This richly illustrated volume explores mystical themes in European, Scandinavian, and North American landscape paintings from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This book features works by Emily Carr, Marc Chagall, Arthur Dove, Paul Gauguin, Lawren Harris, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler, among others. Common to their work is the expression of the spiritual crisis that arose in society and the arts in reaction to the disillusionments of the modern age, and against the malaise that resulted in the Great War. Many artists turned their backs on institutional religion, searching for truth in universal spiritual philosophies. This book includes essays investigating mystical landscape genres and their migration from Scandinavia to North America, with a focus upon the Group of Seven and their Canadian and American counterparts. Accompanying an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d'Orsay, this book offers a penetrating look at the Symbolist influence on the landscape genre.

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)--court physician to the king of Saxony--was a naturalist, amateur painter, and theoretician of landscape painting whose Nine Letters on Landscape Painting is an important document of early German romanticism and an elegant appeal for the integration of art and science. Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. Carus prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the German natural philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, especially Schelling's notion of a world soul, and the writings of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Carus played a role in the revolution in landscape painting taking place in Saxony around Caspar David Friedrich. The first edition appears here in English for the first time.

Ferdinand Hodler's expressive figure paintings, mountain landscapes and portraits are icons of modernism. Even during his lifetime, the work of the Swiss painter (1853-1918), who helped shape Symbolism, attracted great international attention. Contemporaries saw in Hodler above all the human actor, "who knows how to shape the soul through the body", said the artist Paul Klee in 1911. What is hardly known today: Hodler's path to fame also led via Berlin. Alongside Paris, Vienna and Munich, the imperial capital had developed into one of the most important European art metropolises at the beginning of the 20th century. These cities offered Hodler the opportunity to make his work known beyond the Swiss borders. With around 50 paintings by Hodler and works by Lovis Corinth and Hans Thoma, among others, who exhibited with Hodler in Berlin, his success story on the Spree is told for the first time.

Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was an exponent of Symbolism and Jugendstil, a pioneer of Expressionism and an innovator of monumental painting. Hodler's significance can also be charted through those he influenced in Viennese Modernist circles, such as Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Hodler's landscapes, self-portraits and portraits of women (such as the haunting series following the death of his lover Valentine God -Darel) bristle with barely restrained energy and color, paving the way for the expressionistic, decorative experiments of the next generation of artists. Published to accompany the artists' most comprehensive exhibition in Austria since his resounding success at the 1904 Secession, Ferdinand Hodler: Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele explores the main themes of Hodler's work and puts him in the context of his peers and followers.