Hofsttter, Hans H.

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

Hofsttter, Hans H., (2000) "Symbolism in Germany and Europe" from Ehrhardt, Ingrid and Simon
Reynolds (eds.), Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany 1870-1920 pp.17-27, London: Prestel

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Hans H. Hofstiitter

lsite page:
is Ensor
Jortrait with Masks, 1899
I (ct. fig. 6, p. 22)

iotstatler, 1976; Cat.

lotterdam/Brussels/
laden-Baden/Paris, 1976.
1886.
ledon, 1922.
'reud, 1961, p. 293.

Symbolism in Germ'any and Europe

Syrn,bolism might be defined as a mental attitude,

manifested in literature and visual art, which had
recourse to motifs and depictions that were unreal.
The undertying idea was that visible, measurable,
definable reality represents merely the foreground
of an ineffable universal scheme. It was impossible
to
this scheme directlY;lt
could,
only
allusions.
This is why the metaphors and allegories of SyrriboliSt
poets and painters showed that things impossible
in nature could be experienced only under certain
conditions - drear.!1,2
Their intention
was to prove the probable existence of another reality
behind or beyond the things we perceive in a conscious state.
The roots of this attitude reach far back into
the past, and extend through the cultures of many
peoples and continents. To approach the numinous
has always been one of the fundamental strivings
of the human spirit, which, unable to find concrete
points of reference to explain its origins and purpose,
seeks refuge in religions and mythologies. Yet this
global aspect of the theme cannot concern us here,
despite the fact that our present topic lies embedded in it.
After the Enlightenment had convinced eighteenthcentury Europe that all 'superstitions' had been overcome, the Romantic movement mounted opposition
to enlightened rationalism and the aesthetic that was
closely bound up with it. Romanticism already bore
definitely symbolist traits. These were then amplified
in the work of the English Pre-Raphaelites, which in
turn reverted to the Continent and affected the art of
Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, and others in
France, and of Hans von Marees, Arnold B6cklin and
others in Germany, who themselves influenced the
following, younger generation. By the turn of the century this development in art had spread throughout
Europe; its manifestations in Germany are the subject
of the present exhibition. 1
A key impulse came from France, in the shape .
of a manifesto by the writer Jean Moreas, published
in 1886 in Le Figaro litteraire. There he explained:
"The essential trait of Symbolist art consists in never
conceptually fixing or directly expressing an idea.
-A.nEnharrswl)y1fie aspeCts of nature,tneac1S6f
men, actual appearances of whatever kind, do not
themselves become visible in this art, but instead are

symbolized through subtly perceptible traces, through

covert
... We have
<Y.{
suggested the term 'Symbolism' as the only one
which is capable of aptly describing the current
stream of the creative mind in art. We intend to hold
by this designation."2
To Moreas' characterization Odilon Redan added
the remark: "All of the errors which the critics initially
permitted themselves to make about me, amounted
to overlooking the fact that one must not define,
understand, limit, or focus anything,
thing that is truly new - including beauty - bears its
meaning within itself ... A title [for Symbolist works]
is justified only when it is indeterminate, indecisive,
and virtually intends a dark ambiguity. My drawings _
suggest, and cannot be defined. They determine__ ' '.ki
nothing. Like music, they spirit us into the equivocal
woMottheindete;mir1ate."3
Seen in this light, Symbolist paintings and drawings are ultimately inexplicable, as Sigmund Freud
had to admit in connection with the interpretation
of dreams: "With the manifold meaning of symbols,
dreams combine a tendency to admit of overinterpretati.QO, to represent, in a single contentdiverse
and often by nature very divergent thought formations
and wishful impulses." 4
The way in which the viewer's imagination can
be spirited out of the familiar and into the "equivocal
world of the indeterminate" (almost every Symbolist
had his own method of doing this) is clearly demonstrated by Max Klinger's portfolio, Fantasy on the
Rnding of a Glove (fig. 1). The point of departure
here is a real, identifiable object and an actual setting,
complemented by a psychologically explicable act.
In the first etching we see a skating rink where
a number of people are enjoying themselves, alone,
in pairs, or in groups, much as in any illustration in
a contemporary magazine of that time. In the second
depiction everything comes to a head, as the artist
focuses on two main protagonists, a lady who drops
a glove and a gentleman skating behind her who
bends to pick it up. The figures' attitudes and gestures are important, especially the man's losing of
his hat, which renders him vulnerable. In the third
image, he is sitting up in bed, the glove in front of
him on the covers. We may conclude that he has
not returned it to the lady, as etiquette would require,
but has kept it as a reminder, a fetish that fuels his

