Sculptural rhymes of Art Nouveau: on the visual poetics of symbolism

Davydova Ol'ga Sergeevna ORCID: 0000-0002-6834-3291 PhD in Art History  Leading Scientific Associate, Scientific Research Institute of Theory and History of Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts Russia 125445 Moscow Levoberezhnaya Street, 4 building 1, flat 56 davydov-olga@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

All art is lyrical, or at least lyrical in its roots.

            Harry Kessler. Diaries. September 2, 1911

You can talk about style from different points of view. In the article "Plastic rhymes of modernity. On the question of the visual poetics of symbolism,"an attempt is made to understand the Art Nouveau style from the point of view of the artistic type of vision of the world. In this study, we will focus on the semantic allegorical poetry of plastic language, which is directly related to the nature of the creative and personal worldview of symbolist artists.

Art Nouveau is the dominant stylistic trend of the turn of the XIX–XX centuries [see, for example, 19, 20, 28, 34] – it takes its internal origins, first of all, in the creative search for symbolism, which embodied a new stage in the development of romantic-idealistic tendencies of the preceding time.  Symbolism became a milestone in the development of artistic thinking, after which the dynamics of plastic and iconographic modifications in art quite naturally gained more and more intensity. Moreover, the decisive innovation of symbolism, which goes beyond its historical boundaries, was not that it sharply broke with the realistic language of art of the XIX century, but that it reoriented the attention of artists from the external object of the image to the internal one. The search for images adequate to the mental structure (sometimes expressed with the help of realistic techniques) eventually led to the formation of a new visual system of artistic language – to the birth of the Art Nouveau style, which became the formal-plastic culmination of symbolism (for more information about the relationship between Art Nouveau style and symbolism as its internal category, see: ^{[13, 14, 22]}).

It should be noted that, being directly connected with the metaphysical foundations of creativity, with the synthesis of abstract-spiritual and aesthetically-sensual principles, the roots of which go back to the origins of the conception of "art for art" in the work of the Romantics of the mid-XIX century, modernism as an external stylistic formation and symbolism as its internal motivation require special methodological approaches, including new ones. In relation to the analysis of the works of modernity, not only hermeneutic, iconological and semiotic methods are promising, but also a contextual-associative approach that is born on the basis of figurative and semantic features of symbolism, studying a particular phenomenon in modern art from the point of view of its polyphonic multidimensional interactions with other epochal and ideological trends (more about this: ^{[21, 29]}). However, other publications of the author (see, for example, ^[11]) are devoted to the problem of methodology (its interdisciplinary nature), the importance of which we considered necessary to indicate for understanding the scientific foundations of the study, which is why in this article we will focus directly on art history issues, examples and characteristics related to the analysis of the suggestive specificity of the artistic language itself modern.  

Making a generalization at the level of artists' attraction to certain creative tasks, in the history of art, in our opinion, it is possible to distinguish two fundamental psychological principles that determine the semantic meanings of visual images – poetic and prosaic. The isolation of such dominants has a conditional character, especially considering that in practice they constantly interact. However, their accentuation makes it possible to better understand the features of the symbolist mindset, which expressed itself with the help of the generous associative metaphorical language of modernity. At the same time, we note that in this case we are not talking about literary concepts, but about the fundamental value orientations of artists, about the method of their thinking, to which very little research has been devoted in art history until now (V. S. Turchin ^[27], V. A. Kryuchkova ^[17], relatively close to this topic A. G. Kostenevech ^[16], Philippe Julianus ^[31], Jean-David Jumeau-Lafon ^[32]), in contrast, for example, to philology, the leading positions in the development of poetics of thinking in which originally belong to Gaston Bachelard (for example, ^{[1; 2]}).  The poetic type of thinking is characterized by the concentration of the creative consciousness of artists on the idealistic aspects of the perception of life, on the inner, intimate, lyrically sacred (in the broad sense of the word), spiritual world, the problematic and iconography of which the master primarily seeks to express in his work (in particular, these are the priorities in romanticism or symbolism). The prosaic type of worldview almost always brings into art the activity of changing values of external life, reflecting the dynamics of social unrest, political ideologies, alien opinions.  Relatively speaking, if the main center of artistic and poetic thought is a person purely, internal, to a certain extent, invisible, hidden in the spiritual reality, then the prosaic approach to art focuses on the external, social, visible to the world around him with the same degree of physical certainty with which an objective view captures nature (such a figurative orientation dominated, for example, in the critical realism of the Wanderers).

