In an age ruled by materialism, scientific progress and the industrial revolution, Symbolism claimed the right to dream and a return to the inner life. From the late 1880s painters, sculptors, writers and musicians turned away from the visible world to explore the invisible and give form to ideas, from Gustave Moreau to Paul Gauguin and Gustav Klimt, from Edvard Munch to Odilon Redon, alongside poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and composers such as Claude Debussy.
Rather than following the movement country by country or year by year, the editors built the book around themes, and they give the works themselves first place as the starting point of every analysis. The survey reaches from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose Poor Fisherman (1881) some critics hailed as the birth of Symbolism, to Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin, and brings in lesser-known figures such as Armand Point, François-Rupert Carabin, George Frampton and Jeanne Jacquemin.
Written to replace a bibliography that had grown old, the book was greeted in the French-language press as a monument: a large-format volume that is both a scholarly synthesis and a feast for the eyes.
A centerpiece for any library of nineteenth-century art and a superb gift for lovers of Symbolism and the fin de siècle.
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