17

imagination, which in the following eight pictures

will confront him with a series of wish-dreams and
nightmares.
What can be developed in a graphic cycle as
a sequence of phases can be suggested simultaneously in a painting, as in Bocklin's Self-Portrait with
Death Playing the Rddle (cat. 155) in Berlin. The artist
has depicted himself realistically, standing at his easel
as a skeleton with a violin approaches him. Here the
unreal is depicted in a way that m.akes it seem just
as real as the artist's figure. Max Deri has termedlRis,
probably the commonest method of symbolistic alien1.- ation, "naturalistic permutation,"S which in the present
case means that persons and objects rendered with
fidelity to nature appear in a connection which is impossible in 'normal' everyday reality.
When we review the present exhibition, and also
take into account works of international Symbolism,
we can recognize a further principle of this current
in art. Symbolism was not limited to any particular
JL style, nor did it engender any of its own. it employed
various styles and approaches from Romanticism
through Realism, from the decorative, planar art
of Jugendstil to Expressionism. Yet whatever style
the Symbolists adopted, they never conformed to
the letter of its canon. instead they manipulated its
appearance with an eye to conveying the !@Qscendthey strived for.

The principle of synaesthesia

Like their contemporary poet-colleagues, Symbolist
painters again and again emphasized the synaesthetic element in their works, and many of them admired the music of Richard Wagner, the synaesthetic
genius of the nineteenth century. Wagner's idea
of a synthesis of all the arts into a comprehensive
or total work, a Gesamtkunstwerk, was one of the
most fruitful of theera. In hiS operas, words and
music blended and became one with the colours
and atmosphere of the stage sets. Emile Bernard
recorded the profound influence that Wagner's
music had on the circle of artists around him and
on Gauguin. And GaL\guin himself wrote to a friend:
"One must suggest and not describe in painting,
just as music does, by the way."
Redon once described a painting in musical
terms, as "a little grey, three or five main tones, whose
arrangement occurs rhythmically or contrapuntally in analogy to a fugue". For Redon, music was a
mystic force which was capable of spiriting listeners
to a supernatural realm. Bocklin, too, stated the case
programmatically: "A work of visual art should tell a
story and give the spectator food for thought, just as

18

Hans H. Hofstatter

Fig. 1
Max Klinger
Fantasy On the Finding
of a Glove (Opus IV)
2nd Scene, 1881
Private collection

much as a work of literature, and make an impression on him just like a piece pf music." The list of
examples could be extended indefinitely.6
An equally obvious feature in Symbolist pictures
is the frequent depiction of musical instruments.
We find girls playing flutes in Gauguin's SOUth Seas
paintings, ladies playing lutes and harps in the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites, and lute-playing again
in the German artist Heinrich Vogeler's Annunciation.
Like the flutes, harps, and violins in Jettmar's works,
the lute figured prominently in Vogeler's works. as a
musical accompaniment to courting. Symbolist poets,
too, revelled in musical similes and comparisons.
Take Verlaine, who exclaimed in his Art Poetique:
"De la musique avant toute chose ... "

Points of contact with literature

The points of contact with the literature of the day
were just as close as those with music. Authors such
as Victor Hugo, Gerard de NeNal, Charles Baudelaire,
Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme and Gustave
Flaubert in France, Edgar Allen Poe, that mirror of
the unconscious, in the United States, the Dutchman
Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Englishman Oscar Wilde,
and the Flemish Maurice Maeterlinck, were the most
important. After the Romantic period, artists had become more widely-read than probably ever before. In
Germany, with Stefan George, and especially in Austria, a comprehensive literature emerged in parallel
with Symbolist art which could be described by that

5
6

Deri,1920.
Cf. Hofstatter, 1976,
p. 141 ft.

same term and which maintained vital contacts with

the visual arts. Its protagonists were Arthur Schnitzler
,
Richard Oehmel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer
Maria Rilke.
Even though these authors could not be called
Symbolists with regard to their entire (Euvre (which,
by the way, also holds for the visual artists), they at
least gave out and received strong impulses in this
direction. Still, literary allusions as such played no
greater role in German Symbolism than in that of
other European countries. Thomas Mann, in his essay
Concerning the Greatness and Suffering of Richard
Wagner spoke of a synthesis of fundamentally incompatible things This well
desCr15es the majority of Symbolist depictions, and
is an important key to understanding them.

