed claim the patronage of some of the great poets of their century, at a time when Paris was not only the capital of France but also the artistic capital of the world. If the City of Light was one of the principal centres of this resolutely international movement, it was thus not merely because of the quality of its artists but also because of the unique nature of a poetic tradition that, like the philosophical tradition in Germany, laid the theoretical foundations of late nineteenth-century French Idealism. It was in the shadow of the ‘replenishing darkness’ invoked

by Charles Baudelaire, poet of ‘Les Phares’ (The Beacons) and ‘Correspondances’, that there flourished a whole generation who laid claim to a subjectivity that was absolute, synaesthesia and the sacredness of art. It was in the ghostly gardens of Paul Verlaine, among the ‘wild oats’ and ‘the tall, slender fountains’ sobbing ecstatically ‘among the marbles’ (cat. 3). It was by looking through the eyes of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Voyant’, or seer, that painters and musicians claimed to communicate that which could not be seen, and to explore a world beyond form.

And finally, it was under the auspices of Mallarmé’s musicality (fig. 14) that the artists of the 1890s pursued their cryptic quest for form and meaning. Admittedly, poets from around the world had contributed to the creation of this seething cauldron of creativity; it was in Paris, however, that they found fame and mingled with French poets: Émile Verhaeren, Maurice Maeterlinck and Georges Rodenbach with Albert Samain and Saint-Pol-Roux; Stuart Merrill with Remy de Gourmont and Édouard Dujardin; and Francis Viélé-Griffin with Charles Guérin and Gustave Kahn.

It was also that most Parisian of Greeks, Ioannis Papadiamontopoulos, known as Jean Moréas (fig. 15), who wrote the Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. In a style characteristic of the Symbolist aesthetic, the author of Cantilènes expounded a few principles that certainly concerned literature, but that in their Idealist inspiration were applicable to every discipline: ‘Symbolist poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in a sensitive form which, nonetheless, would not form its sole purpose in itself, but which, while serving to express the Idea, would at the same time remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be viewed as stripped in any way of its sumptuous robes of extraneous analogies . . .

Thus, in this art, no image of nature, no human action, no concrete phenomenon can manifest itself by itself; they are the sensitive outward appearances intended to represent their esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas.’ Despite its convoluted

(opposite) Walter Damry Joséphin Péladan, fig. 16

1. ‘Then the accusations with anti-plastic, literary aims . . . We’ll have this type of idiocy by the spadeful,’ Gustave Moreau, Écrits sur l’art, ed.

Peter Cooke, Fontfroide, Fata Morgana, 2002, vol. 1, p. 168. ‘Every time there is no plastic invention there is a literary idea,’ Odilon Redon, À soimême. Journal (1867–1915), Paris, Corti, 1985, p. 81.

Fig. 14 Félix Vallotton Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1895 Woodcut, 34 × 22 cm Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

Fig. 15 Paul Gauguin Soyez symboliste, portrait of Jean Moréas published in La Plume, 1 January 1891 Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

2. Stuart Merrill, À Puvis de Chavannes. Poèmes, 1887–1898, Paris, Mercure de France, 1897, p. 209.

3. Albert Aurier wrote: ‘Some painters, as I am well aware, are not exactly made to be philosophers . . . they have come bearing forgotten words, in an era of scepticism . . . and this is why they have done well to be at once both artists and theorists,’ ‘Les symbolistes’, Revue encyclopédique, 1 April 1892, p. 475.

4. Maurice Denis, ‘Définition du néotraditionnisme’, Art et critique, 23 and 30 August 1890.

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perorations, Moréas’s manifesto was of crucial importance, as it envisaged a relationship between idea and form that was definitively interactive, and that ­– over and above any internal bickering – held good for French Symbolism as a whole.

In around 1890, the landscape of the Paris art scene was moreover ready for the emergence of a ‘different’ type of art: academicism was in its final throes, and Impressionism was beginning to pall (‘too slow on the uptake’, as Redon used to say).

Contemporary society, materialistic, unspiritual and mercantile, found in these different versions of naturalistic art (the first illusionistic, the second optical) a faithful illustration of the world, satisfying a bourgeoisie that in the end hung paintings by William Bouguereau or Claude Monet in exactly the same way: above the sideboard in the dining room. But the world needed an element of mystery. Two years before Moréas’s manifesto, Joris-Karl Huysmans had published À rebours (Against Nature), a novel of decay and decadence in which the sole character, weary of life and of the times in which he lives, seeks redemption through art and the rarest of sensations. Under the auspices of Baudelaire and his Anywhere Out of the World, the hero of the novel, the Duc des Esseintes, discovered Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and Charles-Marie Dulac; luxuriated in intoxicating perfumes and liqueurs; gilded the shell of a tortoise; and decorated his interiors according to the precepts expounded by Baudelaire in his preface to Edgar Allen Poe’s essay on ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, installing a room for dreaming (rêvoir) just as you might have a smoking room (fumoir) or a boudoir. In France, artistic Symbolism as a whole was to constitute a life-size, or rather culture-size, rêvoir, since – like Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde – the Symbolists mistrusted nature, which they found vulgar and predictable. Their declared ambition was altogether different: to show that which could not be seen.

It was for this reason that a whole generation, like des Esseintes, revered Moreau, the ‘workmanlike composer of dreams’, in his own words, and Puvis de Chavannes, whose frescoes, as Merrill wrote, depicted ‘The ancient Paradise where the fathers among whom we are numbered brought together more beautiful bodies and less base souls.’2 The dreamlike worlds of Redon, the ‘inextricable’ engravings of Rodolphe Bresdin, to borrow Robert de Montesquiou’s expression, and the equally dreamlike images of the English Pre-Raphaelites were further manifestations of artists who yearned to break with both the strictures of academic teaching and the diktats of ‘plein air’ painting. But this was a world of the imagination that also included masters of an earlier age, Turner and Blake, and before them Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer and the Italian painters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, all of whom were viewed as demiurges in their art.

But although these tutelary figures were present in their minds, the young Symbolist artists were by no means their slavish imitators; Symbolism found expression in a variety of different aesthetic movements, but what distinguished it, beyond questions of concept and form, was the affirmation of individual approaches that were more irreducible than ever. The Idealist painter created his universe, relayed his vision via his brush, and gave form to his ‘idea’, thereby making the task of the historian who wants to paint a more general picture that much more difficult.

