The Symbolist Muse: A Selection of Prints from the National Gallery of Canada
Jul 16, 2010 - Oct 21, 2010
Until October 21, 2010, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting The Symbolist Muse: A Selection of Prints from the National Gallery of Canada in its Graphic Art Centre. The exhibition includes over fifty masterpieces, spectacular prints by such renowned and influential figures as Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, 脡douard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Edvard Munch, Maximilian Kurzweil, Max Klinger, F茅licien Rops, Franz von Stuck and James Ensor, as well as, in certain works, Auguste Rodin, Henri Fantin-Latour, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, F茅lix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard and the early Pablo Picasso, among others. This exhibition has been organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada. Admission to the exhibition is free at all times.
Symbolism emerged as an artistic movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching its apogee in the visual arts towards the end of that century. Its origins, however, lie in the literature of the American author Edgar Allen Poe and in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, St茅phane Mallarm茅, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, during the 1860s and 1870s, leading to the Symbolist Manifesto of Jean Mor茅as, published in Le Figaro in 1886. While to some extent an outgrowth of the glorification of the individual and personalized emotional response found in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, Symbolism espoused no idealism. Instead, it sought, through highly metaphorical, obscure, ambiguous, dreamlike imagery 鈥� sometimes macabre or even sexual and taboo in nature 鈥� to stir the viewer鈥檚 imagination and spiritual sensibilities. Synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by exciting another, of using hearing to stimulate seeing and vice versa, for example, was a central ambition of the movement, glorified by the anti-hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans鈥檚 controversial and influential novel Against Nature of 1884. Oscar Wilde鈥檚 The Picture of Dorian Gray and his late play Salom茅 reflect Symbolist ambitions. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and Debussy鈥檚 opera Pell茅as et M茅lisande are other profoundly Symbolist works. It is no coincidence that the movement coincided with increased public interest in Eastern religions and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis. United by their reaction against the focus on the physical world that preoccupied the Realists and Impressionists of mid-century, the Symbolists were less connected by a stylistic consistency than by a philosophy. Symbolist artists used personal, private, obscure images and iconography, and evocative colours to speak in intentionally ambiguous terms to the individual soul.
Hilliard H. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the Montreal presentation of the exhibition.
Symbolism emerged as an artistic movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching its apogee in the visual arts towards the end of that century. Its origins, however, lie in the literature of the American author Edgar Allen Poe and in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, St茅phane Mallarm茅, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, during the 1860s and 1870s, leading to the Symbolist Manifesto of Jean Mor茅as, published in Le Figaro in 1886. While to some extent an outgrowth of the glorification of the individual and personalized emotional response found in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, Symbolism espoused no idealism. Instead, it sought, through highly metaphorical, obscure, ambiguous, dreamlike imagery 鈥� sometimes macabre or even sexual and taboo in nature 鈥� to stir the viewer鈥檚 imagination and spiritual sensibilities. Synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by exciting another, of using hearing to stimulate seeing and vice versa, for example, was a central ambition of the movement, glorified by the anti-hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans鈥檚 controversial and influential novel Against Nature of 1884. Oscar Wilde鈥檚 The Picture of Dorian Gray and his late play Salom茅 reflect Symbolist ambitions. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and Debussy鈥檚 opera Pell茅as et M茅lisande are other profoundly Symbolist works. It is no coincidence that the movement coincided with increased public interest in Eastern religions and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis. United by their reaction against the focus on the physical world that preoccupied the Realists and Impressionists of mid-century, the Symbolists were less connected by a stylistic consistency than by a philosophy. Symbolist artists used personal, private, obscure images and iconography, and evocative colours to speak in intentionally ambiguous terms to the individual soul.
Hilliard H. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the Montreal presentation of the exhibition.
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Until October 21, 2010, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting The Symbolist Muse: A Selection of Prints from the National Gallery of Canada in its Graphic Art Centre. The exhibition includes over fifty masterpieces, spectacular prints by such renowned and influential figures as Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, 脡douard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Edvard Munch, Maximilian Kurzweil, Max Klinger, F茅licien Rops, Franz von Stuck and James Ensor, as well as, in certain works, Auguste Rodin, Henri Fantin-Latour, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, F茅lix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard and the early Pablo Picasso, among others. This exhibition has been organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada. Admission to the exhibition is free at all times.
Symbolism emerged as an artistic movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching its apogee in the visual arts towards the end of that century. Its origins, however, lie in the literature of the American author Edgar Allen Poe and in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, St茅phane Mallarm茅, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, during the 1860s and 1870s, leading to the Symbolist Manifesto of Jean Mor茅as, published in Le Figaro in 1886. While to some extent an outgrowth of the glorification of the individual and personalized emotional response found in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, Symbolism espoused no idealism. Instead, it sought, through highly metaphorical, obscure, ambiguous, dreamlike imagery 鈥� sometimes macabre or even sexual and taboo in nature 鈥� to stir the viewer鈥檚 imagination and spiritual sensibilities. Synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by exciting another, of using hearing to stimulate seeing and vice versa, for example, was a central ambition of the movement, glorified by the anti-hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans鈥檚 controversial and influential novel Against Nature of 1884. Oscar Wilde鈥檚 The Picture of Dorian Gray and his late play Salom茅 reflect Symbolist ambitions. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and Debussy鈥檚 opera Pell茅as et M茅lisande are other profoundly Symbolist works. It is no coincidence that the movement coincided with increased public interest in Eastern religions and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis. United by their reaction against the focus on the physical world that preoccupied the Realists and Impressionists of mid-century, the Symbolists were less connected by a stylistic consistency than by a philosophy. Symbolist artists used personal, private, obscure images and iconography, and evocative colours to speak in intentionally ambiguous terms to the individual soul.
Hilliard H. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the Montreal presentation of the exhibition.
Symbolism emerged as an artistic movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching its apogee in the visual arts towards the end of that century. Its origins, however, lie in the literature of the American author Edgar Allen Poe and in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, St茅phane Mallarm茅, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, during the 1860s and 1870s, leading to the Symbolist Manifesto of Jean Mor茅as, published in Le Figaro in 1886. While to some extent an outgrowth of the glorification of the individual and personalized emotional response found in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, Symbolism espoused no idealism. Instead, it sought, through highly metaphorical, obscure, ambiguous, dreamlike imagery 鈥� sometimes macabre or even sexual and taboo in nature 鈥� to stir the viewer鈥檚 imagination and spiritual sensibilities. Synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by exciting another, of using hearing to stimulate seeing and vice versa, for example, was a central ambition of the movement, glorified by the anti-hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans鈥檚 controversial and influential novel Against Nature of 1884. Oscar Wilde鈥檚 The Picture of Dorian Gray and his late play Salom茅 reflect Symbolist ambitions. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and Debussy鈥檚 opera Pell茅as et M茅lisande are other profoundly Symbolist works. It is no coincidence that the movement coincided with increased public interest in Eastern religions and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis. United by their reaction against the focus on the physical world that preoccupied the Realists and Impressionists of mid-century, the Symbolists were less connected by a stylistic consistency than by a philosophy. Symbolist artists used personal, private, obscure images and iconography, and evocative colours to speak in intentionally ambiguous terms to the individual soul.
Hilliard H. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the Montreal presentation of the exhibition.
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