Subject-matter and means of expression

...L

2
inand Hodler
limity, 1913
gn for mural in assembly
1 of Hanover City Hall
:h,

The subject-matter of a Symbolist picture could be

anything that, in the experience of the normal, average person, takes one to the frontiers of normality
and reality - religious fervour, intoxication, dream,
love, death. One of the key means used to express
such experiences, as mentioned, was naturalistic
permutation. This applied especially to combinations
of things and figures which could never occur in
reality. The fantastic nature of these phenomena,
their location and the plot in which they were
involved, conveyed unprecedented sensations.
Such hybrid configurations had of course long
been employed in mythologies, for instance in
the shape of centaurs, tritons and nereids, whose
composite bodies transcended the realm of the real.
Arnold Bocklin, Max Klinger, Franz von Stuck and
Hans Thoma depicted such unnatural hybrids quite
frequently.
An analogous means of expression was stylistic
permutation. This involved the mixing of varioUSStYIes
and, in the case of historical forms, deliberately

emphasizing their anachronism. Gustave Moreau,

for instance, had his Salome dance in a temple furnished with both Christian and ancient Indian cultic
symbols. Stylistic permutation presupposed a certain
eclecticism, a sense of the unique effects of different .
styles on the viewer. Such stylistic mixtures were
familiar from the nineteenth century, being found
in the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes, imagery in which stylization, naturalism and
sentimental mysticism co-existed.
Stylistic permutation also frequently took the
shape of a combination of naturalistic and abstract
forms. Moreau, for example, occasionally surrounded
a realistically-depicted human figure with free-form
flecks of colour. Similar effects are found in the works
of Ferdinand Hadler, wtiQ placed stylized, if still realistic, figures in abstract spaces. Gustav RJimfem=-bedded realistiC, mildly stYlized portraits in swirls of \
golden ornament, thus symbolically immersing them' -<:..in the exquisiteness of noble sentiments.
A further means of expression, which had
a long tradition in visual art but was now strongly
emphasized, was the symbolism of pantomime.
poses and movements of the human
to
were raised to a symbolic level. As Winckelmann
.. ,
had already noted, the human figure was - unlike
traditional, pictorial iconography - capable by itself,
in the absence of all attributes, of conveying a symbolic meaning solely through its intrinsic expressive
value. This is something all of us have experienced
in daily life, since we are capable of understanding
body language and its expressive connotations even
without specialist knowledge. In pantomimic symbolism, this means of body language was purposely
employed, and artists usually concentrated on clear
and basic attitudes and gestures whose meaning
communicated itself immediately to the viewer.
This type of symbolic representation was
common especially in English art, in John Flaxman,
William Blake and J. H. Fuseli, in Ferdinand Hadler of
Switzerland and in the German-speaking countries,

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

19

above all, in Max Klinger, LUdwig von Hofmann, Franz

von Stuck and others. Hodler heightened its effect
by depicting multiple figures performing a pantomime
in a single picture. He called this the principle of
parallelism, and explained that it was based on the
natural laws of plant growth, which determine that all
of the petals of a blossom repeat the same form or all
the tree trunks in a forest grow in parallel. Translating
this phenomenon into the terms of art, Hodler placed
several figures in a regular, rhythmical sequence,
or repeated certain expressive gestures such as an
outstretched arm or a clenched fist. Examples of the
application of this parallelism are the artist's murals
for Hanover City Hall (fig. 2) and at Jena University,
to name only two works in Germany.

Physical and facial expression

The expressions of the human face, too, can be
manipulated so that they suggest certain expressive
values and, hence, certain inner emotions or moods.
Symbolist artists focused especially on the ability of
eyes and mouth to convey mystery, as well as on the
elements that frame the face, such as the chin area
and especially the hair. In literature too, these features
were sometimes emphasized in isolation from the
face and figure, as by Baudelaire:
Eyes which do not sparkle, so bitter and yet so sweet,
are both as cold as jewellery - pure decorations
of steel and gold. Entwined in your tresses so thick,
a waft dispells - a sea of scent rolling in brown and
blue waves.

In another place he wrote: "The naked eyes are

a magic mineral - strange Nature has found her
symbol."? For the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the eyes were the mirror of a melancholy
soul. In the pale faces of his heroines they appear
large and brilliant, as if brimming with a vague
nostalgia.
The mouth had long before been described as
the most significant part of the face by physiognomist
Johann Kaspar Lavater, who also remarked on its
ambivalence. In his view, the mouth revealed wisdom
and foolishness, power and weakness, virtue and
vice. The mouth of a woman in love, the lips open
and arched, reflected her inward blooming. In the
faces depicted in the drawings of Fernand Khnopff
(fig. 3), we often see compressed lips, especially in
his representations of 'Silence', with which he associates the finger raised to the lips. Here, even a whisper is suppressed. The facial expression is reduced
to the point of an inward-directedness that excludes
the outside world, but which, thanks to the interplay
of the eyes with the hair framing the face like an aura,

