The Ark

Impressionism at the turn of the 20th Century included artists who were concerned with the religious and spiritual meaning of life.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

The Symbolist Movement influenced Henri Matisse and Gustave Moreau. The Nabis ("prophets" in Hebrew) included artists like Pierre Bonnard. They are part of The Impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: The French Impressionists are probably the most popular group of artists today, but what's not well known is the spiritually minded movement it generated.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and on The Ark today, we hear about the Symbolists and the Nabis, who flourished in the fin de siecle, the turn of the century. They rejected the trend toward scientific realism, and promoted religious and even esoteric mysticism.

At the National Gallery of Victoria an exhibition of their work is on show. Director Gerard Vaughan tells us about the Symbolists.

Gerard Vaughan: What you get in Paris at the end of the 1880s and the early 1890s is a group of artists who were self-consciously radical, but who were also very traditionalist, but they linked themselves in with a group of contemporary writers, playwrights, poets, and so forth, and the idea of the work of art being symbolic was a kind of issue that they dealt with in great depth.

It was something that interested them, the critics wrote about them as Symbolists, there was an awareness that these young artists were doing something quite different to what I would call High Impressionism and so you begin to get those radical exhibitions in the early 1890s, they put it both ways. They talk about them as exhibitions of Impressionists and Symbolists; in other words, recognising that something pretty interesting had actually happened as an offshoot of Impressionism.

Rachael Kohn: So were they pitting themselves against the kind of sunny pastoral scenes that we usually associate with Impressionist artists?

Gerard Vaughan: I think that's precisely, so far as the artists are concerned, that's precisely it, that Impressionism in many ways, although it's radical stylistically, it's still naturalism in that traditional sense. It's painting the world as you see it.

But the Symbolist artist, beginning with Gauguin and then picking up all those young Parisian artists who were his followers and protégés, those artists we call the Nabis, Maurice Denis, Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, all those artists, they very much saw themselves as moving away from the directness of Impressionism, that moment of expressing an optical effect, you know, the effect of sunlight on a street corner, or sunlight on a field of daisies, that kind of thing. And for them, art had to be much more enduring, much more powerful, with the ability to move the viewer, to have an emotional effect.

And so they got it through abstracting forms, through the richness and saturation of colour, through the idea that you can just suggest a figure rather than exactly delineating it, if I can put it like that, for visual power, and then the subject matter itself, they enter a world of the dream, something very cerebral, something spiritual and idealistic, and for them the idea of just reproducing nature as it's observed becomes an irrelevance. They believe that to be powerful and to move the viewer a work of art must have a spiritual quality.

For some of them it was what I would call traditional Christianity and in France traditional Catholicism, because the whole history of French thinking in the 19th century was almost a battleground between scientific positivism and Catholicism, and there were various revivals of Catholicism, and so the whole Romantic movement in its different forms, from the early 19th century right through to the late 19th century, those late Romantics that we call the Symbolists, whether they're writers or poets or painters, that movement, because it was idealist, had underneath it, a sense of religion of some kind.

So some of these artists, like Maurice Denis or Paul Serusier who are both very strongly represented in the exhibition that we have at the National Gallery of Victoria at the moment, for them, their spirituality was expressed in traditional Christianity.

They were passionately religious and very devoutly Catholic, and remember, that this coincides with a moment of struggle in a political sense, and a social sense, between the Third Republic, which as anti-clerical, and the Catholic church. And it was in the 1890s when these artists were at their peak and painting these subjects that have a religious dimension and a spiritual dimension, it was a moment of tremendous struggle between church and state, and so a lot of people who had interest in religion, linked their sense of religion with the traditions of the French nation and that took them right back beyond the Revolution beyond the ancien regime to the Middle Ages.

And so there was within this modernist milieu, there was a revival of interest in things mediaeval, because that was the age of faith, when art was simple, ideas were simple and powerful, and these were things that these artists admired and which you see coming through in their work.