This vibrant creative scene in Paris manifested itself in two ways: through the publication of policies and manifestos, and through the appearance of new exhibition spaces. The importance of manifestos may be attributed not just to the incorrigible French penchant for phrase-making, but also to the need to justify an aesthetic that was so strongly opposed to naturalism.3 A few years after Moréas’s article, the world of art took up the cause: in 1890 Maurice Denis published his ‘Définition du néotraditionnisme’, 4 and in 1891 Joséphin Péladan (fig. 16) proclaimed in a number of texts the Rosicrucian aesthetic that was later expounded in L’Art idéaliste et mystique. Finally, to cite only the most important figures in

Paris: One Symbolism, Many Symbolists

the movement, between 1890 and 1892 the critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier published three articles of fundamental importance which, taking the example of Vincent van Gogh for the first,5 Paul Gauguin for the second,6 and a wider group of artists for the third,7 set out a detailed definition of what a work of art should be (ideist, symbolist, synthetic, subjective and decorative). Beyond the subtleties in his approach to the relationship between the idea and its visual form, to a variety of different formulations and to the sometimes fractious artistic cliques, French Symbolism is here clearly identifiable with a theoretical framework that has at last reached a degree of coherence. While later interpretations, often partial or influenced by a dogmatically ‘modernist’ approach to art history, were to attempt to erect barriers between artists or groups of artists (synthetists and ‘Nabis’ here, Neo-Impressionists there, Idealists and ‘imagists’ somewhere else, and so on), the creative turmoil of the 1890s created the spectacle of a multitude of painters maintaining close relations with each other, sharing the same beliefs, often exhibiting together, changing places and circles, adopting one style or watchword one day and another the next, far removed from the artificial constructs, the watertight labels and the rigid visions that studies of fifty years later were to describe. In their attempts to oppose different styles and tendencies in such a crude fashion, art historians – faced with a Paris art world that was more complex and more aesthetically multi-faceted than the Symbolist movements of Belgium, Switzerland, Italy or Germany – have often resorted to a simplistic approach, to reiterating certain personal antagonisms word for word, or simply to applying retrospectively to Symbolism a Manichaean approach echoing their own vision of twentieth-century art, based on fantasy. In this approach, ‘progressive’ artists were set against ‘conservatives’, and ‘literary’ artists against ‘formalists’. The reality of French Symbolism bears little relation to fictions such as these. The painter Maurice Denis, who expressed his belief that a painting was first and foremost a ‘flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’ (a declaration which, through no doing of his own and rather to his annoyance, was to become synonymous with modernity),8 was also the artist of the ‘sujet intérieur’, of spiritual fervour and the ‘Catholic mystery’, who defended the ‘ideists’ in La Revue blanche in 1892,9 and whom Octave Mirbeau, in his virulent criticism of ‘Artists of the soul’ who were supposedly ‘literary’, lumped in with Alphonse Osbert, Carlos Schwabe, Armand Point and Alexandre Séon, and was particularly critical of.10 Joséphin Péladan, magus of the Rosicrucian order, scourge of the contemporary world and admirer of the ancients, often accused flatly of championing a conservative world vision, was also the figure who decried academicism and welcomed to his salon artists as innovative as Ferdinand Hodler, Félix Vallotton, Charles Filiger, Fernand Khnopff, George Minne and the young Georges Rouault. The critic Alphonse Germain, who was close to Péladan, nonetheless proposed and theorised about an Idealist Neo-Impressionism that formed a link between the legacy of Georges Seurat and the art of Séon.11 Finally, Aurier, considered as a hero of the defence of the Nabis (a ‘group’ who never were one, and whose name, for private use and never mentioned in the public sphere at the time, has only been recognised as such relatively recently),12 nevertheless in his article entitled ‘Les symbolistes’ mixed up together, in one capacity or another, Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, the Pre-Raphaelites, Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Sérusier, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Filiger, Seurat, Charles Guilloux, Henry de Groux, Séon and Albert Trachsel – in other words, Synthetists, Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, mystical landscape painters, artists who had exhibited at the Salon de la Rose+Croix or the Salon des Indépendants, artists who defied categorisation, and more. It becomes clear that, contrary to many analyses, Symbolism in Paris was neither a simple matter

Fig. 16 Walter Damry Joséphin Péladan, 1894 Photograph, 19 × 12 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris Inv. Pho1992-18

5. Albert Aurier, ‘Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh’, Mercure de France, January 1890.

6. Albert Aurier, ‘Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, March 1891.

7. Albert Aurier, ‘Les symbolistes’, op. cit.

8. Maurice Denis was to distance himself from the too-formalist interpretation of his words: ‘It is . . . the first sentence that is the most read . . . I wrote it at the age of twenty, under the influence of the ideas of Gauguin and Sérusier’, Maurice Denis, Le Ciel et l’Arcadie, Jean-Paul Bouillon (ed.), Paris, Hermann, 1993, p. 5, note 3.

9. ‘No one has better understood than they the beauty of a line or coloration. And we cannot see that they would in no way be more painterly if they took their motifs from compositions of villages, boulevards and faubourgs,’ Maurice Denis (under the pseudonym Pierre L. Maud), ‘Notes d’art et d’esthétique’, La Revue blanche, June 1892, pp. 364–65.

10. Octave Mirbeau, ‘Les artistes de l’âme’, Le Journal, 23 February 1896.

11. See Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, ‘Le néoimpressionnisme idéaliste d’Alexandre Séon’, in Rossella Froissart, Laurent Houssais and JeanFrançois Luneau (eds.), Du romantisme à l’Art déco, lectures croisées, mélanges offerts à JeanPaul Bouillon, Rennes, PUR, 2011, pp. 63–76.

12. The term ‘Nabi’ was never used in public before the 1940s, as Catherine Méneux pointed out in her ‘Nabis’ seminar in the series Redefining European Symbolism (Amsterdam, 26 November 2010).

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Fig. 17 Unknown artist Caricature of the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, 1892 Unidentified press cutting Next to Théo Wagner and Alexandre Séon can be seen works by the Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler, Albert Trachsel and Auguste de Niederhäusern, known as Rodo Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

Fig. 18 Erik Satie. Sonneries de la Rose+Croix Cover of the score of Sonneries decorated with a red chalk drawing by Puvis de Chavannes depicting a detail from Bellum, 27 × 22 cm Paris, Salon de la Rose+Croix, no date (1892) Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

13. See Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Les Peintres de l’âme, le symbolisme idéaliste en France, Brussels, Musée d’Ixelles, Antwerp, Pandora, 1999.

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nor a black-and-white world, but rather a subtle constellation of shifting colours, within which artists, aesthetics, influences and inspirations constantly mingled, overlapped and evolved.

