art and artists of the Decadent and Symbolist movements

""Volumul Andradei Fatu-Tutoveanu reuseste sa transforme marginalitatea tematica in centralitate, dovedind ca anumite calitati si valente simbolice asociate cu experienta intima a opiaceelor sunt strins legate de insasi configurarea unei noi conditii, a unui nou statut al literaturii in general si al poeziei in special. Nu putem sa nu mentionam noutatea indiscutabila a demersului. Desi literatura si critica literara de la noi nu au fost niciodata straine de experimentele narco-literare asupra carora se focalizeaza cercetarea Andradei Fatu-Tutoveanu, totusi tratarea subiectului a ramas pana acum la nivelul contributiilor punctuale si ocazionale. Caracterul sistematic al abordarii, amploarea si complexitatea acesteia, o singularizeaza, asadar, de indata in peisajul comparatisticii romanesti. Prin interesul temei, prin amploarea si insolitul materialului explorat, prin articularea si deschiderea interdisciplinara, prin deosebita calitate intelectuala a abordarii, lucrarea Andradei Fatu-Tutoveanu se inscrie cu toata claritatea si maturitatea intr-un dialog academic european.

Caius DOBRESCU""

The hybridity that is seen everywhere in symbolist poetry is not so much evidence of a temporary trend of the era following the interest in the crossing of species in nature as much as it is an attempt to confront the very nature of “art” itself. The time of the “quarrel of monsters” has passed, and the hybrids of contemporary poetry – competing for a place in the mythological scene that is symbolism – roam guiltless. And yet, beyond literary conventions, this mythological bestiary is anything but innocent and outdated; in fact, it embodies a genuine mythopoetic repertoire. For Mallarmé in particular, this hybrid bestiary reflects the illusive “Chimera” of poetry.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of
Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and
interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the
author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental
text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that
incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private
thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s
themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and
explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which
D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.

This article presents the interpretation of 21 songs (composed between 1911 and 1927) by Irena Wieniawska (1879–1932), based on Paul Verlaine’s poems. The composer, also known as Poldowski or Lady Dean Paul, was a daughter of the famous Polish artist and violinist – Henryk Wieniawski, and Isabelle Hampton-Wieniawska. She lived and worked in Belgium and England. It is worth mentioning that Madame Poldowski knew some impressionistic works (among others Maurice Ravel’s) in France and these experiences influenced her artistic idiom.
First, the author analyzes the lyrics (main themes as well as the structure of Verlaine’s texts). Then the attention is paid to the music level: the author subsequently describes the basic musical elements such as melody, piano accompaniment, harmony, texture, form. In the third part of this article, following some of the rules (so-called corollaries) by Henry Woollett, the problem of word-music relationships in Wieniawska’s songs is discussed. In conclusion the author suggests that Madame Poldowski’s vocal-instrumental pieces represent the genre of French mélodie because of verbal transparency (recitative and syllabic treatment of text) as well as harmonic and formal complexity, and variability. A hypothesis is put forward that this aesthetics is a reinterpretation of common symbolist features in music.

Hartigan offers an alternate reading of playwright-avant garde artist Alfred Jarry's "overly performative public conduct," placing it within the context of fin-de-siècle Parisian Symbolism, focusing on performance, artifice, authenticity, and self. He discusses the premiere of "Ubu Roi" as well as Symbolist "self-as-performance."

Considerato il più importante artista svizzero, Ferdinand Hodler (Berna 1853 - Ginevra 1918) ha ricevuto scarso riscontro nel nostro paese. Il testo, prima monografia italiana su di lui, intende colmare questa lacuna contestualizzando e riattualizzando la figura dell’artista, vissuto in un’epoca stretta tra i fermenti simbolisti e la nascita delle avanguardie. Da molti considerato un secessionista e un pittore di storia, Hodler
va considerato soprattutto come artista simbolista, in particolare rispetto all’uso della linea e del colore, che anticipa l’Espressionismo e l’Astrattismo. I contributi più originali sono dati dallo studio del rapporto dell’artista con l’arte italiana e dalla rilettura del passaggio dal realismo al simbolismo.
In appendice viene presentata per la prima volta la traduzione italiana dei due principali testi di Hodler: "La missione dell’artista" e "Il Decalogo del pittore".

