Australian Symbolism
- The sound of Experiment
- Oct 22, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Oct 23, 2024
Rupert Bunny - "Pastoral", circa 1893, oil on canvas, 142 x 251cm
Introduction
Australian Symbolism: dream art presents a comprehensive overview of a phenomenon that is often ignored or misunderstood. Of the Heidelberg painters, Tom Roberts, Arthur Stratton, and Charles Conder experimented with symbolism, but only the latter showed any long-term interest. Charles Douglas Richardson, who was one of the exhibitors at the 1889 9 by 5 Impression exhibition that brought the Heidelberg School to prominence, comes closer to being career symbolic, but is a minor figure alongside the others. Sydney Long, who created some of the most imaginative Australian images of that era, owes his lucid line to Art Nouveau, although his fawns, nymphs and flamingos can be seen as Symbolists in inspiration. In later life he renounced this style and became a stubborn realist. Among Australian artists, Symbolism was a passing phase that never put down roots. This is understandable when trying to understand what the term meant and where it came from (‘Australian Symbolism’). Instead of representing the real world, symbolist artists tried to propose altered realities as created by the mind. To evoke ideas, dreams and sensations, they envisioned poetic landscapes, femme fatales and figures coming from spiritual and mythological lands. The movement had a huge impact across Europe in the late 1800s. While Australian painting of the period is best known for its landscapes, figures of fantasy and mythology were a growing presence (Australian Symbolism).
Historic Overview
There are moments in art history that are fascinating to reflect on but irretrievably small. This pretty much sums up Australian Symbolism, which plays a supporting role in the impressionist landscape, and those paintings of a broadly nationalist belief that dominated art in this country in the decades leading up to the First World War (‘Australian Symbolism’). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Australian artists began to extend beyond the picturesque pastoral and interact with international movements and themes, the trend for Arcadian motifs expanded to more overt classicism. Classical mythology became a signature of Australian classicism as artists such as Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) and Sydney Long (1871-1955) turned to filling their renderings of the Australian pastoral landscape with mythical figures such as sea nymphs, sailors and satyrs. Notable examples are Bunny's "Tritons" (c.1890) (Figure 5), 5 "Sea Romances" (c.1890) and "Shepherding" (1893). and Long's "Pan" (1898).6 Deborah Edwards (1989: v) suggests that there are two traditions or sources of inspiration at the heart of the work of artists such as Bunny and Long. that is, the "conventions aligned with the popular themes of classical mythology as depicted in the work of British academics and giants of French salons," as Bunny characterizes, and the "loose group of 'pagan' classical artists in Australia," as Long characterizes. Artists such as Bunny, whose work was aligned with the high art of the British and French schools, tended towards higher visions of Greek mythology, endowing their interpretations with a grandeur consistent with British and European aesthetics (although in works such as Triton and Sea Idylls we also find a debt to Symbolism and Art Nouveau). The more elevated treatment of myth is also evident in works by Abbey (Avaam) Alston (1866-1949), such as "The Golden Age" (1893), and especially in sculptures and monuments by artists such as Bertram McKennall (1863-1931), known for his masterpiece, "Circe" (1903), and public works. While Long's interpretations of a new mythical Australia are lazy, welcoming, and decidedly bland, Lionel Lindsay's (1874-1961) and Norman Lindsay's (1879-1969) treatment of the same theme in a similar pagan style is characterized by frighteningly dystopian renderings of the mythical, as illustrated by Lionel Lindsay's The Edge of the World (1907), 9 Ariadne (1917)10 and Pan and Syrigix (1921). Lionel Lindsay depicts several perennial motifs of classical myth in each of these prints. "The Edge of the World" – though not as overtly scary as "Pan and Syrinx" – centers around the theme of European defence in the Australian bush; a theme that is also present in Lindsay's representation of the myth of Ariadne. Lindsay's underlying message of getting lost in a not-so-Arcadian Arcadia is effortlessly conveyed due to his audience's familiarity with the motif of the white woman or white child lost in the Australian bush. "This is a colonial response to the bush, haunting nineteenth-century art and literature, and not without reason." (Johnson 2017: 51). It's as if the landscape itself and its nature spirits have rebelled against white invaders. (JOHNSON).
