Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition 9781474298551, 9781474298582, 9781474298575

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

Imagines – Classical Receptions in the Visual Performing Arts Series Editors: Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner Other titles in this series: The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Rosario Rovira Guardiola

Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition Richard Warren

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Richard Warren, 2018 Richard Warren has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Clare Turner. Logo design: Ainize González and Nacho García Cover image: Danaë, Gustav Klimt (Photo by Ali Meyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition / Richard Warren. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. | Series: Imagines— Classical receptions in the visual and performing arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017024381 | ISBN 9781474298551 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474298568 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art nouveau. | Modernism (Art)—Classical influences. Classification: LCC N6465.A7 W38 2017 | DDC 700/.4112—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024381 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9855-1 PB: 978-1-3501-1731-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9857-5 ePub: 978-1-4742-9856-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Jana

Contents List of Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction Re-­birth Muse Hero Bloom Desire Nation Death Conclusion

Notes Select Bibliography Index

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1 15 29 55 77 95 139 171

187 191 207 213

Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

János Vaszary, Golden Age © Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images. Secession building, Vienna © Richard Warren. Secession building (detail), Vienna © Richard Warren. Secession building (detail), Vienna © Richard Warren. Gustav Klimt, Allegory of Sculpture. Courtesy of MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art. Photograph © MAK/ Georg Mayer. Athena, Apollo and the Muses sarcophagus, Glyptothek, Munich © PHAS/UIG via Getty Images. Gustav Klimt, The Girl from Tanagra, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna © Richard Warren. Paul Cauchie, Paul Cauchie’s house (detail), Brussels © Richard Warren. Gustav Klimt, ‘Poetry’ (from the Beethoven Frieze), Secession building, Vienna © Imagno/Getty Images. Greek white-­ground lekythos vase, © Getty Images. Paul Hankar, Hotel Ciamberlani, Brussels (detail), © Richard Warren. Stanisław Wyspiański, Agamemnon (from illustrations to The Iliad). Courtesy of National Museum, Krakow. Mycenaean terracotta krater, © Getty Images. Gustav Klimt, Danae, © Ali Meyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images. Aubrey Beardsley, Apollo Pursuing Daphne, © Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/Getty Images. Stained glass window depicting faun, Lucerna Arcade, Prague, © Richard Warren. Jacek Malczewski, The Unknown Note (portrait of Stanisław Bryniarski, a Cracow painter). Courtesy of National Museum, Krakow. Photograph © Richard Warren. Aubrey Beardsley, Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook, © The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images. Alphonse Mucha, Salammbô, © Buyenlarge/Getty Images.

15 24 24 25

31 32 34 35 45 48 63 71 72 96 100 112

114 116 126

List of Illustrations

20 Aubrey Beardsley, The Birthday of Madame Cigale, © Print Collector/Getty Images. 21 Follower of Douris, Women at Home, © The British Museum Images. 22 Aubrey Beardsley, Lysistrata, © Historical Picture Archive/ CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images. 23 Stanisław Wyspiański, Ascension (detail), Franciscan Church, Krakow, © Richard Warren. 24 Stanisław Wyspiański, Ascension, Franciscan Church, © Richard Warren. 25 Stanisław Wyspiański, Apollo: The System of Copernicus, Medical Society building, Krakow, © Richard Warren. 26 Jacek Malczewski, Nike of the Legions. Courtesy of National Museum, Krakow. Photograph © Richard Warren. 27 Jan Preisler, Novák Commercial Building façade (detail), Prague, © Richard Warren. 28 Jan Preisler, Novák Commercial Building façade, Prague, © Richard Warren. 29 Prague Main Station interior (detail), Prague, © Richard Warren. 30 Prague Main Station exterior (detail), Prague, © Richard Warren. 31 Antoni Gaudí, Can Cuyàs de la Riera estate gate, Barcelona, © DeAgostini/Getty Images. 32 Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, © DeAgostini/Getty Images. 33 Head of Hypnos, British Museum, © Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images. 34 Jacek Malczewski, The Pythia. Courtesy National Museum, Krakow. Photograph © Richard Warren. 35 Aubrey Beardsley, Ave atque Vale, © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images. 36 Alphonse Mucha, Medea, © MPI/Getty Images.

