The Nabis And Symbolist Theater

Through a rereading of the available textual and visual sources of Symbolist theater and of the work of Nabi artists, as well as through an analysis of sources and paintings previously unexamined in the existing literature, this book rewrites the history of the cross-fertilization between Nabi art and Symbolist theater. Symbolist theaters functioned as platforms for the exchange of ideas between Symbolists of different artistic disciplines, providing stages for artistic experiment and collaboration. Merel van Tilburg shows how Nabi visual art and theory were firmly embedded in the Symbolist theatrical, literary and aesthetic context. The impact of Symbolist theories on Nabi thinking, their translation into art, and the traces of a Symbolist theatricality in Nabi painting are all scrutinized.

Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.

This encyclopedic guide explores the rich and varied meanings of more than 2,000 symbols?from amethyst to Zodiac.

Exhibition catalogue for Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints, December 6, 2012 to March 1, 2013 at the La Salle University Art Museum. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how the Symbolist fascination with ambiguity seen in their choices of subject matter (i.e. half-human, half-animal hybrids such as harpies and sphinxes, gender ambiguity and androgyny) extended to formal strategies of representation that obscure form as well as content. This exhibition places Symbolist art in the context of Modernism by focusing on the ways in which artists experimented with print media and explored technical means of suggesting formal ambiguity (i.e. flattening, abstracting, obscuring) both to better match form and content and to push the boundaries of figurative art. The exhibition features work by artists Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Ibels, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Buhot, Pierre Roche, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Maurice Dumont, Jeanne Jacquemin, Georges de Feure,François-Marius Valère Bernard, Carlos Schwabe and others. Print techniques represented in this survey range from lithography and etching to gypsography. The exhibition catalogue features essays by the curator and La Salle faculty from the disciplines of art history and philosophy.

Although by writers better known for their verse and narrative prose, the plays of the Symbolists were not intended, like the dramatic poems of the Romantics, for the study rather than the stage. Instead, they are highly theatrical creations in a new style that demanded a new style of production. Meyerhold played a decisive role in the new Symbolist theatre and it was his production of Blok’s The Puppet Show in Komissarzhevskaya’s Theatre that launched the new direction in Russian drama. Among the works collected here are the plays The Puppet Show and The Rose and the Cross (Blok), The Triumph of Death (Sologub), The Comedy of Alexis and The Venetian Madcaps (Kuzmin), Thamyris Kitharodos (Annensky), and The Tragedy of Judas (Remizov) and essays by Briusov, Blok, Ivanov, Bely, Sologub, and Andreyev. Rounding out this essential anthology are Michael Green’s general introduction, as well as insightful prefaces for each writer, placing the plays and essays into their cultural and historical contexts.

This book focuses on the aesthetic, symbolic, and cultural concepts of radiance and beauty in stained glass in modern art; global exchanges between stained-glass artists in Europe and the Americas; and the transformation of stained glass from religious decoration to secular material culture. Unique features of the book include its geographic breadth, encompassing England, France, Italy, USA, and Mexico, and its inclusion of American female glassmakers. Essays consider how stained glass became an art form during this time, and show how the narrative for the figurative design drew from the Bible, mythology, history, literature, and the symbolism of the time, including popular culture such as ecology and materiality. Written for students and the general public interested in the humanities, literature, history, art history, and new media and popular culture, this book examines the visual beauty and symbolism of stained-glass windows in Europe and American cultures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the modern era.

Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form.

Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.