This is an early thesis examining the phenomenology of the image of the feminine in Symbolist Art. Much of the work here formed the foundation for later published papers including, 'Nature and the Ideal in Fernand Khnopff's Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses'. The framework of this study could still be a stimulus for further research into this neglected area of the field of Symbolist Art and its symbolism and iconography. The end chapter is a draft paper that suggests strong links with the Jungian perspective on the nature of the anima. There are many historical and intellectual links between the iconography of Symbolist Art and Jung's ideas that are worth exploring further.

Il saggio ripercorre le tappe principali della ricezione italiana dell'arte preraffaellita, e in generale inglese, nel secondo Ottocento.

The essay covers the main steps of the italian reception of Pre-Raphaelite art, and English art in general, in the late Nineteenth century.

Jean Delville was not only a gifted painter, but also a prolific author, poet and polemicist. He is unique amongst his artistic contemporaries for having written extensively on the subject of Idealism in art. Idealist philosophy, as an intellectual influence, was fairly pervasive amongst contemporary non-realist authors, poets and painters; the core nineteenth-century influence in this regard was the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Delville, however, took a different path, particularly in his seminal book, La Mission de l'Art, and his various polemical essays on the subject, which reflect, rather, key ideas derived from the writings of the German Idealist, G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel's influence on late-nineteenth century non-realist art is understated in the literature. This paper analyses the main ideas of Delville's La Mission de l'Art in the context of Hegelian Idealism. It focuses on key areas of this tradition, specifically with regard to the nature of the Idea and the Ideal, the relation of the Ideal to the natural world, the relation between the Idea and the notion of BEAUTY and the special role of the artist in revealing the Idea in physical form.

"The Roses of Heliogabalus" (1888) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema represents a legendary episode of Heliogabalus' life, in which a rain of flowers literally buries people during a banquet. Although sources speak of "violets and other flowers", the painter chooses roses, probably for their reference to imperial luxuria, but also because tradition had always linked Heliogabalus and roses – as evidenced by some religious texts of the Seventeenth century – perhaps for their dual symbol of beauty and death. The paper presents and discusses a series of decadent European images, poems and novels, where the topos of rose as ambivalent symbol of beauty (and passionate love too) and death has a central place, from the rediscovery of Heliogabalus in French Romanticism, through Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolistsin England, up to D’Annunzio’s works at the Great War eve.

SUMARIO

ARTÍCULO

Mariano Sverdloff  (Universidad de Buenos Aires-Consejo nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas)

UT PICTURA DECADENTIA: HUYSMANS COMO CRÍTICO DE ARTE. DE LOS IMPRESIONISTAS AL CRISTO DE GRÜNEWALD

El presente trabajo estudia las diversas etapas de la crítica pictórica de Joris Karl Huysmans: Impresionista, Simbolista y Católica. En cada una de éstas se reformula el modo en el que la palabra escrita lee a la pintura; paradójicamente, en el momento en que el lenguaje pictórico comienza a autonomizarse de la literatura, Huysmans retorna, para interpretar los cuadros de Degas, Redon o Cézanne, el viejo tópico horaciano del ut pictura poesis. En tal interpretación ocupa un lugar central la alegoría: procedimiento de lectura que permite asignarle un sentido a la pintura, pero también a una Tercera República que se considera, precisamente, decadente. Tanto la allégorie hié- ratique de Moreau como la symbolique du moyen âge, son, entonces, respuestas a la crisis del símbolo romántico y permiten acercarse a un contenido espiritual que va más allá de las premisas positivistas del naturalismo: la alegoría, ya sea como expresión de un mundo onírico subjetivo o bien como escritura sagrada, es el modo mediante el que Huysmans expresa e intenta superar el nihilismo de fin-de-siecle.

