Rodolphe Rapetti: Symbolism.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Rodolphe Rapetti Symbolism. Flammarion, 320 pages, $95

Just as no one today longs for the art of the 1990s, so the Symbolist art of the 1890s never fared well in the public opinion polls of the twentieth century. Such disdain is regrettable, because Symbolism's reaction against nineteenth-century realism can be the missing piece of the puzzle to any full understanding of modernism. Symbolisms embrace of literature, poetry, music, and criticism, not to mention the return of myth and narrative to paint, attempted to rise to Wagner's much-quoted mandate for the "total work of art." For a moment, Symbolism was art's international answer to the rising tide of European nationalism and politicization, and it produced some of modernism's most unusual and still unexamined works of art.

The new coffee-table-size book on Symbolism by Rodolphe Rapetti, the head curator and deputy director of the Musees de France, is therefore a welcome addition to our understanding of this diffuse, forgotten, even maligned period of art. Well-reproduced illustrations, matched to informative introductions, trace the beginnings of Symbolism through the Pre-Raphaelites, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Bocklin. Additional chapters explore the thematic manifestations of the movement ("Strange Beauty" "Satanism and Mockery"), related artistic developments (Cloisonnism, Decadence, Neo-Impressionism, Synesthesia), the artists and writers of the period (Paul Gauguin, James Ensor, J. K. Huysmans, Odilon Redon, Stephane Mallarme, Felix Feneon, the brothers Goncourt), and the cultural landscape of the fin de siecle ("Hysteria: A New Expressive Repertoire" "The ...