The artistic features of the stylistic system of modernity clearly indicate the attraction of the masters of the turn of the XIX–XX centuries to the expression of a poetic worldview in its origins – musically irrational, and, at the same time, deeply essential; associatively multidimensional, and, at the same time, piercingly concrete at the core of that semantic insight into the understanding of life, which is almost always concluded in the bottomless concentration of even the smallest, but genuine poetic form. In modernity, poetry has gone beyond the boundaries of literary utterance, transferring the principles of versification to almost all types of art. It was at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries that the process of self-consciousness of the visual language was growing, in which it became possible to consider poetry not as a specific art form interacting with visual creativity in various ways, but as the beginning defining the essence of the symbolists' imaginative thinking, as the primary source of artistic consciousness of the modern era.  Such an outburst of poetic intuition beyond the boundaries of traditional linguistic forms affected not only the level of content and perception of works of fine art, but also influenced the principles of formation of symbolist visual and verbal images, which always have a complex nature of synthesis of several categories of reality at once – physical and spiritual, or rather, spiritual, directly related to the individual sensory response personalities on inner experience through art: "... to be an artist means to withstand the wind from the worlds of art, completely unlike this world, only terribly affecting it; in those worlds there are no causes and effects, time and space, carnal and disembodied, and these worlds are innumerable: Vrubel saw forty Demon heads, but in reality they cannot be counted. <...> What happened was this: they were "prophets", they wanted to become "poets"" ^{[4, p. 148]}, – wrote Alexander Blok. These reflections of Blok were echoed by his art not only by Vrubel, but also by Viktor Borisov-Musatov, who felt like Orpheus (Orpheus of the brush) – one of the main characters of the figurative pantheon of symbolists: "I am still a Dante" ^[5], the artist confessed, putting his principled emphasis: "I could write entire volumes of my novel, but I have "my sword before God," as Cyrano said, dying. This is my art, and I will remain faithful to it and fight with it, fight to the death" (cit. according to: ^{[9, p. 327]}). Such a mindset was characteristic not only for Russians, but also for Western European masters of symbolism: "My drawings are inspired, not defined. They don't claim anything. Like music, they transport us into the dual world of the indefinite" ^{[33, p. 28]}, – Odilon Redon characterized his imaginative suggestive logic.

In the process of image formation, symbolist artists actively used purely poetic principles of creativity - the ability to summarize succinctly, metaphorically, identify the rhythmic originality of the drawing and various spatial registers within the composition, organically replace real details with fictional ones, immerse themselves in the adjacent zone between memories and imagination, intensively include a nostalgic element in the figurative structure of the work, prolonging the moment before that it seems to be equal to eternity (in contrast to the opposite temporal characteristics of time in the Impressionists, who sought to convey the effect of movement, speed). For symbolists, paraphrasing the lines of the American-English modernist poet Thomas Eliot, which invisibly included the eternal moment of the "Soul of the Rose" by John William Waterhouse (1908, private collection), "yew and rose are equal" (in Eliot's final poem "Little Gidding" from the cycle "Four Quartets" (1934-1942) distinguished by a subtle nostalgic imagery, close to the symbolist longing for the present as a hypostasis of the past, there are lines that have become quite famous in artistic circles: "We are born together with the dead: / You see – they come back and bring us with them. / The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew / are of equal time" ^[30]).

The very external characteristics of Art Nouveau in the visual arts – the musicality of contours, the fluidity of lines, the emphasized role of rhythmic pulsation in the organization of space on the plane, the individual melodics of the figurative system, ornamental "voice science", decorative, the variability of repetitions of several leading plastic motifs, a subtle sense of coloristic harmonies – speak of the birth of a new form of expression of poetry – visual. It can be said that modern artists are introducing a new kind of poetic rhyme – plastic, based on the harmony of forms with each other, their intonations intentionally echoing each other, forming an aesthetically expressive pattern. 