The diverse nature of the Symbolists’ exhibition spaces adds a further layer to this already complex picture. The secession from the official Salon had led to the birth in 1890 of the Sociéte Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which took a more welcoming approach to new movements than the Société des Artistes Français. Some Symbolist artists continued nevertheless to favour the official Salon, while others preferred the new one. In parallel, the Salon de Indépendants, which had been in existence since 1884, was another source of encouragement for artists lacking in any official qualifications; it was there, for example, that the critic Roger Marx discovered the Idealist landscape painter Guilloux. Meanwhile, between 1891 and 1897 the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery brought together artists from virtually every new movement in its ‘Impressionist and Symbolist’ shows. These included not only individual exhibitions devoted to the paintings of van Gogh, Maxime Maufra, Armand Seguin and Dulac, but also group exhibitions featuring most of the Symbolist artists: this was virtually the only venue, for instance, to show the Symbolist pastels of Jeanne Jacquemin. Specifically Symbolist circles, finally, also appeared, consisting principally of the six Salons de la Rose+Croix, organised by Péladan, and a handful of ‘Artistes de l’âme’ (Artists of the Soul) exhibitions mounted between 1894 and 1896 by the review L’Art et la vie.13 These colourful events, with their rather ostentatious air of taking a stand (fig. 17), received mixed reviews but caused a considerable stir and attracted the whole of the art world and all the critics, to the point where they have themselves assumed an oftrepeated symbolic importance in the historiography of the period. Over twenty years after the ‘gestes esthétiques’ of the Rosicrucians, Marcel Proust was himself to make use of Péladan and his salons several times in À la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in order to give the flavour of the artistic context and atmosphere of the age. Nor were dealers such as Georges Petit and Paul Durand-Ruel, whose role became of crucial importance during the last third

Paris: One Symbolism, Many Symbolists

Fig. 19 Charles-Marie Dulac The Tiber Valley at Assisi, 1898 Oil on canvas, 41 × 46 cm Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

of the century, immune to the creative turmoil of Symbolism. The Salon de la Rose+Croix (fig. 18) was itself displayed in the galleries of Petit and Durand-Ruel (in 1892 and 1897), and these influential figures also devoted solo shows and retrospectives to Idealist painters.

The literature of art, artistic coteries and exhibition spaces thus all combine to reveal the extent to which Paris was the theatre in which the many ‘scenes’ of Symbolism were played out. From this explosion of creativity, from which it is difficult for a brief survey to extrapolate any aesthetic coherence, or on the other hand to extract any misguided classifications, we should draw a deeper significance.

If a ‘Nabi’ such as Paul Ranson was exploring esotericism and peopling his canvases with enchantresses, while an Idealist such as Séon was painting landscapes that were purely Synthetic; if Gauguin was posing metaphysical questions such as Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

(1897–98) while Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer was channelling the spirit of Rodenbach through a ‘simple’ portrait; if the devout Franciscan Dulac was painting nothing but landscapes (fig. 19) while Maurice Denis devoted himself to a powerfully iconographic Annunciation; and if Osbert was creating a hypnotic series of processions of enigmatic figures while Redon was delineating a figure of Parsifal, 1892, with his helmet and lance (fig. 20), then it becomes clear that beneath the cliques, styles, genres (whether landscapes, figures, portraits, myths, ‘allegories’ or others) and manifestos is concealed a deeper quest, capable of transcending the alleged artistic quarrels and the byzantine debates around the different ways of articulating content and form. All these Symbolists, from Filiger to Armand Point and from Louis W. Hawkins to Émile Bernard, as well as from Camille Claudel to Samain and from Claude Debussy to Émile Gallé, deployed strictly defined formal methods in a quest that doubtless remained beyond expression, but that was of a depth that in itself generated inspiration and ‘meaning’, both plastic and ‘spiritual’.

For the French Symbolists, ‘to clothe the Idea in a sensitive form’14 was indeed to render the invisible visible.

Fig. 20 Odilon Redon Parsifal, 1892 Lithograph, 32 × 24 cm Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond collection

14. Jean Moréas, ‘Le symbolisme’, Le Figaro, 18 September 1886.

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Brussels: Crossroads of Symbolism M iche l D r aguet

The ‘Symbolist moment’, a period of decisive importance in Belgian history, took shape at a time when Brussels was emerging as a crossroads of European modernism.1 In so doing, it combined national – and later regional – sensibilities with the universalist aspirations that characterised the avant-garde movements of the time. Hence Brussels is recognised first and foremost as the setting in which initiatives taken elsewhere – in Paris, London and Berlin, the great centres of artistic activity in the nineteenth century – were disseminated. In this context, the foundation of the Cercle des XX in 1883 constituted an essential step in initiating the Secession movement that defined not only the art scene at the end of the century but also the art market that accompanied it.2 It was a phenomenon that was to make a lasting impression on the rise of Symbolism in Belgium, by associating it, as early as 1890, with the spirit of renewal in the decorative arts and then with the advent of Art Nouveau.3 In the long view, artists – to simplify the scenario – were positioned against the world, adopting a defiant attitude that was to rebound upon them by the end of the century, as science disputed their position of primacy and social developments found expression in growing tensions. The artist now stood in opposition to society, as the witness to occult powers that destroyed the illusion of progress through reason.

The beneficiary of this crisis in values was the subject, which in the end became the sole point of reference through which reality could be grasped. Now reality could no longer be confused with a truth that was henceforth inaccessible.

Félicien Rops was to dismiss it mockingly as an old dream that had lost its relevance; Fernand Khnopff placed it in the distant past, and Jean Delville in an unwavering devotion to the traditional order. Once more, the literary factor played a decisive role, not so much by making the visible subservient to the legible in the academic manner, as by generating multiple strategies, from illustration to transposition, to assert the opening up – now with no turning back – of meaning.

The avant-garde rubbed shoulders with academicism within the Symbolist nebula, the structure of which derived from the questioning inherent to the realist aesthetic as it developed in Belgium in around 1878, with the aim of forming the cornerstone of an identity that was at once national and modern. 4 Moreover, the actions of the literary world could not be confined to the emergence of a ‘literary art’ that the most literary of painters – Rops and Khnopff – were never to tire of repudiating.

The rise of Symbolism in Belgium followed many different paths, leading via literature and music to a culmination in artworks and architecture. Painting served as a point of convergence, although Symbolism did not in itself define a particular way of painting. A state of mind more than a style, it had as much to do with tradition as with any issues shaped by the debate around modern art. In Belgium, Symbolism was not limited to a reaction against realism. It consisted more of a broadening of the notion of reality that, while adopting the opposite viewpoint to material positivism, was interested less in the appearance of nature than in the questions that these same limits imposed on consciousness. With Symbolism, painting attached itself to this self that poets, playwrights and novelists were putting in the spotlight in all

(opposite) Fernand Khnopff Art or Caresses, fig. 22

1. Bruxelles: Carrefour de cultures, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Europalia), 2000.

2. See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-siècle Europe, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996. On the Cercle des XX, see Michel Draguet, ‘Les Vingt et le pouvoir. La mythologie des ruptures à l’épreuve des faits (1883–1893)’, in Ginette Kurgan-Van Hentenryk and Valérie Montens (eds.), L’Argent des arts: La politique artistique des pouvoirs publics en Belgique de 1830 à 1940, Brussels, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2001, pp. 99–112.

3. This question is explored further in Philippe Roberts-Jones (ed.), Bruxelles fin de siècle, Paris, Flammarion, 1994.

4. This way of framing the question was at the heart of Ensor’s approach until 1885 (see Michel Draguet, Ensor ou la fantasmagorie, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, pp. 69–101). On the Symbolist dimension of Ensor’s work, see my Symbolisme en Belgique, Antwerp, Fonds Mercator, 2004, 2010, pp. 136–53.

Fig. 21 Jean Delville Dead Orpheus, 1893 Oil on canvas, 82 × 103 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 12209

its various states. Symbolism thus penetrated the world of painting and sculpture on the fringes of the major debates that animated the Belgian literary scene from 1885.