UT PICTURA DECADENTIA: HUYSMANS AS AN ART CRITIC. FROM IMPRESSIONNISTS TO GRÜNEWALD’S CHRIST

This paper examines the different periods in Joris Karl Huysmans’ art criticism: Impressionist, Simbolist and Catholic. In each of these periods the way the written word interprets visual art changes: paradoxically, in an historical moment in which pictorial language starts becoming autonomous from literature, in order to read Degas, Reson or Cézanne’s paintings, Huysmans returns to Horace’s topos ut pictura poesis. In such interpretation, allegory has a key place: it is a reading procedure that allows to give meaning not only to the painting, but to the Third Republic –which is in fact considered decadent- aswell. Both Moreau’s ‘allegorie hiératique’ and the ‘symbolique du moyen âge’ are, consequently, answers to the crisis of the romantic symbol, and allow Huysmans to approach a spiritual content that goes beyond naturalism’s positivist premises: allegory, whether considered as an expression of a subjective oniric world or as a holy scripture, is the way through which author of À rebours expresses and tries to overcome the nihilism of fin-desiècle.


ESTUDIOS CRÍTICOS

Karlheinz Barck  (Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung/Berlin)

CÓMO PENSAR LAS VANGUARDIAS HOY

Traducción de Azul Katz (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

En una aproximación a la problemática sobre la actualidad de las vanguardias tanto para la estética como para el pensamiento occidental contemporáneos, el presente estudio crítico toma como punto de partida tres tesis sostenidas en el último tercio del siglo XX. En primer lugar, aquella de Peter Bürger y Bernd Hüppauf sobre el fin o el fracaso de las vanguardias. Luego, la tesis de Sylvian Agacinski, que ha pensando un anacronismo de las vanguardias resultante del desfasaje entre forma estética y progreso técnico. Por último, la ofrecida por Boris Groys, quien ha encontrado un antecedente estalinista desde el cual criticar al vanguardismo: la coincidencia entre utopía y totalitarismo. El trabajo recupera al surrealismo para volver a abrir la pregunta sobre la actualidad de las vanguardias. Por un lado, la puesta en perspectiva del aporte de la revista Documents, fundada por George Bataille y Carl Einstein en 1929, abriría una visión universal y ya no eurocentrista del surrealismo. Por otro lado, la revisión de ciertos aspectos del romanticismo alemán permite repensar el análisis de las vanguardias, no sólo considerando su aporte iniciático, sino también a la luz de una superación de la estética idealista, ante la cual el surrealismo ha jugado un rol histórico importante: el concepto de surrationalisme de Gaston Bachelard presenta al surrealismo como razón de lo irracional, llevándolo más allá de los límites de la estética y haciendo de la vanguardia el reverso de los conflictos que constituyen la mise en abîme de los presupuestos de nuestra cultura occidental.

HOW TO THINK AVANT-GARDES NOWADAYS

This critical study deals with the discussion of the relevance of avant-gardes for contemporary asthetics and for Western thought. It takes as starting point three thesis of the last third of the 20th century. First of all, Peter Bürger and Bernd Hüppauf’s controversial thesis on the failure of avantgardes. Secondly, Sylvian Agacinski’s thesis, which states an anachronism of avant-gardes as a result of the distinction between aesthetic form and technical progress. Lastly, the thesis offered by Boris Groys, who has found a Stalinist precedent to criticize avant-garde movements: the coincidence between utopia and totalitarism. The paper also retakes surrealism to open once again the question about the relevance of avant-gardes nowadays. On the one hand, the contribution of the journal Documents, founded by George Bataille and Carl Einstein in 1929, gives a universal point of view instead of an eurocentric one on considering surrealism. On the other hand, the revision of some aspects of German Romanticism makes possible to rethink the debate on avant-gardes, considering not only their first contributions, but also the overcoming of idealist aesthetics: Bachelard’s notion of surrationalisme presents surrealism as the reason of the irrational, taking surrealism beyond the limits of aesthetics and placing avant-gardes as the reverse side of the conflicts that constitutes the mise en abîme of our Western culture’s premises.