20

Fig. 3
Fernand Khnopff
Study of Women, c. 181
New York, private collec

exerts an enigmatic attraction. In German art, the girl

in Vogeler's Annunciation (fig. 4) embodies the type
of the femme fragile, as does von Stuck's Innocentia
(cat. 87). At the other extreme, von Stuck's Sin
(cat. 89) and Klimt's Judith personify the femme
fatale. Their eyes gleam coldly out of a shadowed
face, signalling hard-heartedness and cruelty.
Such guiding images now even began to be
projectea-nacKTrifi)'lhepast;intO'lJortratts-wt:1i9J
wern-seenTn' quite different lightat the time of their
executioITroY instance, fheEnglish art historian
lJiTaiterPater described the face of Leonardo da
Vinci's Mona Lisa as "having been shaped by all the
thoughts and experiences of the world - the animal
instinct of Hellas, the lust of Rome, the dream life
of the Middle Ages with its divine ambition and
chivalrous love romances, the return of the heathen
sensual world, the sins of Borgia."s
Baudelaire devoted an entire poem in Les Fleurs
du Mal to women's hair, of the full, flowing, wavy kind
seen in so many Symbolist paintings. In Oscar Wilde's
play, Salome invokes the black hair of Jokanaan as
if in a litany, and concludes: ''The long black nights,
when the moon hides her face, when the stars are
afraid, are not so black. The silence that dwells in the
forest is not so black. There is nothing in the world
so black as thy hair ... Let me touch thy hair."
r
Hair plays a similarly fateful role in the relationship!
7 Charles Baudelaire
between the sexes in Edvard Munch's art (fig. 5). It i /f'Spleen et Ideal' (tr
8 Pater, 1873.
expresses the power of female eros over the male,

Fig. 4
Heinrich Vogeler
Annunciation
(detail), 1901
Private collection

creeping around his head like vines and taking him

captive. As their love cools, the woman's hair gradually loses its hold. In Peter Behrens's colour woodcut
The Kiss, the interwoven strands of hair evoke the
oneness of the lovers and shield them from the outer
world like an impenetrable hedge.

Masks, dances and veils

An important special case in Symbolist physiognomy
is
it is extremely manipulable. With
the aid of a mask all the human traits of a face can
be filtered out, to the point where only indifference or

Fig. 5
Edvard Munch
Separation, 1896
Oslo, Munch-Museet

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

21

J.?

+-

impassiveness remains. Or, just the opposite - a

mask can be used to heighten a particular emotion
or mental state. Another basic characteristic of the
mask is its fixedness since, once its expression has
been determined, it is unchangeable. Goya painted
a picture with masks as early as 1812, Entitled The
Burial of the Sardine, it illustrates a Spanish custom
at the end of Carnival. All of the people in the painting
wear masks, and they perform various jocular antics.
Yet the fun somehow does not communicate itself
to the viewer: instead, we tend to feel uneasy. The
same is true of the depictions of probably the most
renowned painter of masks and masquerades, the
Belgian artist James Ensor, who took his motifs from
the Carnival in Ostend and the curiosity shop run
by his mother. Yet with Ensor (fig. 6), the normal
function of the mask is reversed, and it now serves
to unmask. Everything evil, rnalicious, corrupt, mean
and ridiculous about human beings is emphasized
through the exaggerated facial features of the masks.
Their loss of personal identity lends the disguised
figures a mysterious, eerie and ambiguous appearance. Franz von Stuck once depicted a Medusa as
a mask with the face of a femme fatale, whose hair
metamorphoses into vipers that slither towards us
out of the picture.
The dance represents a special form of pantomimic expression. Dancing is capable of producing
a state of Dionysian intoxication that transforms and
de-personalizes the dancer to the point of inducing
a sense of transcendence. In The Dance of Salome
(fig. 7), Moreau condensed all the depravity of
the femme fatale into a single figure. With Munch,
a Dance on a Summer Night becomes a Dance of
Life (1899-1900), a pessimistic summing-up of the
results of sexual attraction and repulsion,
Yet the dance can also be a symbol of liberation.
Around the turn of the century in France, Loie Fuller
performed dances with veils whose sweeping motions evoked cosmic rhythms in which her individuality
seemed to Virtually dissolve. Fuller's performances
were depicted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and
others, and in consequence exerted a profound influence on both fine and applied art. In the paintings
of von Stuck (fig. 8) and Fidus, the dance, and above
all, the female dancer, became erotic symbols which
suggested the merger of intellect and sensuality in
movement and rhythm, with the aim of furthering
a higher erotic culture. Ferdinand Hodler depicted
a special type of dance, eurhythmics, an almost Iitur- j
gical dance with measured steps and movements ,;
which were intended to attune human beings with
the primaeval harmonies of nature and cosmos.
.
Because of its symbolic significance, dance also
found a place in the dramatic literature of the day. As