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129 130 132 142 143 145 149 154 155 157 158 164 172 173 179 181 185

Note: For a full list of links to online images of all works discussed in this book, see this book’s page at Bloomsbury.com

Introduction Art Nouveau and the Classics We are right to think of the fin-­de-siècle as the age of the new. In this sense, the conventional English term for that mixture of sometimes really quite different art, Art Nouveau, is spot on. Yet it is not the whole story. Art Nouveau looked backwards as well as forwards. This book will show how in it the heritage of the classical world – its myth, literature, art and so much more – endured. The great artistic mixing palate that was the 1890s bred many new styles. Too often Art Nouveau has been considered as a style which simply rejected the old in favour of the new.1 Art Nouveau artists did welcome the new technological age, for which it had all the optimism of the turn of the century. But at the same time, they retained a dream of Arcadia, so brutally lost to the next generation as a result of the First World War. It was the birth of a new century, but also the death of the last. Artists sensed that they were on the brink of something new, something that they wanted to embrace, but also something that they feared. Their turning to the classics was both a way of expressing that fear and a flight to the refuge of fantasy. The classical transformations of Art Nouveau are incredibly rich and incredibly varied. They reflect all the anxiety and desire of the fin-­de-siècle. This book has been divided thematically, each chapter treating one of these anxieties or desires in turn. The divide is not, and cannot be, a neat one. Many of the works we look at here, which span everything from architectural décor to the painted canvas and the decorated jewel, express several of the different chapters’ themes at once. Moreover, the diversity of Art Nouveau production was enormous, and to try to cover all the ground would be beyond the scope of a single book. What has been attempted instead is to give a broad selection of representative examples, which are considered comparatively by way of bringing out the general patterns that emerge in Art Nouveau’s transformations of the classics. And in so doing many

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

works of central and eastern European Art Nouveau have been given prominence. For too long anglophone studies have neglected this rich stream of inspiration, which also covers important ground in the history of nationalist art. In a study like this it would verge on negligence not to consider their reception of the classics too, which has a lot to add to that of western Europe and North America. Tschudi-Madsen’s (1967: 14) assertion that eastern European Art Nouveau ‘did not achieve any particular eminence’ can no longer stand as an excuse. It cannot be stressed enough that this book is intended as a corrective. That is, a corrective to a false opposition that has been constructed – and inadvertently accepted in some studies of Art Nouveau – that the style was based upon a rejection of the classical both in form and in content.2 False because, as we will see, for many Art Nouveau artists there was no inherent opposition between the classical and the modern. Indeed, their incredibly inventive transformations of the classics show that if anything they could be radically modern, often providing a vehicle to challenge the artistic establishment. It is perhaps not so difficult to comprehend why this misunderstanding has arisen. It is predicated upon the idea that Academic art – which Art Nouveau was turning away from – is the same as the classics. It is not. It is true that Academic painting and sculpture were heavily classical in their inspiration. By the late nineteenth century second-­rate neoclassical painters had so hackneyed classical myth and history as to make it seem the marble-­pallid corpse of the ancient world.3 But despite such contaminated receptions, the source itself remained pure. And it was at that source that Art Nouveau artists still thirsted to drink. Some of what interested artists about the classics had changed; in other ways it had not. Classical art continued to offer a certain brand of beauty that appealed to Art Nouveau artists in the way that it had to many Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticist and neoclassical artists before them, even if they would reinvent it in new ways and for different reasons. But there was also a host of new interests entertained by artists at the turn of the century, which were all closely allied with the intellectual and social developments of their day. Even if Art Nouveau remained the art of an elite (albeit now more a newly wealthy industrial-­ commercial than an aristocratic one), at the same time it brought the classics out of the realm of the favourite aristocratic themes of lovemaking and hunting, and brought it into contact with the – sometimes less comfortable and more disconcerting – mentality of its age. We will see many examples of this in the chapters that follow, but to highlight two in particular that were new: the Freudian interest in the psyche, and the growth in mysticism. Both found their way into Art Nouveau in a major way, and affected its reception of the classics too.

Introduction

3

Defining Art Nouveau Before we go any further, it is vital that we clarify what we mean by ‘Art Nouveau’, but rather than starting with the what, in this case we need to start with the when. Tschudi-Madsen (1956) and others essentially established the years between about 1890 and 1910 as the period in which the style was current. Several decades on from Tschudi-Madsen’s study, that continues to feel about right. It is true that much of the finest Art Nouveau – at least in western Europe – had already reached its apogee before 1900. However, to ignore the first decade of the next century is to neglect a large body of important later development in the style. This is all the more significant if we are to consider Art Nouveau more globally, beyond the confines of western Europe, given that elsewhere it often reached its full efflorescence a little later. The many names of Art Nouveau across Europe are well known: Modern Style in France, Jugendstil in the German-­speaking world, Secession in central Europe, Stile Liberty in Italy, and Modernismo in Spain.4 Each reflect the different ways that the style was understood in different countries, but all attest to its association with the new. It is also important to understand at the outset that in many places the style was initially received in a derogatory fashion, its advent being seen as an unwelcome and untutored departure from the well-­established precepts of Academic classicism (we might note the English and French each linguistically associating the style with the other!). This was linked to a basic challenge that Art Nouveau artists issued to the traditional understanding of the ‘Fine Arts’. Throwing down the gauntlet to the canonical understanding of art, it claimed that the applied arts of jewellery, book illustration and binding, furnishing, architectural ornament and other crafts that had formerly been relegated to a status below that of the high arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, should be considered as on a par with these. While Paris was already ahead of its time in its departures from Academic art, elsewhere this idea was simply anathema to the conservative art establishments of many other cities. The editorial commentary of the Czech Secessionist journal Volné Směry gives an idea: It wasn’t so long ago [. . .] that only the graphic and plastic arts were considered genuine and ‘great’ fine art and everything else, all applied art or for example industrial art, was trivialised as ‘lesser’ art, as mere rubbish and therefore meaningless [. . .] We don’t believe anymore in the contradiction between art and life, and between art and the everyday, and we don’t believe in the contradiction between beauty and truth, between poetry and health [. . .] we abhor the spiritless archaeologists of art who, in a long-­dead language and in