2) Florencia Abadi (Universidad de Buenos Aires-Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas)

LA TAREA DE LA CRÍTICA DE ARTE: LA LECTURA DE BENJAMIN DEL ROMANTICISMO ALEMÁN

La noción de crítica de arte fue objeto de un debate sobre su lugar y la pertinencia en relación con la obra de arte. En tanto aproximación conceptual a las obras, la crítica ha sido rechazada por aquellas corrientes que consideran el concepto como ajeno a la esfera artística y a la obra como artefacto autosuficiente. Demás está decir que esta posición socava la legitimidad de la propia crítica en tanto disciplina. En el polo opuesto, se encuentran aquellas posiciones ilustradas, especialmente aquellas contenidas en las poéticas normativas, que consideran la obra como una estructura pasible de ser explicada por un sistema conceptual ajeno a las particularidades de las obras singulares. La obra de Walter Benjamin, especialmente la tesis dedicada al Romanticismo alemán, contrasta con ambas perspectivas. El concepto de crítica que halla en los escritos de los románticos se presenta como superador de ambos polos: la crítica se muestra legítima a partir del concepto de “criticabilidad” [Kritisierbarkeit], que establece que la obra contiene en sí misma el germen de su propia crítica y que, por lo tanto, reclama el concepto desde su propia estructura interna. El objetivo es analizar esta lectura de Benjamin, y luego sus críticas a la misma en El origen del drama barroco alemán.

THE TASK OF ART CRITICISM: BENJAMIN'S READING OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM ABSTRACT

The notion of art criticism has been object of a debate about its place and appropriateness in relation to the work of art. As a conceptual approach to the work of art, the criticism has been rejected by those positions that consider the concept outside the artistic sphere and the work of art as a selfsufficient artefact. It is obvious that this position undermines the legitimacy of the art criticism as a discipline. In discussion with these considerations, we found the enlightened positions, especially those contained in the normative poetics, which consider the work of art as a structure that can be explained by a conceptual system that pays no attention to the peculiarities of the singular works. Walter Benjamin’ s work, especially the thesis about the German Romanticism, resists both visions of the problem. The concept of art criticism that he finds in the writings of the first romantics is presented as a superseding of that opposition: the criticism is justified as a discipline by the notion of “criticizability” [Kritisierbarkeit], which establishes that the work contains itself the germ of its own criticism and, therefore, it asks for the concept from its own internal structure. The aim is to analyse Benjamin’s reading, and then his objections to it in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Artículo sobre la imagen dual de la mujer y sobre la pulsión de eros, vida y muerte que se aprecia en las primeras obras de Francisco Villaespesa, así como en el grupo literario con el que lucha por el modernismo en España.
Publicado en el volumen Villaespesa y los inicios del modernismo poético en España (ANDÚJAR ALMANSA, José, coord.), Almería, Universidad de Almería, 2005

"Film as Life after Death (Evgenij Bauėr's "Posle smerti"/"After Death", 1915)

Tags:

- a symbolist treatment of a realist text:
E. Bauėr's film and I. Turgenev's story "Klara Milič. (Posle smerti)” (1883)
- dreams and hallucination in Bauėr's film
- Bauėr and Russian symbolism
- symbolist "thanatology"transferred onto the screen
- gender in Bauėr's films: the overlooked male victims
- film is perceived as a new life "after death""

As a result of translating Delville's poetry anthologies it was discovered that one of his major poems from his first anthology relates directly to a finished drawing,  ‘L’Allégorie de l’Enfer’, that came up for sale in 2015. The current essay is an analysis of the drawing and discusses the correlations with his poem 'Azrael'.