Fig. 6
James Ensor
Self-Portrait with Masks, 1E
Antwerp, private collection

Wolfdietrich Rasch noted in his essay Dance as Ufe

Symbol in Drama around 1900: "First Ibsen's Nora
danced, followed by Salome in Oscar Wilde's drama.
But Wedekind's Lulu and Hofmannthal's Electra

Ii

22

Hans H. Hofstatter

Fig. 7
Gustave Moreau
The Dance of Salome
Detail of The Apparition, 18;
Paris, Musee du Louvre,
Cabinet des Dessins

Fig. 8
Franz von Stuck
Serpentine Dancers
1894-95
Munich, Museum
Villa Stuck

d<'

danced, too, and Pippa danced in Gerhart Hauptmann's fairy-tale play." 9

A further means of expression in Symbolist painting consisted in rendering the subject in a vague or
veiled way. Like any art that gives priority to the imagination over reality, Symbolism looked for beauty in
phenomena that eluded visual perception. Already in
the Romantic era, Navalis had defined poetry as the
"art of alienating in a pleasant manner, of making an
-------.,Then
he went on to recommend "giving the commonplace
a mysterious appearance, the known the dignity of
the unknown, the finite an infinite meaning." 10 We
find examples of this not only in Romanticism, as in
Caspar David Friedrich's ineffable landscape entitled
Monk by the Sea (1808 -181 0), but also in the paint
ings of William Turner and the portraits and scenes
of Eugene Carriere, Henri Fantin-Latour and Fernand
Khnopff. This element of indeterminacy and vagueness also plays a role in the etchings of Max Klinger
(cats. 133, 134) and Rudolf Jettmar (cat. 148) and in
the paintings of Franz von Stuck and others.

Proportions, space, light and colour

Jl
Rasch'1967, p. 59ft.
Navalis, Schriften, Stuttgart,
1960.

Another Symbolist means of expression took the

form of a treatment of spatial arrangem@!}! and
natural proporti,ons that ran counter to the classical
academic
realism had defined
\ space precisely, in terms of its actual dimensions,
and determined the respective sizes of the figures
that occupied this space in terms of proportional

relationships. The Symbolists, by contrast, took up

the Romantic notion of an indefinite or indeterminate
space as a transparent shell in which toJQcatetlleiL
Transcendentaildeas. The first-;tep towards evoking
IIlTSlYpeOfSpace-ccmsisted in aball_cl(),IlLngpe!spective, which reduced the sP.'lClJIl,p?intir"l9s, tQa
'alTy defined stage or arena. Then the Symbolists went
alfedhe size relatioosbips between human
figures such that their natural proportions seemed
awry, disturbing to normal perception. Early examples
of t.his had already appeared in the eighteenth century, in Piranesi's Carcieri etchings or in the outsized
figures in Goya's aquatint sequences.
In the art of the German-speaking countries,
this type of alienation was employed by Jettmar in
his illustrations to Byron's Cain (cat. 150), and by
Klinger in his etching The Philosopher (1898-1910),
which depicts a nude male figure looming high above
a landscape and reaching out towards his own mirror
image appearing on the far horizon. In one of Alfred
Weisgerber's paintings a nude female figure of huge
dimensions reclines in a landscape as tiny human
figures move around her, making her an incarnation
of Nature herself. The artist rather sentimentally entitled the picture Mother Earth (1905).
Light, and colour too, were employed in a way
that ran counter to academic doctrine. Colours were
no longer treated as local colours that d"8S;gnated
the objects to which they were attached; light was
no longer handled as illumination that defined form.
Instead, light and colour merged in Symbolist art'to
become a means of expression in their own right,
autonomous and divorced from the subject of the

onto

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

23

picture. Thanks to this treatment of light and colour,

Symbolist imagery appeared to elude normal, everyday perception. It could take the form of a bright,
even garish, palette, as in some of the paintings
of Ensor or the Pre-Raphaelites, or it could lead to
a monochromatic treatment, as for example in von
Stuck, Ludwig von Hofmann or Klimt, whereby the
reduced palette infused the image with a certain
mood or atmosphere. The colour blue, above all,
became a symbol of loneliness, melancholy or a
vague yearning, as in Klinger's The Blue Hour (fig. 9),
where the pervasive cool atmosphere, together with
a warming fire that casts a flickering light over the
women's bodies, evoke the sense of an undefinable
passion. Many further examples in the painting
of other European countries could be named, from
van Gogh's Sunflowers through Munch's twilight
Nordic landscapes to Picasso's Blue Period.

