Word: symbolist
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...mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair. So he could be believed. The rhetoric never altered; he was too ancient a drummer for that. The circumstances of his career did, and violently. For a brief time, the decade ending in 1939, he-with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood-bestrode and dominated the taste of America. His emergence, however...
Ideal Somnambulism. At one stroke, Moreau was canonized as a patron saint of dandyism and decadence, the father of symbolist art. His canvases, exotic in their spurts and blooms of color, are populated by pale androgynous youths and languid women encased, like scarab beetles, in glittering carapaces of emerald and embroidery. Such pictures were hailed as setting the tone of an entire sensibility-the same cast of imagination that in literature ran from Flaubert's Salammbô to Swinburne and Wilde, heavy with allusions to enigmatic and castrating Fatal Women. Moreau's own work was rich in homosexual...
SIGMUND FREUD, a cigar smoker, warned against the overzealous application of dream symbolism to real life--there are times, he said, when a cigar is only a cigar. Not in this book. John Hawkes has no more use for superfluous detail, like non-phallic cigars, in his symbolist writing than he does for such commonplaces of novelistic technique as simple diction and chronological narrative...
...long stood for a filleted sort of consciousness: the epicine, misty, dandified transcendentalism and café demonolatry whose sturdier ancestors were men like Baudelaire and Poe. There is a certain truth to this, as evidenced by a work like Jean Delville's Orpheus. A member of the symbolist circle, Delville (1867-1953) was a devoted admirer of Joséphin Péladan, leader of the Rosicrucians in France. Yet it probably does not help us much now to know that the sickly greenish-blue radiance in which Orpheus swims was intended to represent the astral light. This illustration...
...romantic fascination with the image of woman as sphinx, Medusa, castrator or remote, implacable goddess -the belle dame sans merci in her numerous fictive avatars-also figures in symbolist painting, especially in the world of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), another member of Péladan's circle. Art or The Caresses conjoins a mysteriously smiling sphinx (looking not unlike a satisfied Rossetti redhead in a leopard coat that has grown onto her skin) with a puzzled-looking boy who has presumably come to answer her riddle. It is painted with a high, pale elegance that altogether removes it from...