The main topic of this article is the history of a rare and precious French magazine of the late Nineteenth century, in which a vivid and crucial discussion about arts and their inter-relation grew the more and more intense in the short space of four years (1892-1896). The “Livre d’Art” was first conceived as a simple booklet to be distributed to the spectators of the experimental plays of the ”Théâtre d’Art”, but it soon became a sophisticated art object, which merged figurative and poetic art in order to create a mutual relation of authentic correspondence among them, thus overcoming the wagnerian idea of Gesamtkumstwerk.
We are then going to focus on the second series of the Livre d’Art (1896), that exhibits a new tendency towards Modernism and Internationalism, opening towards Belgian, German and English artistic and literary movements, such as Jugendstil and Arts and Crafts, but opening also to contemporary theatre aesthetics, publishing i.e. Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

CASTELLANO
El objetivo de esta comunicación es presentar la problemática recepción que el retrato tuvo por parte de los pintores simbolistas, una relación problemática pero a la vez significativa y enriquecedora, que permitió una reformulación del género afín al espíritu del fin-de-siglo. Para ello nos centraremos en un ejemplo concreto y supremo de la ambivalencia finisecular en esa atracción y rechazo hacia esta temática, esto es, la presencia/ausencia del retrato en las exposiciones organizadas por la Orden de la Rosa+Cruz.

ENGLISH
The aim of this paper is to present the problematic reception that portrait received by the Symbolist painters, a problematic relationship yet meaningful and enriching, allowing a reformulation of this subject akin to the fin-de-siècle spirit. We will focus on a specific and supreme example of this ambivalence between the attraction and rejection towards portrait, that is, the presence/absence of the portrait in the exhibitions organized by the Order of the Rose+Croix.

D’Annunzio’ s approach to beauty has largely unnoticed connections with the anti-modern anthropological discourse on symbolic economy that at the turn of the century begins to reject instrumentality in life and representation. From the cultural primitivism of his time, D’Annunzio develops a consistent reflection on the aesthetic and ethical significance of ritual exchange that informs his search for a higher morality through art.
Focusing on the nexus of art, giving and temporality, this essay addresses the intuitions and the contradictions of unconditional expenditure in D’Annunzio’s works, analyzing the leitmotif of the hand as an ambivalent carrier of lavishness and power. From Trionfo della morte to Il Fuoco, from Le vergini delle rocce to his autobiographical writings, the implications of D’Annunzio’s argument contribute to an extended theoretical debate that interrogates the role of value in aesthetic and social practices—from Nietzsche, Mauss, and Bataille to Heidegger and Derrida. Can art’s luxurious dissipation truly break the circle of speculation and restitution?

Presented at:
Association for the Study of Esotericism Sixth International Conference 2018
Eros, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Esoteric Traditions
Rice University, Houston
Abstract: In 1890, French author, playwright, theater critic, and Theosophist Eduard Schure wrote out what he imagined to be the esoteric contents of the ancient mystery rites of Eleusis in his play entitled Le drame sacré d'Eleusis. His dramatic narrative was informed by his interests not only in ancient religious philosophy, but also in the more esoteric ideas of the Theosophical Society, the founder of Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, and the occult activities of the Symbolist Movement. Similarly, British occultist Aleister Crowley staged his version of the Eleusinian mysteries at Caxton Hall in London, England, 1910, in a performance entitled Rites of Eleusis. Crowley’s theatrical vision of the ancient mysteries included music, poetry, and trance-like dances of ecstasy combined with ceremonial magic, which shocked and elated the public and newspaper critics, who described the performances as “sex worship” and “Black Mass.” My presentation analyzes how these late 19th/early 20th century artists and writers responded to contemporary problems by drawing upon the wisdom of the ancient world and implementing it into their artistic creations. Through a new type of dramatic mimesis, and the imitation of sacred myths, human beings embodying gods became a source of spiritual aid against the traumas of the modern world. Mystery dramas were revived and utilized by symbolists and esotericists, who attempted to re-anchor the western world to its foundational roots and pilot human progress in a different direction by re-instantiating classical consciousness using embodied performance and modern dance. Those who worked in these areas believed that the transformative power of art and drama was much more than socially potent; it was spiritually enlightening. In the words of one Russian symbolist, the poet and playwright Vyacheslav Ivanov, “the crowd of spectators must fuse into a choral body, like the mystical communities of ancient orgies and mysteries.”