4

Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition deadened forms of expression, which have long lost their raison d’être, compose and cobble together their artistic fakes and plagiarisms’.5

And here again is that same weariness with the worn out forms of the old, where the term ‘archaeologists of art’ is a clue. So, Art Nouveau was not just the fine arts, as traditionally defined. We still don’t have a full answer to the what though. Here we must briefly address the inspirations behind the style, to gain a fuller picture. First and foremost, we should be in no doubt over whether the classics were the major source of inspiration for Art Nouveau. They were not. This accolade must rather fall, if anywhere, to Japanese art. Almost all the artists whose works we look at in this book were at some stage entranced by the forms of Japanese art. Of course, the art of East Asia was not a new arrival in European art, but the collector and patron of Art Nouveau in Paris in the 1890s, Siegfried Bing, did much to propagate a renewed interest in it through his frequent importation and display of art objects from Japan. Now for the first time not merely the iconography, but also the form, of Japanese art was adopted and adapted wholesale by European and North American artists. In some cases, this is more obvious than in others (Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), René Lalique (1860–1945) and Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) being clear examples of this influence), but by greater or lesser degrees all Art Nouveau artists were affected by the Japanese sense of line and use of floral ornament. The London-­based American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) also did much to bring a generation of artists round to the dynamic potentialities of Japanese art.6 Yet Art Nouveau really developed as a conglomeration of different stylistic influences. The Celtic, Islamic, Gothic, and Baroque and Rococo have also all traditionally been considered as major contributors in smaller ways.7 The classical should be added to that list. We are still left with a basic problem of definition in using the term ‘Art Nouveau’. Tschudi-Madsen early highlighted that the style was really a plurality of styles, which varied across Europe but was united in its basic principles. The Jugendstil of German-­speaking countries has sometimes been considered a separate style from the Art Nouveau of Belgium (and its antecedent forms in Britain), being variously considered a more ‘geometric’ manifestation of the style. While French Art Nouveau has rightly been recognized as owing much, and sticking more closely, to France’s native Rococo traditions. A difference has also been noted between more northern forms of the style, and those of Italy and Spain, where Antoni Gaudí’s (1852–1926) unique innovations are often considered in isolation. And central and eastern European developments of the

Introduction

5

style have traditionally been relegated, unfairly, to being mere bastardized offshoots of the high art of its more solid western branches.8 To add to this complexity, much art that could be described as belonging to the style may owe more to that other rather nebulous artistic grouping, Symbolism. So where does Art Nouveau begin and where does it end? There is no easy distinction to be made, nor would it have much value. While we can often make a distinction between the descendants of Impressionism or Post-Impressionism, and what is more Art Nouveau or Symbolist in character, beyond this it is hard to construct cast-­iron boundaries. As a result, many of the works we look at in this book really straddle the boundary between the latter two styles, and may be more Symbolist in content while retaining Art Nouveau formal elements. And no conscious distinction is made between ‘Art Nouveau’, ‘Jugendstil’, ‘Secession’ and other terms, in recognition of the fact that, while the style did vary significantly across Europe and North America, the degree of cross-­fertilization between these and the degree of international interaction of artists is such that there is little benefit in seeing them as wholly separate national styles. The exercise to define the precise limits of the style also tends to end up being somewhat paradoxical. As Eidelberg (1989: 67–8) puts it: The issue of defining Art Nouveau is an old polemic. Is Art Nouveau a specific style or does it denote the general renewal of the arts at the turn of the century? This polemic goes back to the time of Bing himself. Bing declared that the name ‘Art Nouveau’ represented only the search for a style. But the history of his own gallery shows that while there was no uniformity of vision when he began in 1895, the situation changed, and before 1900 Bing had fixed upon an atelier style which was cohesive: its basic elements were taken from the dynamics of Van de Velde’s abstract, linear style. Indeed, it is the whiplash style which is invariably cited when critics want to define ‘High Art Nouveau’. Then, almost as though not to offend, recognition is given to the other modes as well. As a result, the issues remain confused. Yet the aesthetics of Guimard and Gallé cannot be contained by a single term, unless that term is meant to denote just a chronological period rather than a cohesive style. If it were decided that Art Nouveau should refer only to a chronological period, that still leaves the problem of naming and understanding the styles which came into being.

