080086 SE Seminar: Symbolism in Central Europe (2021S)

The beginning of modernism in the visual arts is commonly associated with the stylistic changes that took place in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the dawn of modernism also occurred at the same time on the level of content: within the framework of "symbolism". A manifesto had already been formulated in 1886. Around 1900, Symbolism was an internationally dominant movement in all artistic disciplines. Despite this, it disappeared almost completely from the horizon of perception after its decline during the First World War. This is not least due to art historical methodology. For those art historical traditions that focus on the formal aspects of art (including the Viennese School of Art History), Symbolism remained alien.
This obvious lack of perceptual criteria prevented a serious examination of the phenomenon of Symbolism on the part of scholars as well as its reception by subsequent generations of artists. It was precisely this amnesia of knowledge, which could be observed until the 1970s, that led to the fact that it was hardly comprehensible that painters such as Paul Gaugin, Max Klinger and Giovanni Segantini and sculptors such as Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso and Adolf von Hildebrand were united by far more and far more fundamental things than they were separated by.
He is nothing but an eye, but what an eye, as Cézanne said of Claude Monet's painting out of deepest admiration, would elicit at most a shake of the head as a compliment from any of the above-mentioned artists: "Retinal" aspects, a key term of Marcel Duchamp's, were for the first time to be of a secondary nature in their art and serve to intensify content.
While – from the Realists through the Impressionists to the Expressionists – it was above all the typical design features of the pictorial surface that held the respective group together internally and at the same time demarcated it from the outside, the Symbolists undermined the dividing lines between the different schools. Their far-reaching and multi-layered network did not follow any common ideologies. However, the way of looking at things, the common themes and the desire for a new, specifically individually coloured mode of representation characterised by their own, new symbols ("symbolisms") connected their various protagonists intellectually on the philosophical, psychological, ethical and even esoteric level.
It was therefore obvious that this relationship also formed the basis for overcoming barriers between the different disciplines and that this crossing of boundaries was almost felt to be a prerequisite: Thematic and (syn-)aesthetic connections between visual art, architecture, music and literature were readily assessed as far more significant and stimulating than connections within their own guild.
Together with its almost paradoxical tendency towards clarification through encryption, that "grey zone" that creates a link between the undecided and the precise, the movement therefore becomes an important expedition member into the realm of the newly discovered unconscious, the modern soul, and an indirect but usually unmistakable mouthpiece for social criticism of every stripe.
This search for the unmistakably individual as well as a communal-cultural, increasingly nationally experienced identity became a central theme of symbolism. Even if the corresponding questions were asked everywhere and across the board, the answers given in the various countries could not be more different.
Within individual cultural regions, there is an astonishingly consistent choice of themes as well as a way of expression that was decisively shaped by the specific cultural, historical, social and political conditions in each case.
Martina Pippal, Vienna & Dieter Ulrich, Zurich/Lucerne