It’s the right time to have a look at some of the great art books published in 2021. A fabulous one is the catalogue Decadence And Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de). The exhibition featuring some 200 works was originally scheduled to start at Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin on September 18, 2020 and expected to end on January 17, 2021. Currently, all Berlin museums are closed. Check their website for updates.
The richly illustrated catalogue contains eight essays by specialists as well as the catalogue part with the illustrations of all the works exhibited at Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin as well as additional information, including short portraits of the Symbolist artists represented in the exhibition.
Ralph Gleis from Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin writes that Symbolism emerged as an artistic movement in the 1880s and was characterised by mysterious magic, erotic sensuality and dark dreamworlds. At the end of the 19th century, society believed to be in the midst of a fundamental (identity) crisis. Artists translated this into a highly subjective and emotional art that confronted the feared decline with rakish lust and a longing for death, as well as escapism and excess. They dealt with existential and taboo subjects such as sexuality and death, the pathological and the human psyche, anticipating Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899 (English version: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk; original German version Traumdeutung: Amazon.de).
According to Ralp Gleis, Belgium was the country where the propensity for morbidity and decadence was most pronounced and the assertion of Symbolist ideas most comprehensive. At the end of the 19th century, Brussels became a new art metropolis which gave essential impulses to the Symbolist movement.
In the catalogue’s opening Greetings, the Belgian Ambassador to Germany, S. E. Geert Muylle, reminds readers that behing the European Parliament in Brussels you can find the huge studio of the founding father of Belgian Symbolism, Antoine Wiertz, which has been transformed into a museum.
From the Belgian capital, Symbolism spread to Ostend, Bruges and Ghent, represented by artists such as James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert as well as writers including Maurice Maeterlinck and Georges Rodenbach. Freemason artists Félicien Rops and Fernand Khnopff and their works on dreams and decadence had a great impact on Wallonia and Brussels, writes Ambassador S. E. Geert Muylle. They explored the field of tension between the past and myth, and between the old masters and the new-found grandeur of their own country. Symbolism was later celebrated around Europe and taken up by the Western art scene. The disruptive psychology of the ego and the age-old tension between beauty and the ephemeral became the focus of an intense exchange between Brussels, Paris, London and Vienna.
In 2010, the extensive survey of this innovative art movement was the focus of the major exhibition Le Symbolisme en Belgique at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels. At the end of 2018, a monographic show celebrating Fernand Khnopff opened at the Petit Palais in Paris. In 2020, the first major retrospective in honor of Léon Spilliaert was held at the Royal Academy in London and subsequently at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. For the coming years, the Metropolitan Musem in New York and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have announced show on Belgian Symbolism.
The 2020-2021 exhibition Decadence And Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism at Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin is the occasion to deal not only with the aesthetic phenomenon of Symbolism, but also the societal constellations which made it appear.
In his catalogue Foreword, the Director of the Nationalgalerie, Udo Kittelmann, writes that, in the period of rapid change from an analogue to a digital world and from visible to invisible technologies, and in a time which sees climate change and its economic impact as a crisis, we appear to belong to the last generation prior to an imment upheaval. Therefore, we share the prevailing mood of the fin de siècle which led to creative moments, including the emergence of Symbolism.
Udo Kittelmann stresses that, as an art form, decadence had to do with underlying insecurity and anxiety about the future, but also with exploring options against the backdrop of a possible collapse. The awareness that momentary happiness was finite led people to joyfully savour it as if there was no tomorrow. Living on the edge, partly fraught with anxiety, partly licentious, they were devoted to hedonism as the ultimate goal in a blissfully apocalyptic mood, albeit one involving a preoccupation with existential questions and the inner life.
Udo Kittelmann underlines that Symbolism questions reality and examines excessive subjectivism and the absurd. Therefore, the Berlin exhibition is more than just a feast for the eyes. Symbolism reveal the power of art to offer a counter-concept to the idea of progress in terms of the total feasibility of the world.
Ralp Gleis (editor, idea and concept): Decadence And Dark Dreams: Belgian Sybolism. Hardcover, Nationalgalerie – Staatlich Museen zu Berlin, Hirmer Verlag, 2020, 24.5 x 29 cm, 336 pages with 265 color illustrations. Order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The catalogue front cover features a detail of Fernand Khnopff’s (1858-1921) famous work The Caresses, 1896, oil on canvas, 50 × 150 cm, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Fernand Khnopff is known for enigmatic allegories and melancholic landscapes, as well as for portraits of women and children, which he executed in oil, pencil and pastel. Book illustrations and sculptures, along with stage designs and costumes for the Théâtre royale de la Monnaie in Brussels complement his multifaceted oeuvre, which was inspired by contemporary literature, his surroundings and friendships with international artists.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations from the book reviewed here are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on January 1, 2021 at 15:11 German time.
