Chapter 3: The Literature and Music of Painting in Symbolist Art Criticism

James Kearns

From Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle (1989), pp. 53-86, doi:10.59860/td.c380e5c

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Part of the book: Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle

James Kearns

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 27

Modern Humanities Research Association

ModernFrenchPoetryopen


Abstract.  During the summer of 1888, while Gauguin was in Brittany, the gold medal in the Salon had been awarded to Édouard Detaille for Le Rêve, in which sleeping soldiers dream of a heroic battle: a 'literary' painting. For the the Symbolists this was a bad thing. They thoroughly disapproved of art which was 'literary', though they mostly did not include Impressionism in that category. But art criticism was itself a literary genre, and many writers discussed at great length questions like: what are and/or should be the relationships between literature and painting? when and how was painting literary? if allegorical painting was literary, what made Symbolist painting non-literary? could a writer's understanding of painting ever be the same as/equivalent of, that of a painter?

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