This short essay on Symons' poem was published in a volume of papers editied by Agostino Lombardo, "Gioco di Specchi, Saggi sull'oso letterario dell'immagine dello specchio", Rome (1999).
It discusses the importance of the dance theme in later 19th century poetry and in particular how Symons uses it and the image of the dancer in the mirror to create an art lyric in which the moment of tension between what is real and what is only perceived is heightened by the ephemeral nature of the spectacle.

„Strenuously Fabricated Stories“: Double Mystification in Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s Prose.

Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s mystificatory lifestyle is very well known: various details from his life are now doubtful due to his tendency to show an artificial, not quite true picture of himself. Consequently, we can’t be sure about e. g. his date of birth, his aristocratic background, or his relationship with the „Viennese friend“ whose identity is still completely obscure.

Playing with reality, dislike for the usual idea of truth in literature, and systematized glorification of fiction („lie“) are significant for both Karásek’s poetry and prose. Several of his prose texts published between 1900 and 1908 illustrate this concept or actually construct an unusual connection between a text that doesn’t pretend to be mimetic („true“) and a reader who has to accept that the story he is reading „does not contain anything but follies“. Two of those texts are preceded by prefaces that could be considered manifestos of glorified lie and mystificatory literature: „Gotická duše“ (version of 1905) and „Román Manfreda Macmillena“ (1907). There the reader can find such statements as: „In matters of art it is indispensable to lie, on one condition: there has to be a deeper sense to what is being fabricated than to mere reality.“

A perfectly successful example of mystification, though, is to be found in another Karásek‘s novel from this period, „Scarabaeus“ (1908). Contrasting with the directness of what undoubtedly is the first explicit description of a love story between two male characters in the history of Czech literature, the text hides its „true“ essence and plays with its readers up to the final pages where a double mystification is revealed: the protagonist consciously and deliberately fooled himself about almost every event in the novel, therefore the reader is also fooled, but unconsciously and by the will of the author. What seemed to be a story, a relation of events, turns out to be a stream of imagination on a quite uneventful evening. Similarities to another turn-of-the-century book that was built on this principle, Richard Beer-Hofmann‘s „Der Tod Georgs“ (1900), are yet to be explored.

The flâneur has been a celebrated figure in visions of Paris for at least 150 years—certainly since Baudelaire defined him in “The Painter of Modern Life” and perhaps even since Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris. The concept of the flâneur was of particular significance to the surrealists, with Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris being perhaps the best known literary examples of surrealist celebration of flânerie. What is not so well known is that flânerie was also of high importance to the early Prague surrealists, and that Parisian flânerie was not the sole source for the Czechs.

Long before they became surrealists, Prague avant-gardists Vítězslav Nezval and Jindřich Štyrský followed the example of the earlier Prague symbolists and decadents in exploring the mysteries of the “city of a hundred spires.” Young men from the provinces, both Nezval and Štyrský used their urban roamings to ignite the poetic spark, whether that spark was primarily verbal (Nezval) or visual (Štyrský). Among the results were their meditations on Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, poems and novels of flânerie by Nezval (notably Pražský chodec, forthcoming in English from Twisted Spoon as The Flâneur of Prague) and some of Štyrský’s photographs. In this paper, then, I examine the ways in which these key Prague surrealists, as well as others of their generation, practiced flânerie in both Prague and Paris, taking inspiration from the likes of Neruda, Karásek, and Leppin as well as from Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Breton, and Aragon.