Now for other artists, the interest in spirituality was quite different. One of the aspects of literary symbolism of course is an interest in esoteric religion. There was a salon of painters who were interested in mysticism, and it was called The Salon de la Rose Croix, the Salon of the Rosy Cross.

Rachael Kohn: Who were some of those artists?

Gerard Vaughan: Well one of them was a man called Josephin Peladin, who founded the Salon de la Rose Croix. He's a forgotten artist now, but he was very well known in the late 1880s and early 1890s and he tried to get the Nabis artists to exhibit in these strange exhibitions of mystical works. Some of them agreed, and some didn't. They felt it was too far from what they were interested in.

Rachael Kohn: Now you've just mentioned the Nabis artists. Can you explain that particular group, because the term has an interesting provenance.

Gerard Vaughan: It does indeed. The Nabis group, and they're these young Parisian artists who were followers of Gauguin, deeply inspired by Gauguin and Cézanne who wanted art to do something quite different to what Impressionism had done in the previous generation.

They called themselves the Nabis but it was simply a very lighthearted title they gave themselves in the 1890s because they would meet together, they'd have meetings in each other's studios once a month, they'd have a dinner together, they'd dress up in funny costumes, they would debate current literature, what was going on in the theatre, they'd each bring a painting, something they'd produced in the previous month, and they'd call it their icon, and they did talk about religion a great deal. We know this from their letters and from their diaries.

They called themselves the Nabis; it's a Hebrew word meaning prophet, because they saw themselves as the prophets of a new art, a new approach to art. But it was a very private term at the time. No-one had ever heard of it. It was only really art historians in the mid-20th century who liked the idea of the Nabis as a defining category for these artists.

Rachael Kohn: How did some of the artists like Maurice Denis, for example, who was a prominent Nabis, express his religious themes through his art?

Gerard Vaughan: Well in fact when I think about it, the most overtly religious paintings by Maurice Denis are not those in our current exhibition, although one of them, it's a very large canvas from a series of seven canvases, called La Chasse de St Hubert, The Hunt of St Hubert, and it's all about the legend of St Hubert, who was this sort of early saint in northern France in the Ardennes Forest, who chased a great stag all day and finally was about to get the kill, so to speak, and he saw the stag with a cross appearing between the antlers and it was a moment of conversion for this Pagan ruler in northern France.

And this was a subject of great interest to a man called Baron Cochin, who was a friend and protector of Maurice Denis and it's interesting because Cochin was one of the leaders of the Catholic party in this sort of maelstrom of French politics of the 1890s where you have Catholicism pitted against, as I said before, the Third Republic. And he was a spokesman in the French Parliament for the rather traditional, and to be frank, rather aristocratic Catholic party, and Denis, because he was a very deeply religious person himself, I think fitted rather naturally with the Cochin circle. So that is one good example in fact of the kind of political and social elements of this interest in religion flowing over into art.

Rachael Kohn: And yet that mural of St Hubert could be seen as simply a return to traditionalism. What was modern about it?

Gerard Vaughan: Well you've absolutely put your finger on it, that's a really good question. The painting, it is reduced, we have flat patches of colour, it's all based on the concept of the arabesque. In other words, there are abstracting qualities in the picture itself, if you squint you can reduce the picture down to a series of curving, arabesque lines, a decorative pattern on the surface, and we're only a little short step away from Matisse's Dance and Music, you know, these great early 20th century movements towards almost abstraction.

So the painting in that sense is very radical. But Denis himself wrote a treatise at the age of 20, if you can believe it, in 1890, he was so upset by the vicious review that a series of pictures by Gauguin had received in Paris, including Gauguin's great Vision After the Sermon, that he wrote a treatise on what the new art was all about, and he began with really one of the great statements that every book on abstraction quotes this young 20-year-old in Paris who was passionately interested in the art of Gauguin, and saw himself as his follower, and he started off saying 'You must remember that a picture before being a painting of a battle horse or a nude woman or anything else, a picture is essentially a flat surface, covered in colours, assembled in a certain order.' A very simple statement but incredibly radical and almost a theoretical basis for the shift towards abstraction that came in the decades that followed.