Mirror Images

it

II

f\

The mirror image was another means of alienation

commonly used in Symbolist painting. Often it even
took precedence over reality, because the artist considered its reflection more significant than the reality
itself. The image in the mirror became especially
crucial in cases where a protagonist confronted himself and his own failings there, as in Wilde's Picture
of DO.rian Gray (1891), which continually oscillates
a realistic and a symbolic narrative level.
The idiosyncracy of the mirror as addressed in
Symbolist painting consisted in the way it
what was reflected from the natural context, lent the

dL
unprecedented experiences. Such mirror imageS-arefound, lor instance, in the work of Eugene Delacroix
(Vanity), Edward Burne-Jones (Medusa), William
Holman Hunt (The Lady of Shalott), Khnopff, Klinger
(Eve and the Future, 1880) and in the Viennese
Jugendstil artists B6hm, Klimt and others.

Religion and sexuality

The expressive means and stylistic forms mentioned
were combined in Symbolist art with a content in
which alternative worlds were projected as being real.
In the process a number of familiar traditional subjects
were sometimes transformed to convey new notions,
particularly in the context of religious art. The majority
of Symbolist pictures, however, involved imagery that
was quite alien to previous tradition and addressed
problems or suppositions which were previously
taboo or repressed. Thus memories of the Christo-

24

Hans H. Hofstetter

logical, Mariological and cultic ceremonial traditions

of the churches were invoked, and, at the same time,
confronted with an alternative world in the shape of
a Satan cult which personified evil and represented
it as the other side of reality. Yet an escape from religious responsibility into a neutral world that was seen
as neither good nor bad, was also a favourite subject
of Symbolist artists.
A further complex, in which the disgarding and
transgression of middie-c1ass ethical norms figured,
was the experience of eros and sexuality as oppressive instincts. After ecstatic fulfilment came disappointment and the sense of being inextricably
involved in a hopeless tie in which the loving union
of the sexes led not to liberation but to perdition.
The result was the emergence of two opposing
images of woman: the adored femme fr@.i1e on the
one hand, and the dangerous temPtress, the femme
fatale, on the other. In many cases it is difficult to
aeclde which of the two is represented. A female
figure might metamorphose from one into the other,
while still retaining the common quality of
which virtually every Symbolist artist projected
onto his image of woman. Ultimately, the Symbolists

Fig. 9
Max Klinger
The Blue Hour, 1890
Museum der bildenden
KOnste Leipzig

sought liberation from the oppressiveness of sexuality

in a dream world or even in death; images of which
are constantly invoked in their art
Sacred themes and their counterpart, the worship of evil, are discusseg in the chapter 'Faith and
Damnation' (pp. 131-141).

Nature and paradise

1uther, 1912, p. 573f.

this pessimism, there

erperged the notion of paradisal innocence expressed
in
Golden Age or simply}.!:!.idyUic, natural scenes. An overt feature of such imagery was a
setting In untouched natural surroundings, populated
by nude human figures; its covert trait was the idea
of overcoming history and conflict. Artists dreamed
a dream of harmonY,a desirable world
unlike
tne--sOldRfrealworld. Such ideas are found in French
painting as early as Ingres and, later, in Puvis de
Chavannes, in the Swiss artist Hodler, in von Marees,
B6cklin, Vogeler and von Hofmann (cats. 15-21).
Of the last-named artist's pictures Richard Muther
wrote: "His humans are children who suspect nothing
about evil, children who are amazed at sunrays, at
the murmuring of a spring, to whom all nature and
their own being represent a miracle." 11
Just as Jean-FranQois Millet and Paul Gauguin
discovered paradise in the ordinary lives of people in
their native French environment, Giovanni Segantini
depicted peasant life in the Swiss mountains in a way
that emphasized the oneness of human beings with
nature, their integration in the natural cycle, the meaning given to their lives and labours by their conformity
with the universal rhythm. Yet landscape in Symbolist
art could be more than a setting for the paradisal or,
what amounted to the same thing, simple pleasures
of life. Landscape could take on a complex symbolic
character, as in B6cklin's seascapes with their passive
co-existence of Triton and Nereid (cat. 12), who here,
in the midst of an oppressive natural atmosphere,
become a symbol of the difficulty of the sexes in
understanding each other.
Hodler takes us into the heady loneliness of the
Swiss Alps, whose peaks are sometimes crowned
with a halo of clouds. Similar motifs are found in the
art of the German-speaking countries in, say, Walter
Leistikow or Rudolf Jettmar whose landscapes are
either entirely devoid of human beings, or else those
who do stray into them seem completely lost in their
immensity.
In another variety of landscape, the Q.atural en.:vi.r:.onment fig.ures as an eerie place that induces fear
a;nd trembling.EXamples of thiS are found, again,
in 86cklin, as in a landscape shimmering with heat