5. Albert Mockel, Esthétique du symbolisme.

Propos de littérature (1894), Stéphane Mallarmé, un héros (1899). Textes divers, preceded by a study

by Michel Otten, Brussels, Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises, 1962.

6. On Khnopff, see my book Khnopff ou l’Ambigu poétique, Paris, Flammarion, Brussels, Crédit Communal, 1995.

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Khnopff and the ‘Internationale symboliste’ In 1886 the Cercle des XX in Brussels forged a close relationship with Paris, which was evolving rapidly from Impressionism to Neo-Impressionism. Questioning the very notion of reality, some artists such as Henry Van de Velde endowed Neo-Impressionism with a dimension that was symbolic if not Symbolist. Exploring what would make sense within the spectacle of reality without yielding to the transience of the moment, landscape opened the way to a Symbolism that would make its first appearance in the experiments of James Whistler.

Xavier Mellery turned away from this idea of the reversible nature of reality, his allegorical works embodying the ideality of a sublimated reality. While his animist interiors bore witness to the same aspiration to capture the unreal at the heart of the everyday, his panels on gold backgrounds attested to a striving for allegory in a conceptual universe now proposed as a ‘modern synthesis’. The fleeting symbol, taking form through ever-shifting sensations, was matched by the unequivocal quality of meaning that was intrinsic to allegory. These two poles account for an ambivalence on which the poet Albert Mockel was to erect one of his most comprehensive theoretical writings.5 Within the Cercle des XX, Khnopff embodied the principal way into the Symbolism that Émile Verhaeren was to define – with regard to Khnopff – in a series of articles published by L’Art moderne from 1886.6 Khnopff’s elitist oeuvre reveals the slow maturing of an imaginative world that brought together French literature, the mystical realism of the early Flemish artists, the sublimated Middle Ages of the English Pre-Raphaelites, the dream-like mythographies of Gustave Moreau, the musical harmonies of Whistler and the ambiguous photographic illusions of artists such as Alfred Stevens and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Khnopff’s painting, an oeuvre of masterly skill and structure, consecrates a mimetic illusion elevated to the status of a mystery. The draughtsmanship prevails over the painting in order to underline the conceptual dimension of an approach that tends towards writing.

Brussels: Crossroads of Symbolism

From 1892 to 1897, Khnopff took part in four of the six salons organised in Paris by Joséphin Péladan, who hailed Khnopff’s work as a model as well as an ideal. His esoteric compositions testify to a deeply considered hermeticism and desire for concealment. His reputation spread beyond national boundaries to reach Munich, Vienna and London, where Khnopff spent several months of every year.

Yet his work within the Cercle des XX seemed doomed to failure. The ‘Internationale symboliste’ that he hoped to create within the ranks of the XX collapsed after Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau repeatedly refused to let him exhibit their work.

Pain and decoration Commenting on the subject of the Salon of 1892 – dominated by the Georges Seurat retrospective – Verhaeren drew attention to the development within the Cercle des XX of a ‘literary painting’ that confirmed ‘the resurgence of an Idealism that was to be known as symbolism, intellectualism or esotericism’. In parallel with the revival of the decorative arts, Symbolism gained ground and followers. The work of George Minne, exhibited in 1890, combined death and motherhood in a synthetic vision to which he was to remain faithful.7 The artist’s sensibility found expression in a stripping back that focuses on the essential and concentrates its emotional charge in a form of painful autism. With Minne, Symbolism bears witness to the existential angst that was expressed in the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and that was to have a decisive influence on Expressionism.

Together with that of Jan Toorop, who from 1890 adopted a Symbolist spirit marked by the ornamental, Minne’s work formed a link between the culture of Symbolism and the revival of form characterised by the decorative ideal. This ornement de la durée betrays an awareness unfolding painfully in a hostile world. This Symbolism of withdrawal and reclusion so amply illustrated in the work of Minne was soon accompanied by the rise of the objet d’art as the fermenting agent of an ideal world to be created.

Although the figureheads of Symbolism balked at exhibiting at salons of the Cercle des XX, these shows nevertheless attracted work from throughout Europe, including works by the English painter Ford Madox Brown (1893); the Italian Giovanni Segantini (1890); the French artists Odilon Redon (1886, 1890), Paul Gauguin (1889, 1891) and Maurice Denis (1892); the German Max Klinger (1889), who during his time in Brussels, from April to August 1877, came under the combined influence of Antoine Wiertz and Rops; and the Dutch artist Johan Thorn-Prikker (1893). They thus bore witness to the rise of a Symbolism that in the early 1890s not only became established as such, but also permeated European art as a whole.

Fig. 22 Fernand Khnopff Art or Caresses, 1896 Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 151 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 6768

Fig. 23 Félicien Rops The Supreme Vice, 1884 Lead pencil, Indian ink and white gouache highlights on paper, 23,8 × 16 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 11996

7. Robert Hooze (ed.), George Minne en de kunst rond 1900, exh. cat., Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 18 September–5 December 1982, Gemeentekrediet.

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Fig. 24 Xavier Mellery The Fall of the Last Leaves of Autumn or Autumn, c. 1890 Watercolour, ink, charcoal and black chalk on paper pasted on board; silver and gold ground, 92 × 59 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 3913

8. On Péladan and Belgium, see Christophe Beaufils, Joséphin Péladan, 1858–1918. Essai sur une maladie du lyrisme, Grenoble, Jérôme Millon, 1993, as well as Splendeurs de l’idéal, Rops, Khnopff, Delville, Liège, Musée de l’Art Wallon, 1996.

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The esoteric chapels of Brussels Standing in opposition to this broad conception was a Symbolist esotericism that was to develop rapidly in Brussels, hard on the heels of the initiatives Péladan had taken in Paris to restore the Rosicrucian Order.8 More allegorical than Symbolist, this hermetic movement drew inspiration from a number of traditions, ranging from the Kabbalah to Wagner, to draw a symbolic portrait of a society deemed decadent. In 1893 Péladan, endowing artists with the status of initiates, launched the salons, or ‘gestes esthétiques’, which until 1897 brought together these ‘exceptional beings’ devoted to the cult of Beauty. Péladan’s aesthetic aspired to total art, declaring the unity of the spirit as a magical power. Brussels quickly emerged as one of the richest centres of Idealism in Europe. There Péladan’s artistic vision exercised a decisive influence over a new generation of artists, who set out to give expression through allegory to a form of beauty that would celebrate the moral values of a society devoted to order and virtue. This nucleus of artists grouped around Jean Delville was to evolve on the fringes of the art system and market. Whether it was the ‘Pour l’art’ group founded by Delville in 1892, the Kumris independent group for esoteric studies set up in 1890 on the initiative of Francis Vurgey, from Nancy, or the Salons d’Art Idéaliste of 1896, 1897 and 1898, esotericism brought together various initiatives marked by the aspiration towards the absolute, which was encapsulated by Delville’s Angel of Splendour, painted in 1894.