In Art Nouveau, the desire to expand the boundaries of the subject, to look at the world from an elevated point is quite obvious. Hence the poetic criteria for judging works of art that were inherent in the masters of the modern era themselves, who used such characteristics as "soul-stirring ghostliness" (words of M. V. Nesterov; cit. according to: ^{[8, p. 31]}) or "barely beginning uncertainty" (words of Borisov-Musatov; cit. according to: ^{[25, L. 75]}). The attempt made by modern artists to express the "inexpressible", "unclear" (V. F. Nouvel's formulation from a letter to K. A. Somov, September 14, 1897; cit. according to: ^{[24, p. 458]}), "something indefinite, airy, barely distinguishable" (Somov's words from a letter by A. A. Mikhailova, December 25, 1923; cit. according to: ^{[24, p. 224]}) led to the fact that the era of symbolism became a turning point in the system of creative sense-generating capabilities of the visual language. Alexandre Benois, for example, wrote about the foundation of his "artistic"Symbol of Faith: "If an artistic work – be it painting, sculpture, architecture, music or literature – contained the genuine immediate charm of poetry or what is commonly called the "soul of the artist", then it attracted me to myself, whatever direction it belongs to" ^{[3, p. 516]}.  

From the point of view of national peculiarities, the lyrical potential of the images created by one of the artists of the Abramtsevo circle, Mikhail Nesterov, is indicative in the affected context. The artist deliberately laid the associative poetic principle that found expression in most of his visual elegies as the basis for the authenticity of the work of art, whether it was a finished painting, for example, "Two Frets" (1905, Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum), inspired by the idyllic fairy–tale ballad of Alexei Tolstoy "Sometimes Merry May / Along the meadow of Leningrad, / Walking among the flowers, / Two frets are walking..." (1871); or sketches extraordinary in their plastic musicality, in particular, a sketch for the just mentioned painting "Two Frets", presented by Nesterov to the writer Vasily Rozanov (1905, collection of George Nisin). Inherent in the works of masters close to the Abramtsevsky circle, the national "landscape" temperament coincided with the dominant idea of the romantic-symbolic worldview about the paramount importance of mood – the spiritual level of perception of reality – expressed by the artistic organism. It was the iconography of lyrical emotion of feelings, enclosed in an associative synthesis of images of nature, history, poetry, aesthetic thought of the late XIX century. began to be considered as a new meaningful substance, expressed not by speech, but by plastic means.

Of course, not only Benois, Mikhail Nesterov, but also Viktor Borisov-Musatov ^[10], Mikhail Vrubel ^[12], Fedor Botkin, Konstantin Somov, Lev Bakst, Evgeny Lancere, Pavel Kuznetsov, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, James Whistler, addressed poetry as the main criterion for the authenticity of an artistic image. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Axeli Gallen-Kallela and many other artists whose judgments convey their personal notes about art, correspondence, diaries or memoirs of contemporaries. If we talk about the historical and theoretical research of the late XIX - early XX century, then here, being limited to only a few Russian–speaking authors (due to the capacity of the topic), it is impossible not to mention the developments of Ivan Ivanovich Lapshin about two types of artists-poets – those who develop an intellectual approach, basing their imaginative system on trust in memory, and those who gives primacy to the imagination, drawing creative suggestions from the spiritual depths of fantasy and mystical intuition (for more details, see: ^[18]). In the context of revealing the poetic inclinations of the modern era, the writings of Borisov's friend-Musatov Konstantin Vladimirovich Stanyukovich, in whose talent the artist believed with great enthusiasm, are no less meaningful. However, Stanyukovich's legacy, which includes both works of art criticism (one of the most significant in terms of the volume of material and psychologically reliable intonation, the monograph about Viktor Borisov-Musatov ^[25]) and works of art ^[26], still remains poorly studied and practically unpublished on an independent level.