where the pastoral god Pan suddenly appears

from behind a rock and strikes mortal fear - indeed
'panic' - into the hearts of shepherds, who flee him.
Jettmar evoked the dangers lurking along life's path
in a painting of a man hiking through the mountains
and seeing the rocks by the wayside metamorphose
into weird, frightening creatures. In another work,
a giant squid suddenly emerges from the sea and
hauls a ship-to its destruction. Jettmar also translated
natural phenomena into symbols of human fate, for
example in a painting where a jumble of rocks and
uprooted trees looms in the landscape like a powerful
memento mori.

The relationship of the sexes

The relationship of the sexes was a theme of which
many aspects were treated by the Symbolists. At
the same time, Sigmund Freud, in depth psychology,
was analysing the fundamental conflicts involved.
The problem he termed 'awakening consciousness' or, in plain English, puberty - was addressed by
Symbolist artists in every part of Europe, from the
Pre-Raphaelites in England to GaugUin in France and
Khnopff in Belgium. In Germany, von Stuck in 1889
painted an Innocentia (cat. 87), a personification of
innocence in whom an awareness of her sexuality
and its power is clearly emerging. Vogeler associated
this motif with the biblical Annunciation (fig. 4). What
the angel is communicating to the girl with the innocent gaze is evidently the secret of love, as her facial
expression reveals.
Munch gave the theme a much more radical
expression in his painting Puberty (fig. 8, p. 140).
Klinger, like Vogeler, transposed it into the biblical
realm, in a depiction of Eve sitting alone in a meadow
while Adam sleeps a1 some distance behind her; she
gazes ahead and runs a hand through her hair, as
if with a presen1iment of what is to come. Another
delicately allusive treatment of the theme is found
in Hodler's portrait of a girl holding and cherishing
a red flower in her hands.
A reaction to the strict morals of the day, which
led to the repression of desire and sexual instincts
both early on and in later life. found multifarious expression in depictions of womanhood. In this respect,
too, painting throughout Europe provides countless
examples. An idolization of woman took the form
of female figures surrounded by flowers or exquisite
ornamentation, as with Oskar Zwintscher (cat. 164)
or Gustav Klimt. In many other instances, feminine
innocence was seen as endangered. A favourite
theme here was the Perseus legend, in which the ..l..
hero rescues Andromeda from a monster and she

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

25

finally fulfils her destiny by becoming his wife.

Examples are a Perseus cycle by Edward BurneJones (fig. 10), and paintings by B6cklin, Jettmar
and others.
Women are very frequently depicted in connection with animals in Symbolist art. This may go
back to the mythological tradition of Zeus and the
ease with which he approached mortal women in
animal form. A girl surrounded by swans, alluding
to the myth of Zeus and Leda, was a repeatedlyemployed motif, and the peacock as symbol of
vanity was also popular. Women's maternal instinct
was also addressed, for example by Segantini who
projected it into peasant life, frequently depicting
women in close association with animal mothers,
especially cows.
Yet the image of the femme fatale was often
symbolically associated with animals as well. Von
Stuck painted several versions of a nude female
figure with a snake coiled around her, entitling them
Sin (cat. 89) or Sensuality (cat. 90). In Klimt, water
snakes, snails or fish often occur. In Ludwig von
Hofmann's work such creatures appear in a carved
frame, around a picture of bathing boys and girls.
Similar examples are found in the work of Alfred
Kubin: women worshipping a goat, being observed
by a hungry crocodile while swimming, being thrown
to a serpent or succumbing to a lion's claws. In a
Jettmar painting a dragon has stocked his larder with
naked damsels, but their rescuer is already visible in
the distance (cat. 79).
This genre also includes the hybrid of human
female and tiger, lion or panther, a Sphinx who poses
riddles for men to solve and devours them when
they fail. Women as bringers of death appear in great
numbers in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as they do in
the art of France and the Bavarian-Austrian region,
where they go by the name of Salome, Judith or
Messalina, to mention only the most important
themes. Many of Klimt's drawings show how the
experience of the sexual act can spirit us out of
reality and into a transcendent realm of bliss, evoked
by the simultaneous depiction of a woman's pubic
triangle and ecstatically-smiling mouth. Munch too
represented female ecstasy in several personifications, Madonna - Loving Woman - Conception,
though he did not go so far into the intimate sphere
as did Klimt.

