An exhibition organized by Professor Reinhold Heller of the Department of Art of The University of Chicago.

From the Exhibition Catalogue's Preface:
"In 1886, the Greco-French poet Jean Moreas published a manifesto in which he suggested the term Symbolism for the then dominant post-Naturalist literary movement that had as its precursor Charles Baudelaire and in Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine its primary active poets. Soon applied to the visual arts as well, Symbolism was characterised by its revolt against positivism and science, proclaiming that its goal was, in the words of Gustave Kahn, to "objectify the subjective (the exteriorization of an idea), rather than to subjectify the objective (nature seen through a temperament)." Artists active in the Symbolist tendency, roughly during the years 1870-1910, varied widely in style, but were unified in their extreme subjectivity and their concentration on a limited number of motifs, among which the nature of woman is perhaps the most significant, with woman viewed as an evil or destructive force forming the primary subsection of this motif. Because of the concern with ideas rather than the accidents of external reality, Symbolist artists tended to think in terms of types rather than individuals, and to perpetuate these archetypal images as dogmas in countless variations intended as idealistic proof demonstrating a truth far more convincingly than the disturbing evidence of facts might. "Genius," the Symbolist spokesman Gustave Vanor proclaimed in 1889, "is the perfect intelligence of symbols reaffirmed in the visible world; it no longer consists of the narration of legends or the analysis of passions, but in the divination of correspondences existing between objects and our ideas and dreams." The image of woman, obsessively rendered by the predominently male artists, thus visualised the subjective realm, not of women actually experienced, but of subconscious desires, fears and anxieties that become self-perpetuating."
(Reinhold Heller)

Discussion