This study has two main aims. The first is to inform about approaches to painting among the poets and critics who, during the years 1885-95, were associated with the French Symbolist movement. The second is to examine the relevance of the work of certain painters to the poetic theory and practice of Mallarmé, Kahn, and Jarry. The first aim may be called synchronic, for its focus is Albert Aurier's 1891 definition of Symbolism in painting, the needs to which it responded and the controversies to which it gave rise. But the second may be called diachronic, for the poetry and criticism of these poets are produced at three distinct moments in the movement's history: Mallarmé's break with the Parnassians in 1875; Kahn's involvement in the emerging Symbolism of 1886; and Jarry's deconstruction of Symbolist theories in 1894.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1989 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-23-4, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-xiii, 1-219
Symbolist Landscapes: The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and his Circle James Kearns Complete volume as single PDF
A reconstruction of the historical context to the relationship between Gauguin and Aurier, and to the article with which the poet promoted the painter. This context is necessary if we are to understand why the harmony of March 1891, when Gauguin was fêted by Paris intellectuals just before sailing to the South Seas, was to prove to be a fragile one.
Aurier's article would inflame rather than silence the controversies within the avant-garde surrounding Gauguin's painting. We turn now to the Neoplatonist framework which Aurier provided for that work, and the oppositions which this interpretation aroused. That opposition would only grow, for within eighteen months of March 1891 Aurier was dead, and replaced at the Mercure de France by the unspeakable Camille Mauclair whose idea of Symbolism most certainly did not include the painting of Paul Gauguin.
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53-86
Chapter 3: The Literature and Music of Painting in Symbolist Art Criticism James Kearns doi:10.59860/td.c380e5c
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?
Mallarmé was a central figure in debates about Impressionism from 1876 onwards, for in that year he had published L'Après-midi d'un faune as well as one of the most important articles on Manet ever written. The relationship of one to the other is the subject of this chapter.
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123-44
Chapter 5: The Science of Free Verse: Kahn and Seurat in 1886 James Kearns doi:10.59860/td.c59f686
As the Impressionist cause gained ground, the aim of the cultural establishment and avant-garde alike (not to mention the painters themselves) was to defuse the conjunction of political and artistic change which Mallarmé had found in Manet's open-air work. This aim takes various forms in avant-garde art criticism published during the second half of the 1880s but one of the most important is its approach to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism from 1886.
Gauguin's isolation in Tahiti had not lessened his need to win the Parisian public over to his work nor deprived him of his aggressive business sense, and he staged an ambitious exhibition in November 1893. It brought to an end any hopes of reconciliation with literary Symbolism, but Jarry, after seeing the exhibition, wrote three poems 'd'après et pour Paul Gauguin', one of them based on Gauguin's painting L'Homme à la hache. Poem and painting provide a focus for discussion of Gauguin's situation.
During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the relationships between French literature and the visual arts were diverse, eclectic and indiscriminate. To attend exhibitions, publish art criticism and produce work derived from or containing specific pictorial reference and analogy was by then a well-established French literary tradition, with all that this implied in terms of institutional and generic practices and constraints. As far as the Symbolists were concerned, Mallarmé and the young poets and critics grouped around him had direct and frequent access to the painters, dealers, curators and historians whose activity and contacts determined the production and circulation of art. The art history and criticism written by those involved in the Symbolist movement complemented rather than opposed their well-known claim that art was to aspire to the condition of music and helped to ensure that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the visual arts in France continued to be as much read as seen.
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Bibliography entry:
Kearns, James, Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 27 (MHRA, 1989)
First footnote reference:35 James Kearns, Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 27 (MHRA, 1989), p. 21.
Kearns, James. 1989. Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 27 (MHRA)
Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Kearns 1989: 21).
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