Many artists were engaged, but almost no one can be reliably called a Symbolist. The lines of definition are blurred, with symbolist art being almost indivisible from Art Nouveau, Aestheticism, Decadence, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. In Australia, the first famous images of symbolists came from the Portuguese immigrant, Arthur Loureiro, who had worked in Paris before arriving in Melbourne. The panel's decorations, The Spirit of the Southern Cross and The Spirit of the New Moon (both 1888), show two lightly covered nymphs seated among the clouds. These images have no equivalent at the moment, but they are very simple emblems that personify the natural world in the form of a woman. In the years that followed, Arthur Streeton would paint The Spirit of Drought (c.1896) as a naked woman in a flaming, sunny landscape. while The Spirit of the Plains of Sydney Long (1897), is a naked woman playing Pied Piper with a herd of brolgas (‘Australian Symbolism’). In Paris in 1886 the poet Jean Moréas published a manifesto that eloquently outlined the Symbolists' goal to "clothe the idea in sensual form" and to turn the artistic gaze inward to capture the lands of imagination, dreams and desires. By the 1880s symbolism could be recognized in the visual arts, literature, music and theatre (‘Australian Symbolism’)
Politics
In essence, Symbolism was a reaction to the accelerating progress of the Belle Époque. The rapid changes brought about by science and technology seemed to sweep away the traditions, beliefs and values of the past. The rationalism and materialism of the new age made many feel that the spiritual aspects of art and literature were also in danger of being eroded. Realism or naturalism, promoted as the most radical innovation in Zola's novels and Courbet's paintings, was considered an integral part of this new materialism. Even impressionism, which was concerned with capturing transient effects of light, was seen as a style attached to superficial appearances, without any concern for the inner world of imagination (‘Australian Symbolism’).
Arts
Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles that were attempts to represent reality in its harsh specificity and elevate the humble and ordinary above the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favor of spirituality, imagination and dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists. For Huysmans, this change represented his growing interest in religion and spirituality. Some of the characteristic themes of The Decadents represent naturalistic interest in sexuality and taboo subjects, but in their case this was mixed with the Byronic romanticism and global fatigue that characterizes the fin de siècle period. Symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassism, a French literary style that immediately preceded it. While influenced by hermeticism, allowing freer phraseology and rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, he retained Parnassism's love of word play and concern for the musical qualities of verse. The Symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier's motto "art for art's sake" and maintained—and modified—Parnassism's ironic detachment mood. Many symbolist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, published early works in Le Parnasse contemporain, the anthologies of poetry that gave Parnassism its name. But Arthur Rimbaud publicly mocked prominent Parnassians and published Scottish parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée – wrongly attributed to Coppée himself – in L'Album zutique. One of the most colorful proponents of Symbolism in Paris was the art and literature critic (and occultist) Joséphin Péladan, who founded the Salon de la Rose + Croix. The Salon hosted a series of six presentations of avant-garde art, writing, and music during the 1890s, to provide a presentation space for artists who embrace spiritualism, mysticism, and idealism in their work. Several Symbolists were associated with the Salon (‘Symbolism (Arts)’).
Symbolism, which began as a literary movement, was put at odds with these currents. At the beginning of his career, the novelist, J-K. Huysmans was a student of Zola, but until 1884 when he published his most famous book, À rebours (AKA. Against Nature), he was an opponent of the Realists. In poetry, Symbolism took its impetus from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and found its most important voices in the Mallarmé, Verlaine and the teenager Rimbaud. In the visual arts, symbolism has never been a coordinated movement, but a set of shared concerns among individual artists. One immediately thinks of personalities like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, but a list can also include artists like Klimt and Munch, while Russian artists embraced the idea enthusiastically. The literary basis of Symbolism was reflected in the images followed by these artists. Renton was involved with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, while Moreau painted a gallery of femmes fatales, including Salome, Delilla, and Helen of Troy (‘Australian Symbolism’). Symbolism introduced a metaphysical, spiritual strand throughout the 20th century, visible in the work of Kenneth Schlesor, Judith Wright, and Patrick White, and in the reactions of Hope and McAuley (Austlit).
Music
Since the early 1970s, the science of symbolism has highlighted the dominant role of musical imagination and musical performance in iterations of the movement in France and Belgium. Music was a unique and sometimes dominant focus for symbolists in both countries. This was especially true of idealistic artists, a subset of the multifaceted symbolist movement, characterized by their connection to late nineteenth-century esotericism and the profound influence of German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) on their work. In the 1890s, most of these artists briefly revolved around the French writer and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918) before losing their vigor in the decades that followed. Along with the different esoteric movements of the time, idealists were the catalyst of the salons, which – like the artists who participated in them – aimed to bring together different artistic practices. In these salons, the integration of music went beyond bringing together two previously separated artistic events (the concert and the art exhibition). Rather, they aimed to reveal a correspondence between these two different sensory experiences—as Charles Baudelaire had imagined in poetry—and two different embodiments of the same aesthetic ideal. During the nineteenth century, the German Romantics began redefining the classical distinction between the arts, an idea that then spread throughout Europe. Richard Wagner's work was an important point of contact for romantic theories about the union of the arts. With his ten major operas, composed between 1840 and 1882, Wagner gave the operatic genre a new dimension by enhancing the expressiveness of the orchestra and writing librettos that brought to light German mythology. In these works, the composer tried to conquer all the arts – music, poetry, theatre, visual arts, even architecture – all of which could be seen in the specially designed theatre he built in Bayreuth. The composer's aesthetic research led him to formulate the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, an ideal embodiment of the synthesis of the arts towards which many artists aspired during the fin de siècle. The power of Wagner's music, like that of Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Grieg or Robert Schumann, dazzled the young symbolists. They were jealous of his ability to be suggestive, remaining elusive. The musicologist Jean-Michel Nectoux has shown that symbolists appreciate the way in which music creates mystery beyond the spoken word: it communicates a lot, but with subtle means. Paul Valéry went further when he wrote that "symbolism is summed up quite simply in the common intention of several families of poets... to 'recover from music what belongs to them.'" [5] Indeed, music, without visual form, has an ambiguity that fascinated symbolist poets and painters. This was especially true of Wagner's music, which cultivated ambiguity through harmonic instability by reducing the boundaries between minor and major modes and using rhythms that bring little harmonic resolution. This ambiguity — which Péladan compared to the Mona Lisa's mysterious smile — was used as a model for poetry and the visual arts. (Midavaine).
