Beginning with the Pre-Raphaelites and those pivotal French artists (de Chavannes, Moreau, Redon and others) who assured the transition from romanticism to symbolism, this magnificent (and splendidly color-illustrated) work turns to examine Gauguin's contribution to the spread of symbolism, an inter

His pervasive interest in Bruges suffuses his work with the quiet, spiritual atmosphere of the "dead" city, a theme frequently evoked by writers of the fin de siecle.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) played a seminal role in Post-Impressionist France. In his writings and work, he favored emotional responses to nature over intellectual uses of lines, color, and composition. In 1888 he and Emile Bernard developed a new style called Synthetism. Three groups of Gauguin's symbolist followers—Pont Aven, Les Nabis, and Rose + Croix pursued and extended the Synthetist vision. This sourcebook focuses on the most prominent adherents of the three schools directly affected by Gauguin's symbolism. This is the first comprehensive, single-volume guide and bibliography of artists in these three important French avant-garde movements. This work covers the entire careers of 16 artists by providing biographical sketches, chronologies, citations to primary and secondary literature and exhibitions.

The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, but this symbol is different from the way it was used and understood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck defined its essence in an article that appeared on April 24, 1887, in L’Art moderne. He wrote that the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract to the concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from the concrete to the abstract, from “what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and sensed to the evocation of the idea.” This volume attempts to give a glimpse into the power of the Symbolist movement and the nature of its fundamental and interdisciplinary role in the evolution of art and literature of the twentieth century. It records the studies of a group of scholars, who met and discussed these topics together for the first time in 2009. While illuminating the specificity of Symbolism in art, architecture and literature in different European countries, these articles also demonstrate the crucial role of French Symbolism in the development of the international Symbolist movement. The authors hope that an expanding group, a society of Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD), born out of the first meeting, will continue to further this discussion at future conferences and in the printed conference proceedings.

Durrell's best-known work fused Western notions of time and space with Eastern metaphysics. Very little has been written about Durrell's work before the Second World War. With A Smile in His Mind's Eye, Ray Morrison seeks to redress this neglect.

Exhibition catalogue for Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints, December 6, 2012 to March 1, 2013 at the La Salle University Art Museum. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how the Symbolist fascination with ambiguity seen in their choices of subject matter (i.e. half-human, half-animal hybrids such as harpies and sphinxes, gender ambiguity and androgyny) extended to formal strategies of representation that obscure form as well as content. This exhibition places Symbolist art in the context of Modernism by focusing on the ways in which artists experimented with print media and explored technical means of suggesting formal ambiguity (i.e. flattening, abstracting, obscuring) both to better match form and content and to push the boundaries of figurative art. The exhibition features work by artists Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Ibels, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Buhot, Pierre Roche, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Maurice Dumont, Jeanne Jacquemin, Georges de Feure,François-Marius Valère Bernard, Carlos Schwabe and others. Print techniques represented in this survey range from lithography and etching to gypsography. The exhibition catalogue features essays by the curator and La Salle faculty from the disciplines of art history and philosophy.

Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing's ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.