Sleep, dream,d ath

Anothe
of withdrawal from mundane reality is
experienced in sleep and dream. Dreams, of course,
\ do not always bring a sense of liberation; they can

26

Hans H. HofsUitter

also surrender the pysche to the dark powers of the .; Fig. 10

Edward Burne-Jane:
unconscious. As early as the 1790s, Goya had alThe Rock of Fate, 1E
ready evoked the way in which the sleep of reason
Staatsgalerie StuttgE
can give birth to monsters, and Fuseli painted almost
concurrently a series of pictures showing a woman
asleep in an unnatural position with a little demon
perched on her breast, disturbing her slumbers with
nightmares. In many versions, a stallion's head.since the dream books of antiquity a symbol of male
sexuality - appears between the curtains. There is
also a poem by Novalis which evokes the demons
that are set free in sleep.
Death as the goal of life, as redemption of the
soul or its dissolution in nothingness, was an image
that had been prevalent since the Romantic era.
c'i
Caspar David Friedrich again and again depicted
cemeteries as places of refuge and peace. The
Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini continued the theme
in works such as the triptych Becoming - Being Passing On (1895-98), or in the painting Comforting
I,

--r

JJ

Cf. the article by Annette

Dorgerloh, this publication,
pp.259-267.
Stephane Mallarme, Propos
sur la poesie (2nd 00.),
Monaco, 1953.

Faith. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the

currency of the theme of death, apart from its liturgical obsequies, became an orchestral event in the
requiems of Brahms, Berlioz, Uszt, Verdi, Dvorak,
Faure, Gounod, Saint-Saens and others. Klinger
produced cycles of etchings, On Death I and On
Death II, in which he reflected on a great variety of
experiences of death (cats. 133, 134).
The circumstances of dying and of death
were often depicted by the Symbolists. Von Stuck
(cats. 73-75), Ensor and Zwintscher recorded the
moments after a corpse grew livid (cat. 77). Hodler
created a veritable documentation of the gradual
physical decline of his beloved, Valentine Gode-Darel.
He portrayed her in the best of health then, sitting
beside her sickbed, recorded in paintings and
drawings the worsening of her condition to the
point of death. Finally, Hadler depicted, next to her
body on the bed, the view from the window into
the countryside, rendering it in coloured bands that
corresponded to the lines of his lover's deathbed.
Parallels to this are also found in literature, as in
Poe's tale Ligeia.
The range of myths surrounding death were
likewise given pictorial form: Ophelia drowning herself in a brook out of love for Hamlet; Orpheus dying
after losing Eurydice; the Three Fates, one in the
process of cutting the thread of life, as depicted by
Rudolf Jettmar and Theodor Baierl (cat. 95). Klinger
etched an image of a dishonoured woman Who,
seeing suicide as the only way out, drowns herself
(cat. 96). In the Segantini triptych mentioned above,
Becoming - Being - Passing On, the sequence
of events is reversed. It shows a dead man being
carried at sunrise out of an Alpine cabin to be laid
to rest, and thus equates the passing of life with
the emergence of a new day. Many Symbolist artists
associated the image of death with their own self-

portraits, thereby raising the question of the meaning

and use of their lives (cats. 155, 163).12
Our consideration of the German contribution to
European Symbolism permits only a brief glance
at the phenomenon of the movement as a whole,
a movement that iQstead of engendering a certain
style
a great range of stylistic
.pproaches. Yet each artist involved developed
such an individual manner that their works are
immediately recognizable, something that can be
difficult in other stylistic eras. We have been able to
mention 'only a few examples to stand for the many,
because the phenomenon of Symbolism was composed, like a mosaic, of countless individual contributions. Yet it must be emphasized that not all
of the artists who painted Symbolist pictures left
behind a consistently Symbolist CBuvre. In many
cases only a part of their works can be so classified.
By the same token, the stylistic means described .
at the outset are not found in every Symbolist image,
nor were the themes mentioned addressed by every
artist associated with the movement. The choice
of expressive means and themes applies only for
a limited number of artists; yet all of their work,
taken together, contributes to the idea we have
of Symbolism.
Any attempt to explain the nature of Symbolism
is bound to bring us back to the dark words Mallarme
offered by way of definition in 1891: "Symbolism
means gradually disclosing an idea in order to suggest a state of the soul - or vice versa, to select a
subject and derive a state of the soul from it through
a series of
In this regard it is important
to recognize that, both in poetry and in painting,
a representation of subjects is less significant than
that which they suggest to us in the way of profound
and enigmatic meaning." 13

II

Symbolism in Germany and Europe

27