Notable Compositions
Missa Papae Marcelli - I. Kyrie - Giovanni Palestrina (1562)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 2 February 1594) was an Italian composer of late Renaissance music. Central representative of the Roman School, with Orlando de Lasso and Tomás Luis de Victoria, Palestrina is considered Europe's leading composer of the late 16th century ('Giovanni Pierluigi A Palestrina')Misa Papae Marcelli, or Pope Marcellus Maza, is a massive sinusoidal candidate of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. It is its best-known mass, and is considered an archetypal example of the complex polyphony defended by Palestrina. It is sung at the services of the papal coronation (the last was the coronation of Paul VI in 1963) (‘Missa Papae Marcelli’). A missa sine nominated, literally an "Unnamed Mass", is a musical setting of the Normal of Mass, usually from the Renaissance, which does not use pre-existing musical material, as was usually the case in mass composition. Not all masses based on free synthetic material were named that way, but many were, especially from the late 15th century to the 16th century (‘Missa Sine Nomine’).
Adoramus te Christe - Giovanni Palestrina (1604)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525 – 2 February 1594)[n 1] was an Italian composer of late Renaissance music. Central representative of the Roman School, with Orlando de Lasso and Tomás Luis de Victoria, Palestrina is considered Europe's leading composer of the late 16th century ('Giovanni Pierluigi A Palestrina').
Violin Sonata in A - I. Allegretto ben moderato - César Franck
César-Auguste Jean-Guillaume Hubert Frank (10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French romantic composer, pianist, organist and music teacher born in modern Belgium ('Cesar Franck'). César Franck's Sonata in A major for violin and piano is one of his best-known compositions and is considered one of the best sonatas for violin and piano ever written. It is an amalgam of his rich native harmonic language with the classical traditions he highly valued, held in a circular frame ('Violin Sonata (Franck)')
Lohengrin, WWV 75, Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, warrior and conductor, best known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works later became known, "musical dramas") (‘Richard Wagner’). Lohengrin (1850, fig. 3) was Wagner's first opera to premiere at the Brussels Opera, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnet, in 1870 (Midavaine).
Tannhauser, WWV 70 - Overture & Act I, Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, warrior and conductor, best known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works later became known, "musical dramas") (‘Richard Wagner’). Tannhäuser (German: [ˈtanhɔʏzɐ]; full title Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg, "Tanhauser and the Minnesanger Competition in Wartburg") is an 1845 opera in three acts, with music and text by Richard Wagner (WWV 70 in the composer's catalogue of works). It is based on two German legends: Tannhäuser, the mythologized medieval German Minnesanger and poet, and the story of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story focuses on the struggle between sacred and profane love, as well as redemption through love, a theme that runs through most of Wagner's work. Opera remains a key element of the great opera repertoire in the 21st century (‘Tannhäuser (Opera)’).
The Son of the Stars, Act I: Prelude "The Vocation" – Satie (1891)
Le Fils des étoiles (The Son of the Stars) is a random soundtrack composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name by Joséphin Péladan. It is a key work of Satie's "Rosikroucian" period (1891-1895) and played a role in its late "discovery" by the French music establishment in the 1910s (‘The Son of the Stars’).
Rose+Cross Ringtones - 1. Air de l'Ordre – Erik Satie (1892)
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist ('Erik Satie'). Trois sonneries de la Rose+Croix ("Three Sonneries of the Rose+Cross") is a piano composition by Eric Satie, first published in 1892, while he was composer and teacher of the Rosicrucian chapel "Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal", led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan (‘Ringtones of La Rose+Croix’).
Afternoon of a Faun - Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes regarded as the first impressionist composer, although he strongly rejected the term. He was one of the most important composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (‘Claude Debussy’). Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (L. 86), known in English as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faunus, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, lasting about 10 minutes. It was written in 1894 and first performed in Paris on December 22, 1894, under the baton of Gustave Doret. [1] [2] The solo flute was played by Georges Barrer. The composition is inspired by the poem L'après-midi d'un faune by Stéphane Malarmé. It is one of Debussy's most famous works and is considered a turning point in the history of Western art music, as well as a masterpiece of impressionist composition. Pierre Boulez regarded the score as the beginning of modern music, observing that "the flute of the faun brought new life to the art of music" (‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’).
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