Under Delville’s aegis, Idealist art defined itself in the conjunction of a hermeneutic (the work as a representative sign of an eternal idea), a mystique (the artist seeking harmony between the three great Life Words, the Natural, the Human and the Divine) and an aesthetic rooted in a respect for tradition.

Far from the cities The city was the centre of modernity, even in its vision of nature. By the end of the century this modernist frenzy, now prey to doubt, had metamorphosed into a critique of the city as an instrument of social repression, while conservative circles saw it as the crucible of a new type of curse: the dictatorship of the majority. The evolution of Idealism thus reflects an absolute mistrust of the universe.

In this context, the Symbolist landscape celebrated the natural value of the individual.

Initiated with Romanticism, this new relationship was tinged by the end of the century with existential questions linked to the crisis in society that was now afflicting the liberal state.

While the landscapes of Rops expressed the energy of a fierce temperament, those of Khnopff took account of the fundamental questions then being posed. As an urban phenomenon, Symbolism developed largely by measuring, in terms of modernity and its technological innovations, the relationship ­– necessarily a conflicting one – between nature and culture, civilization and countryside. Coupled with a crisis that was destabilising the traditional structures of society, this relationship took the form of a new ‘return to basics’ that redefined society’s relationship with nature. The movement was an extension of the primitivist view that had developed in the wake of the English Pre-Raphaelites and their revival of a vision of a fifteenth century infused with mysticism. An antidote to a modernity that was judged irreligious, this return to a past made popular by Brugesla-Morte, published in 1892, was paralleled by a desire to escape from the physical settings of contemporary life. The rural exodus became synonymous with a return to society’s roots, at the very point when the rural population, faced with impoverishment and disintegrating social structures, were deserting the landscapes that Verhaeren described in Les Campagnes hallucinées in order to swell the ranks of the urban sub-proletariat.

The Symbolist aesthetic brought about an evolution in the depiction of nature. In Flanders, the rejection of modern urbanism was accompanied by a return to a countryside where Idealism would meet primitive Christianity. This appeared as an antidote to the ‘poison’ of socialism that was taking hold in the industrial cities. It galvanised a Flemish identity through a combination of the archaic traditionalism of the land and the conservatism of rural thinking.

Viewed from this perspective, the artists who gathered in the small village of Laetham-Saint-

Brussels: Crossroads of Symbolism

Martin were working to redefine the culture of Symbolism,9 which opened the way to the Expressionism that was to flourish between the wars. This current of Expressionism was to define the cultural identity of Flanders in a profound way. The success of the Laethem artists was sealed in this encounter between a traditionalist Catholic discourse and a peasant world perceived as timeless. A view emerged that, while placing the individual in the foreground, laid the foundations for a cultural identity founded on the continuity of tradition. The ideal that took shape at Laetham and which – through a process of influence and reaction – gave rise to the Expressionism of the inter-war years found comparable forms of expression in Wallonia, even if these did not meet with the same success.

The roots of Expressionism Léon Spilliaert was born when Symbolism, then nascent, was about to find acceptance in many different forms.10 Introduced to modern literature at an early age, this avid reader of Nietzsche initially channelled his energies into writing, in which he confirmed the individuality of his approach, carving out a vision in the Mallarméan sense until he attained a language in its nocturnal state, and in which reason was abolished in order to return in transfigured form as images.

Spilliaert very soon displayed a remarkable mastery of this plastic vocabulary, to which he lent a power of expression that was in sharp contrast with the deplorable repertoire of the fin de siècle. Using a limited range of materials – pencil, watercolour and Indian ink applied in washes and with brushes – he produced a wealth of effects, lending the notion of impression a value that was more psychic than visual. Like that of James Ensor twenty years earlier, Spilliaert’s oeuvre grew at the point where ‘provincial marginalism’ was put to the test by the spirit of artistic competition that could only be found in the capital. The furious vitality that characterised the artistic scene in Brussels thus matched the temperament of a man whose life in Ostend was both solitary and neurasthenic.

Human anguish, hitherto transposed into images, now became the subject of the work itself. It fed the idea of the ‘black’ that Spilliaert isolated from the illuminated sign. Black became the agent of a process of derealisation that filled his landscapes and figures.

His city of Ostend was also to become the setting for a shift in perspective. The crisis was primarily that of the intellectualism inherent in the literary imagination that Spilliaert likened to Symbolism. Spilliaert projected himself onto the city of Ostend, the streets of which he roamed during his sleepless nights. This identification of individual and place was a crucial factor in the evolution of his work. In the face of this infinite universe whose future requires the movement of form, the human figure expresses a wait that is contained wholly in its gaze. In the face of a sea of existential anguish, man is condemned to the passivity of a lookout. In the face of man, the object captured in its solitary confinement embodies a state of permanence. Through the image, Spilliaert conducts an investigation into absence which, in the innermost recesses of the night, comes to visit such a deserted spot.

As we have seen, Belgian Symbolism, which emerged in around 1883–84, spanned a multiplicity of manifestations. Between 1886 and 1894 these were the subject of numerous theoretical interpretations. After that, this range of significations metamorphosed into distinct perspectives: from the rejection of easel painting in favour of the decorative arts to the beginnings of Expressionism in the work of Spilliaert. An exploded reality, Symbolism constituted a cultural fiction. This was expressed in a double movement: on the one hand, a poetic in tune with the contemporary condition, and on the other, a call for the theory by which modernity took an unequivocally conceptual turn. Even if some of the Symbolists were to live on far into the twentieth century, Symbolism was to fade away with the First World War, although it continued to exist. The flourishing of war memorials that took their inspiration largely from the Idealist repertoire was to be their swansong.

But Symbolism lived on to feed new aspirations. Thus we might be tempted to end this account with a question. What part – if only through the leitmotif of mystery that was to form one of the central elements in the poetic of the Belgian master of Surrealism – can Symbolism claim to play in the quest of René Magritte?

Fig. 25 Gustave De Smet Eve or the Apple, c. 1912 Oil on canvas, 119 × 157 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 6979

Fig. 26 Léon Spilliaert Self-Portrait, 1907 Watercolour, Indian ink and coloured pencil on paper, 48.8 × 63 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels Inv. 6923

9. On this subject, see Piet Boyens, Symbolisme et expressionnisme en Flandre, Tielt, Lannoo, 1993.

10. On Spilliaert, see Léon Spilliaert, un esprit libre, exh. cat., Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 2006–07.