Even purely scientific research, for example, the works of the German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel on radiolariae, jellyfish and other unicellular animals had a poetic influence on the artistic imagination ("Radiolariae", 1862; "The Beauty of forms in Nature", 1899, in Russia the first edition was carried out in 1904 ^[7]; "Nature as an artist", 1913). For example, the echoes of Haeckel's research, accompanied by the scientist's personal sketches of the simplest inhabitants of the underwater and terrestrial world, are felt in the idealized aesthetics of organic decor cultivated by the Art Nouveau style. In this regard, we should recall the work of Herman Obrist, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Louis Comfort Tiffany, architect Rene Bean, who was so inspired by the aesthetically inspired forms of seashells and jellyfish that, under the spell of their images, he created the concept of the entrance gate of the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, and in 1902 published an album "Decorative Sketches" with decor projects and ornaments that reveal a direct iconographic connection with Haeckel's "heroes". It is interesting to note that the interior decoration of Haeckel's own house – "Villa Medusa" in Jena – was also made in the Art Nouveau style, and the scientist used his tables of artistic forms of nature as an ornamental ceiling pattern.

The episode with Haeckel's works expressively demonstrates the peculiarities of the worldview of symbolist artists. The masters of Art Nouveau sought to synthesize a materially irrefutable basis, structure and its essential spiritual depth, naturally generating the beauty of forms as a vital unavoidable quality. That is why aesthetics was a vital area of artistic reality for modernity. The figuratively perfect ornamental culture itself, which Haeckel identified in groups of unicellular, served as a sign of supersensible sources of matter with the properties of beauty – harmony and symmetry – which means, according to the scientist and artists (recall the works of Odilon Redon), and the soul.

In other words, for the creative consciousness of the modern era, inspired by symbolism, nature was beautiful from the inside, which characterized the soul hidden behind the forms, which they sought to express with the help of the language of art. The poetry of modernity was, of course, not that with the help of this "floral style" (as it was called in Italy – "Floreale" or "Liberty style"), everyone suddenly started talking about roses, irises or orchids, but that in each new artistic image (the same rose, for example) the individual energy of the spiritual transformation of the motif familiar to everyone is palpable (recall, for example, the creative method of M. A. Vrubel, in particular, his "Rose", 1904, GTG). More specifically, the language of modernity was based on the poetic effort of the artist's will, in which a metaphor from the field of comparative turnover turned into an essential concept, into a thought.  Symbolism as an artistic direction motivated by a worldview (on this topic, see: ^[23]) in the visual arts did not consist in the fact that its representatives used traditional symbols to compose visual equivalents to literary texts. Symbolism in painting and graphics was expressed in the creation of new plastically full–fledged artistic worlds endowed with an original meaning, their own ideal time, space, and most importantly - a similarity organic to a spiritual dream (even if we have a moral dodecaphony, like the symbolist from Nice Adolf Mossa, the Austrian graphic artist and writer Alfred Kubin or the Belgian master Felicien Rops). 

By itself, any archetype, symbol, sign can be compared to a shell, inside which symbolist artists cultivated a new essence of the artistic form, a new poetic equivalent of spiritual life. It is no coincidence that the continuators of romantic-symbolist trends in the perception of art, such as poets and art critics Alfred Housman ("The Name and Nature of Poetry", 1933) or Thomas Eliot ("The Purpose of poetry", 1932-1933), compared poetry with a disease – with a painful secretion of the soul, assimilating reality by giving it new figurative qualities. This association of poetry with the "shell disease", with a pearl born in oyster flaps, in the process of assimilation of an alien grain of sand trapped inside a mother-of-pearl shell, has found repeated intuitive reflection in the visual art of modernity. The shell motif is one of the most beloved and enduring subjects of symbolist painting, examples of which can be found in the works of Russian and Western European artists. Let us recall, for example, the charmingly abstract, musical world of the shimmering "Pearl" (1904, GTG) by Mikhail Vrubel, or his associatively ambiguous, saturated with his own existential logic series of graphic sketches "Shells" (1904-1905, GRM). Odilon Redon also created his own image of a fantastically delicate shell – an incomprehensible, almost immaterial substance embodying a mysteriously spiritualized organic particle of poetry ("Shell", 1912, private collection; "Shell", 1912, Orsay Museum). A completely different temperament, brutal, with elements of naturalistic absurdity, the "poetic shell" was also written by Franz von Stuka ("Still Life with a shell and a snail", 1892, Galerie Katharina B?ttiker, Art Nouveau — Art Deco, Zurich; the location is indicated in 2009 by the Munich edition of the Villa Stuka Museum).  The shell has become one of the visual symbols of the poetic attitude of modern artists, not so much because of its physical "material" appearance, but because of those internal processes that develop behind visible forms.