But interestingly, he called his treatise, it was called La Definition du Neo-traditionism - A Definition of Neo Traditionalism - and what he actually said was the most modern artists, in finding sources for their art, and in finding points of inspiration, need to look back bay beyond the savant and all the traditions of 19th century paintings to traditional art, traditional French Folk Art, they need to go back to the Middle Ages, they need to go back to Fra Angelica and those Italian Masters of the 14th and 15th century rather like the pre-Raphaelites in England, saying, we need to go back to a form of art that is simpler, and more powerful and more expressive, but also an art that served the cause of religion.

They went back even further, they were great admirers for example, of Egyptian art, and the Parthenon frieze and works like that. So it's a kind of conundrum, an irony, that you get the most radical young painters in Paris self-consciously embracing traditional art, and saying We see ourselves as traditionalists.

Rachael Kohn: Is that what Gauguin was doing in another way by going back to primitive art? He seems to be not exactly going back to the great European tradition, but he represents a simpler, perhaps more primitive art.

Gerard Vaughan: I agree with that entirely. It's interesting. Gauguin had a great interest in religion, deep interest in religion, without being very religious, so again for him it was almost perhaps anthropological, because all the great stylistic break-throughs of Gauguin, these radical paintings, unlike any pictures ever produced before in history, occurred while he was living in Brittany in the little village of Pont Aven where many of these Nabis artists went in the 1890s, and the great breakthrough painting for Gauguin was produced in August of 1888, it was called The Vision after the Sermon, the Struggle of Jacob and the Angel.

Now it's not in our exhibition because it actually belongs to the National Gallery of Scotland, but if you're looking for the great breakthrough that influenced all of these artists in the whole modern movement, that is it. And Gauguin was fascinated by the simple piety of the Breton peasants, so The Vision After the Sermon is in fact a painting about an idea. He depicts villagers who have heard the parish priest give a sermon on the Struggle of Jacob and the Angel, this great story from Genesis, and he paints what they are imagining, what the peasants are thinking.

So you have peasants in the foreground, the picture itself is as far away from naturalism as you can get, he's not painting anything other than a mindscape, not a landscape, so the ground on which Jacob and the Angel struggle is simply deep, brilliant red, for example, unlike anything in nature. And so Gauguin has created an evocation of a dream using incredibly radical technical approaches, the composition is radical, the way it's painted is radical, the use of colour, and he has completely turned his back on what I would call the naturalism, the optical effects, painting nature as you see it, of the Impressionists. And this painting was transforming, and all these young artists saw it, it was exhibited in Paris at the Great Café Volpini Exhibition of 1889, and of course the critics hated it.

Camille Pisarro, the Impressionist, who was a supporter of Gauguin, because Gauguin began life as a straightforward Impressionist painter, friend of Pisarro, imitated his style. And Pisarro was shocked, because he said, you know, a contemporary artist must paint life around him, you must be modern, and a modern artist accepts the world around him and he is anti-mystical, and you have painted a mystical picture. You are not a good artist because of that.

But in fact, it was this break-through, this Symbolist concept that the picture now can be about the mind, about ideas, you know, what are dreams? It can represent dreams using very abstract ways of applying colour and form, rather than just depicting what the artist sees.

Rachael Kohn: Gerard Vaughan is Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, which has the Impressionists Exhibition on show until 26th September. And you can link to the exhibition on our website.

Next week on The Ark, Between Egypt and Mesopotamia, the lost civilisation of ancient Syria.

THEME

Guests

Dr Gerard Vaughan
is Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Further Information

The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
The exhibition displays more than 90 masterworks from iconic artists including Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas and Renoir. It also examines the liberating impact of Impressionism upon the younger generation of artists who came to prominence in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s - embracing Symbolism's demands for the revival of dreams and the imagination in art.
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/impressionists/