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Vienna and Munich: the Cosmopolitan facet of Symbolism A l exa n de r K l ee

Vienna and Munich, in around 1900, were centres for the arts that were interlocked in competition and mutual influence. Both cities had artists who took up Symbolist subject matter. Vienna’s international connections explain the impact of artistic figures such as Vincent van Gogh and Giovanni Segantini and above all Arnold Böcklin, Ludwig von Hofmann and Max Klinger, whose work was enthusiastically received and often represented in exhibitions. This is evidenced by the Secession purchasing paintings by van Gogh and Segantini for what was to become the internationally oriented Moderne Galerie, Vienna, and by gifts of major works by Max Klinger, such as The Judgement of Paris (1885–87) from a collector1 and Christ on Olympus (1897) from the artist himself in 1901.2 The Austrian Ministry of Education acquired Böcklin’s painting Sea Idyll (1887)3 for the Moderne Galerie in 1902. 4 Symbolist works were shown in public collections in Vienna and were greatly esteemed. For that reason, an encyclopaedic examination of Symbolism in Vienna alone, to say nothing of a comparison with Munich, would exceed the scope of the present essay. Moreover, an examination of the interchanges between the two cities and the differences between Viennese and Munich Symbolism is an almost impossible task. To take two examples, Albin Egger-Lienz liked to identify himself with the South Tyrol but studied in Munich, while the Viennese artist Karl Mediz lived in Dachau for a time and ultimately resided in Dresden.

The movements of artists contributed to the spread of Symbolism, giving rise to an extensive exploration of its artistic possibilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In what follows, I will merely single out examples that characterise the different strands of Symbolism and show connections between Munich and Vienna. A precise analysis of the ambiguities and uncertainties of subject matter that were deliberately incorporated into Symbolist paintings would also exceed the framework of an essay. I can offer only suggestions for their interpretation here.

In addition to the artists mentioned above, one of the central personalities who left profound traces in Munich and Vienna was Franz von Stuck. The Munich Secessionist exhibited two versions of Sin at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 18925 and was represented again in 1894 by a group of pictures, including such major works as the large version of Sin (1893) and War (1894). His repeated participation in exhibitions at the Vienna Secession6 and the award of the Order of the Iron Crown of the Austrian Empire, Third Class, from Emperor Franz Josef in 1899 testify to his success in Vienna.7 This is borne out by an effusive letter from Egon Schiele to Franz von Stuck, which gives some idea of the high regard in which he was held. 8 His contacts with Vienna date even further back. Between 1882 and 1884 von Stuck had already worked on drawings for Allegorien und Embleme (Allegories and Emblems), a volume published by the Gerlach und Schenk publishing house in Vienna. Other artists who contributed to this publication, notably Max Klinger and Gustav Klimt, would also play a central role in the Vienna Secession.

Von Stuck took up themes in his paintings that were in keeping with the sublimated sexuality of the nineteenth century. Whether centaurs, fauns, sphinxes

(opposite) Koloman Moser Self-Portrait, fig. 33

1. Max Klinger, The Judgement of Paris, 1885–87, oil on canvas, plaster and painted wood (frame), 370 × 752 × 65 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

2. Max Klinger, Christ on Olympus, 1897, oil on canvas; pedestal figures of Hope and Pangs of Conscience, marble and wood, central section: 358 × 722 × 5 cm, wings: 358 × 85.5 × 3 cm, predella: 92 × 722 × 5 cm, frame: 380 × 931.5 × 22 cm, total dimensions: 549 × 965 × 65 cm, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, since 1938 in the Belvedere, Vienna.

3. Arnold Böcklin, Sea Idyll, 1887, oil on wood, 167 × 224 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

4. Ludwig Hevesi, Acht Jahre Secession, Vienna, Verlagsbuchhandlung Carl Kongen, 1906, pp. 364–65.

5. Franz von Stuck, Sin, 1893, oil on canvas, 95 × 59.7 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; War, 1894, oil on canvas, 244 × 273 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. See Hevesi, Acht Jahre Secession (see note 4), pp. 531ff.

6. Christian M. Nebehay, Ver Sacrum, 1898–1903, Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1979, p. 289.

7. Heinrich Voss, Franz von Stuck: Werkkatalog der Gemälde, Munich, Prestel Verlag, 1973, p. 72.

8. Ibid., p. 91 note 36.

Fig. 27 Gustav Klimt Detail of the Beethoven Frieze (Enemy Powers), 1902 Casein paint, layers of stucco, pencil, applications of glass, mother of pearl and other materials, gold leaf, 215 × 630 cm Belvedere, Vienna On loan to the Vienna Secession Building

Fig. 28 Hans Tichy At the Fountain of Love, 1908 Oil on canvas, 227 × 327 cm Belvedere, Vienna Inv. 896 9. Franz von Stuck, Innocentia, 1889, oil on canvas, 68 × 61 cm, W. A. Stewart Jr., Palm Beach, Florida; Sin (see note 5); Guardian of Paradise, 1889, oil on canvas, 250 × 167 cm, private collection; Luzifer, 1890, oil on canvas, 161 × 152 cm, National Gallery of Art, Sofia.

10. Gustav Klimt, Adele-Bloch Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver leaf, and gold leaf on canvas, 140 × 140 cm, Neue Galerie, New York; Judith I, 1901, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 84 × 42 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

11. Hermann Müller, Marina Schuster, Noemi Smolik and Claudia Wagner (eds.), Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851–1913): Lieber sterben, als meine Ideale verleugnen!, exh. cat., Villa Stuck, Munich, and Wien Museum, Munich, 2009, pp. 40–41.

12. Ibid., p. 137.

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or moral symbols of innocence – Innocentia (1889) and Sin (1893), The Guardian of Paradise (1889) and the latter’s counterpart, Lucifer (1890) 9 – they reflect human drives and sensuality.

A similar sublimation of the virtuous and erotically seductive woman can be found in Gustav Klimt’s idealised portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and in Judith I.10 The subject’s opaque glaze keeps the viewer at a distance, preventing interaction.

Like von Stuck, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach also came to Vienna from Munich in 1892.

His manner, his interest in nudist culture, his rejection of monogamy and his vegetarian diet repeatedly caused a stir and triggered scandals. With his simple hair shirt and long hair, and his founding of a quasi-religious community, he was closer to Christian iconography, becoming a role model for the Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement. His scandalous behaviour contributed to the success of his exhibition at the Österreichischer Kunstverein, but the organisers embezzled the money that had been made, leaving him ruined.11 Diefenbach’s Symbolist, esoteric paintings inspired artists such as Frantisek Kupka and Hugo Höppner, alias Fidus, who had become the symbol of the Lebensreform and the Wandervogel movements, and whose paintings, such as Prayer of Light (1894),12 became popular icons of the Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement). However, esotericism, spiritualism and theosophy were not powerful currents in Munich, but as fashionable preoccupations they reflected the Zeitgeist and they spread abroad, notably to Vienna, as exemplified by the figure of Rudolf Steiner.

Ethereal figures of angels are thus also found in Broncia Koller-Pinell’s Orange Grove on the French Riviera.13 Using a Pointillist style, she created a carpet of flower and plants which the angels seem to float above while still feeling integrated into the decoration, thanks to the dabbed application of the paint. The works of Erich Mallina, who worked at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, reveal theosophical references.

Mallina’s Procession of Angels is organised into a series of staggered planes and uses an ornamental motif to produce an abstract quality.14 Mallina surely had Alfred Roller’s Sinking Night (1902),15 a wall decorated with angels, in mind. Sinking Night was produced for the Beethoven exhibition at the Secession in 1902, at which Klinger’s Beethoven as Zeus was presented in a sacred installation.

Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (fig. 27) was also part of the overall concept of this exhibition. It is an homage to Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony is based in turn on Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’.16 The frieze depicts the suffering and vices of humanity. The virtuous man, protected by genii, confronts the sufferings and vices in order to overpower them with his creative powers.

Vienna and Munich: the Cosmopolitan facet of Symbolism

Fig. 29 Rudolf Jettmar Ladon and the Hesperides, 1905 Oil on canvas, 68 × 123.5 cm Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, Weimar Inv. G 2175

These powers are symbolised by the giant Typhoeus and his three daughters: the gorgons Sickness, Madness and Death. Lasciviousness, Wantonness, Intemperance and Gnawing Grief also confront humanity. Yearning for Happiness is quenched by Poetry; through the arts, humanity finds the way to pure joy, pure happiness and pure love – to paradise. Klimt is particularly successful in visually formulating the existential fears of and threats to humanity on the short connecting wall with the giant as a hybrid creature – a behemoth-ape-snake.

The parable-like relationship between man and ape was treated in a completely different way by Gabriel von Max, who was born in Prague and worked in Munich.

Max was very interested in spiritualism and theosophy, as well as evolutionary theory and other scientific questions. For him, science and the supernatural were not in contradiction. Rather, he attempted to explain spiritualist issues via science.

At the same time, he eliminated the separation between animal and human behaviour in his work. His interest in apes and their behaviour, inspired by Darwin, led to paintings such as The Anthropology Lesson, in which the roles are reversed: the mother ape, who is on a leash and is holding a doll on her lap, is teaching an attentive child ape.17 The humanoid doll becomes a toy and an object in a demonstration, while the apes interact socially. The scene presents a semantic dislocation: the chain on the female monkey contrasts with the scene of the apes sitting on a bed in a boudoir setting, altering the meaning. The relationship of subject and object, the individuality of the ape, takes on a new significance.

Critical questioning like that in Gabriel von Max’s work was remote from the intentions of the Viennese artist Hans Tichy. In his painting At the Fountain of Love (fig. 28), women’s bodies float trance-like in a state of levitation, devoted entirely to love.

Tichy conveys the impression of a ritual act of love taking place between the man pushing his way in from the right and an only timidly resisting woman.

With the floating putti, it combines the prospect of happy motherhood with the erotic aspect of the woman surrendering to love. Thus his painting seems to have a programme antithetical to Segantini’s Punishment of Lust (1891),18 in which the women seem to float in a very similar way, and The Evil Mothers (1894),19 which was donated by the Secession in 1902 as a cornerstone for the future Moderne Galerie. Its influence on Carl Moll’s Twilight (before 1900)20 and Schiele’s Autumn Tree in Turbulent Air (1912)21 is a measure of how highly the painting was regarded.

The Dwarf and the Woman, c. 1902–03 (fig. 30), by the Viennese artist Walter Hampel, caricatures a situation analogous to the one depicted in Tichy’s painting. After bathing in the river, a woman is drying her naked body on a white towel, which further emphasises her nakedness. A dwarf in red Oriental-looking clothing squats opposite

Fig. 30 Sigmund Walter Hampel The Dwarf and the Woman, c. 1902–03 Oil on canvas, 116 × 130 cm Belvedere, Vienna Inv. 546 13. Broncia Koller-Pinell, Orange Grove on the French Riviera, 1903, oil on canvas, 95 × 196 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

14. Erich Mallina, Procession of Angels, 1904, oil on canvas, 89 × 229 cm, Belvedere, Vienna, on loan from the Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna.

15. This work by Alfred Roller, which has not survived, was presented in the ‘Beethoven’ exhibition, the fourteenth Secession exhibition, in 1902; all that survives is a sketch for the work (mixed media on paper, 60 × 60 cm) in the Theatermuseum, Vienna. The mural is attested only in photographs.

16. Marian Bisanz-Prakken, ‘Der Beethovenfries von Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Secession’, in Secession Gustav Klimt Beethovenfries, Vienna, Secession, 2002, pp. 21ff.

17. Gabriel von Max, Anthropology Lesson, c. 1900, oil on canvas, 59 × 46 cm, private collection, Courtesy Galerie Konrad Bayer, Munich, Andechs.

18. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust, 1891, oil on canvas, 99 × 172.8 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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Fig. 31 Anton Hanak The Last Man (Ecce Homo), 1917–24 Bronze, 230 cm Belvedere, Vienna Inv. 2495

Fig. 32 Karl Mediz Vulture among Rocks, 1897 Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 98.6 cm Belvedere, Vienna Inv. 9791

19. Giovanni Segantini, The Evil Mothers, 1894, oil on canvas, 105 × 200 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

20. Carl Moll, Twilight, before 1900, oil on canvas, 80 × 94 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

21. Egon Schiele, Autumn Tree in Turbulent Air, 1912, oil and pencil on canvas, 80 × 80.5 cm, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

22. Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso, 1882, oil on canvas, 104 × 150 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel.

23. Albin Egger-Lienz, Dance of Death from the Year 1809, 1908, casein on canvas, 225 × 233 cm.

24. ‘Haltlos nach oben, haltlos nach unten, ohne jede Kraft, rings um ihn ist alles leer’, in Friedrich Grassegger and Wolfgang Krug, Anton Hanak, 1875–1934, Vienna, Böhlau Verlag, 1997, p. 149.

25. Emil Jakob Schindler, Pax, 1891, oil on canvas, 207 × 271 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

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her in a meadow of flowers. The voyeur is depicted as an unnoticed little man of weak urges in contrast to the fleshy, overpowering sensuality of the woman, who is self-confidently displaying herself. Although it recalls the biblical story of a pestered Susanna, the scene has turned into its opposite. The ironically interpreted battle of the sexes, which is found frequently in the paintings and woodcuts of Félix Vallotton and in Arnold Böcklin’s Odysseus and Calypso (1882),22 occupies its own thematic field in Symbolism, reflecting the changing understanding of gender roles.

Alfred Kubin offered psychographs of role relationships and nightmarish analyses of human existence. Man is cast into the world and has to find his way and establish his identity in this world under constant threat. Sickness, hunger and death threaten his existence. He is inevitably descended upon by lurid visions.

Dismembered limbs are a frequent motif in the artist’s work: a head separated from the trunk, sitting opposite it and watching it. The relationship of the body to the spirit, the link to the inner psychological life that contrasts with physical realities is a constant theme in Kubin’s oeuvre.

Similarly inclined to the uncanny, the Vienna Secessionist Rudolf Jettmar interpreted ancient myth in Ladon and the Hesperides, 1905 (fig. 29). In Jettmar’s version, however, the dragon is not protecting the treasure of the golden apples, but rather naked women. Three of the women are cuddling, while the fourth sleeps between the monster’s forefeet. Their sensuously lit, bright bodies and pink skin tones stand out in comparison with the massive, lizard-like body in dark shades of blue. Jettmar contrasts the sensuality and passivity of the women, embodying femininity, with the male qualities of cool aggressiveness and distance. While the sky darkens above the monster, the brightness of the bodies continues on the rock wall and leads into a brightened sky. The rider and his squire on the right edge contrast with the sky and storm towards the dragon to do battle with it. The intrepid soldiers can be interpreted as a metaphor for daring to confront a danger courageously and risking failure like Don Quixote. In contrast to Kubin, human beings are not helplessly subjected to this fate; in Jettmar’s work, initiative and the hope of victory in battle survive.