The essence of symbolism, as well as its most organic language, Art Nouveau, is not in external signs–"shells", even if they are mother-of-pearl, but in the discovery and consolidation in the plastic material of the art of understanding life as poetic uniqueness, that is, in that creative "disease" of the soul, which accidentally turns a feeling into a unique artistic the image is a pearl. The new symbolist type of visual poetry consisted in the ability to "see with colors" and was based on the need to convey objects of inner vision. In particular, this is what Maurice Denis, the creator of more than one "poetic Arabesque", aspired to. In this case, an allusion to the artist's famous panel for the house of Lerol "Staircase in Foliage" (1902, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, private collection), the second name of which is "Poetic Arabesque", is deliberately used. It is noteworthy that even in connection with the most important discoveries made during his studies at the Julian Academy, Denis recalled not the formation of drawing skills from nature, but the development of the ability to depict what is visible with inner vision (for more details, see: 10, pp. 14-17; 11, pp. 63-66, 172-190). Attempts to approach the transfer of an artistic image, perceived, felt beyond the boundaries of natural reality and plot content, in many ways became the reasons provoking the search for a new language that led to the formation of the Art Nouveau style.

Symbolist images, directly related to the birth of the visual language of modernity (although not always expressed by it), in almost all national variants synthesized actual signs of the real world, full-scale observations, historical or literary impulses with the element of imagination, with the individual intonation of the artist's inner comprehension of time, with that hidden mental work closed in its uniqueness the artist's "I", which forms a poetic utterance. 

Consciously aware of the depth that lies behind any genuine creative image, modern artists consciously perceived art as a space of interpenetration of earthly reality and otherworldly reality. Because of this, their works almost always contain a "mystical element" – of a poetic-lyrical or religious-philosophical nature – which provoked the birth of immediately recognizable visual forms of modernity. Due to the fact that this "mystical element" in the XX century. for a long time was a topic ignored by science (for very objective reasons – wars, the dominance of atheism, pragmatism and entertainment culture, the virtualization of art), the Art Nouveau style also remained in the exclusion zone for a long time, primarily in those issues that concerned the essential understanding the language of the style. In art, of course, there are phenomena that can be analyzed using purely formal methods. However, the poetic program of modernity does not allow to explain this style only in terms of its formal features. To defend such a position means to remain beyond the boundaries of understanding the fundamental uniqueness of the external vocabulary of modernity, which embodied the inner meanings of the romantic-symbolist worldview. This has been happening for quite a long time in the history of art (for more information, see: ^{[11, 21]}). The aesthetically superficial view of Art Nouveau and symbolism, which at the fundamental level have an immaterial nature, has partly not outlived and still does not, however, it does not outlast poetry, which, from time to time, is attributed purely decorative, banal properties. However, in art, after Romanticism and symbolism, poetry became the source of the philosophy of life and creativity. It was poetic intuition that became the existential feeling that opened the way to utopian dreams of ideal artistic syntheses, one of the first conscious forms of embodiment of which was the Art Nouveau style, surrounded by "modernisms" charged with the energy of creative searches.

Such a metamorphosis of the view of poetry as a meaningful and formative area saturated with concrete being was due to changes in the perception of art history that occurred in the modern era, and as a result of which it received the status of a special self-sufficient spiritual reality with its own illusory existence, attractive to artists.Symbolists were among the first to declare with principled frankness about the appeal to the practice of inner life as a full-fledged visual reality, developing according to its rhythmic and semantic laws and requiring the restructuring of the usual logic of perception of concepts from straightforward to suggestive and contextual-associative. "I really don't know, my friends, how we can get away from the non–existent!" ^{[6, p. 360]}, wrote Paul Valery about symbolism, designating with these words not only the main subject of scientific research for art historians of the modern era, but also that abstract-poetic area of creative attraction that will develop in the art of artists of the XX century, and the beginning of the XXI century.