With his Dance of Death from the Year 1809 (1908),23 Albin Egger-Lienz created a symbol of the Tyroleans’ resistance to Napoleon. It is, however, also a symbol for death as the constant companion of war, and its pitilessness recalls Alfred Rethel’s woodcuts. Like Egger-Lienz, Ferdinand Hodler, the young Egon Schiele and Anton Hanak – in his sculpture The Last Man (Ecce Homo), 1917–24 (fig. 31) – employ gesture. The sculpture was produced over a long period and was associated with the artist’s physical breakdown and the historical context of a world war. In it, the man seems to be ‘adrift upwards, adrift downwards, entirely without energy, everything around him empty’.24 Emil Jakob Schindler presents a Romantic view of faith in his painting Pax.25 Carved deeply into a valley with rocky cliffs lies a damp, moss-covered cemetery. Between towering cypresses and beneath passing rainclouds, an isolated monk lights a candle at a freshly dug grave. Schindler conveys silence and perseverance in this loneliness, protected only by faith, in a way similar to Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the Dead (fig. 2).

Like Schindler’s Pax, Karl Mediz’s Vulture among Rocks, 1897 (fig. 32), was also inspired by the Dalmatian coast. The prevailing mood of the painting is one of loneliness and silence; Schindler’s contemplative calm gives way in Mediz’s work to an inexorability expressed in the hardness of the crags and in the lurking patience of the vulture. Perched on a rock in front of the brightly lit crag, the vulture is difficult to make out. Mediz varies his rendering of the landscape, playing on the contrast between the large decorative expanse and minute detail.

His precision brings out references to the English Pre-Raphaelites that Ludwig Hevesi had pointed out in an article as early as 1903.26

Vienna and Munich: the Cosmopolitan facet of Symbolism

The silence and loneliness in Wilhelm Bernatzik’s Pond (c. 1900)27 and Carl Moll’s Twilight (before 1900) convey a sense of exposure to nature, reinforced by the body of water that extends to the lower edge of the image. They point back to Ferdinand Khnopff’s Immobile Water (1894),28 in which the boundary between the reflection in the water and the landscape is blurred. The international orientation of the Secession is also reflected in the links between Elena Luksch-Makowsky’s Adolescentia (1903)29 and Ferdinand Hodler’s Emotion (1901).30 Hodler was greatly admired by the artists of the Secession, which helped him to achieve his international breakthrough at the nineteenth Secession exhibition.31 Conversely, he had rooms in his apartment designed by Josef Hoffmann in 1913–14 and acquired Gustav Klimt’s Judith I (1901). Not only did Koloman Moser visit Hodler in Geneva in 1913, 32 but he also moved closer to Hodler’s palette and complementary outlines. In the years that followed, the poses of Hodler’s figures, inspired by dance, and the frontality and monumentality of his compositions found a clear echo in Moser’s work, which explored Symbolist themes. In his multi-layered Self-Portrait, 1916–17 (fig. 33), for example, Moser consciously took up the tradition of the iconography of Christ. With his clasped hands, the right one pointing to himself, open and sincere, Moser gazes frontally at the viewer. His chest is exposed as if visiting the doctor, and as in Hodler’s Tired of Life (1892), 33 he seems pensive, as if he was anticipating his death a year later.

Symbolist preoccupations are also found in the work of Egon Schiele, even though he was already regarded as an Expressionist. His painting The Self-Seers II (1911), as well as Dead City (1911) and Four Trees, 34 can be interpreted as Symbolism.

For example, the row in Four Trees recalls not only Hodler’s Autumn Landscape (1898), 35 but also his groups of figures. The tops of the trees and their doubled trunks resemble the ‘parallelism’ of Hodler – whom Schiele knew well – in his Tired of Life (1892), for example. Schiele contrasts the horizontal, ornamental bands of the landscape and sky with the trees, interrupted only by a mountain range that softens the stark symmetry of the composition, with its central red sun. The setting sun, together with the autumnal red of the leaves and the bare tree, announce the end of the course of the seasons.

Today Symbolism can be seen to have spanned different artistic styles and eras, impacting plein-air painting as well as Expressionism. Its enduring fascination derives from the way it tackled universal human themes that cross national borders and cross-fertilised one another in ways almost too numerous to define.

It fed the exchanges that took place between Vienna and Munich, as well as the links with Swiss Symbolism.

Fig. 33 Koloman Moser Self-Portrait, 1916–17 Oil on canvas on board, 74 × 50 cm Belvedere, Vienna Inv. 5569 26. Ludwig Hevesi, in Oswald Oberhuber, Wilfried Seipel and Sophie Geretsegger, Emilie MedizPelikan, 1861–1908 / Karl Mediz, 1868–1945, exh. cat., Vienna, Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, 24 April–25 May 1986, Linz, Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, 23 April–22 June 1986, Vienna and Linz, 1986, p. 11.

27. Wilhelm Bernatzik, The Pond, c. 1900, oil on canvas, 100 × 71 cm, Belvedere.

28. Fernand Khnopff, Immobile Water, 1894, oil on canvas, 53.5 × 114.5 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

29. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Adolescentia, 1903, oil on canvas, 171 × 78 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

30. Ferdinand Hodler, Emotion, 1900, oil on canvas, 115 × 70.5 cm, Belvedere, Vienna.

31.

Dietrun Otten, ‘Die Secession als Königsmacherin’, in Christoph Vögele and Ortrud Westheider (eds.) Ferdinand Hodler und Cuno Amiet: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft zwischen Jugendstil und Moderne, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Solothurn, 24 September 2011–2 January 2012, and Bucerius Kunst Forum Hamburg, 28 January–1 May 2012, Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 2011, p. 48.

32. Sabine Grabner, ‘Ferdinand Hodler und seine Beziehung zu Wien’, in Ferdinand Hodler und Wien, exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie Oberes Belvedere, Vienna, 1992, p. 27.

33. Ferdinand Hodler, Tired of Life, 1892, oil on canvas, 120 × 299 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern.

34. Egon Schiele, The Self-Seers II, 1911, pencil, gouache and body colour on canvas, 44.9 × 32.2 cm, Leopold Museum, Vienna; Dead City, 1911, oil and gouache on wood, 37.1 × 29.9 cm, Leopold Museum, Vienna; Four Trees, 1917, oil on canvas, 110.5 × 141 cm, Belvedere, Vienna, inv. no. 3917.

35. Ferdinand Hodler, Autumn Landscape, c. 1898, oil on canvas, 33 × 46 cm, Kunstmuseum Luzern.

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