To a degree, we can rely on Art Nouveau’s own theorists to try to delimit its characteristics, for instance the primacy it gives to the use of line and the importance it attaches to space as a compositional element in its own right. The Belgian architect and artist Henry Van de Velde’s (1863–1957) extensive essays on the style might for example be used as a basis to do so.9 Yet, as Eidelberg

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

suggests, we quickly run into the problem that one theorist’s ideas do not necessarily correspond with those of another where there was no agreed consensus at the time. Moreover, they may not be representative of Art Nouveau’s geographical diversity; in Van de Velde’s case, his views on Art Nouveau might be helpful in understanding a certain geometric conception of the style in the German-­speaking world, but on their strict application Gaudí could not really be considered an Art Nouveau artist at all. It is also unclear to what degree the artists of the 1890s preferred the term in their own usage. For example, the Czech graphic artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) reportedly ‘never spoke about Art Nouveau’.10 The term will be used throughout this book for the sake of convenience, but in the recognition that its boundaries are blurred. So how did Art Nouveau, the plural style, come forth in the different soils in which it flowered? Our purpose here must be to give only the briefest outline, by way of context for where the classical enters the picture, but one other point of definition that should be addressed at the outset and is what we mean by Academic and Historicist art. The nineteenth century had seen a long tradition of history painting across Europe, and which had itself involved a phased development of sorts. Broadly speaking, we can talk about an early nineteenth-­ century form of romantic Historicism. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, there was a strong interest in portraying the heroic deeds of a country’s national past, this often by way of elevating the glory of the contemporary nation. The increasing scope of the archaeological excavations of the mid-­century then led to a growing interest in history painting as historical reconstruction, even if such art in practice often reflected less the realities of what was being found in the ground as an individual artist’s imagination. Finally, just before the emergence of Art Nouveau, we can detect a shift back to a more romantic form of Historicism.11 It was the late form of this final phase of Historicism against which many Art Nouveau artists and others were rebelling. The initial development of Art Nouveau seems to have happened in a few places simultaneously. On the one hand, a spur to the renewal of the applied arts had already been given by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts movement in England. In Scotland, the ‘Glasgow Four’ (Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933), Frances Macdonald (1873–1921), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and Herbert McNair (1868–1955)) then developed their brand of Art Nouveau, which had a significant impact across Europe as their works were exhibited there.12 In Belgium, Victor Horta (1861–1947) developed his early form of linear architectural Art Nouveau, whose ripples across continental Europe (if not Britain itself) were profound. The Belgian group of artists founded by Octave

Introduction

7

Maus (1856–1919), the Cercle des Vingt (1884–93), whose membership also included foreigners, did much to perpetuate Horta’s style beyond their country through frequent exhibitions and publications (including L’Art Moderne and La Libre Esthétique, which ran right up to the First World War). In Paris, the conditions were already there for the incubation of the style, which was quickly taken up by several French artists, most notably by Hector Guimaud (1867– 1942) in his iron constructions for the Paris metro. But Paris’ role was perhaps more significant for its function in helping disseminate Art Nouveau. A nexus of artists around the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), which included the foreigners Mucha and Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907) (both of whose works we discuss in this book), did much to foment the exchange of ideas, their further refinement and transmission elsewhere. French Art Nouveau’s development was really more focused on Nancy, drawing on that city’s strong Rococo traditions to create a distinct brand of Art Nouveau that we today associate with the Nancy School. Further east, a number of national artistic colonies, including the Darmstadt colony (founded by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse), the Munich Secession (with Otto Julius Bierbaum’s (1865–1910) influential publication Pan), the Gödöllő colony in Hungary, the Prague Secession, and the Young Poland group in Krakow, gave new life to the arts there. Viennese artists considered themselves to be latecomers, but were nonetheless determined to create their own brand of Art Nouveau. Led by the radical Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), a group of artists, taking the name of the ‘Secession’, decided to strike out on their own course. Staging frequent displays of their work in their custom-­built exhibition hall, they also used the medium of their publication, Ver Sacrum, to communicate their style and their ideas. The origins of the choice of this name are debated. Many have argued that it is most likely to be found in Ludwig Uhland’s (1787–1862) poem Der Weihefrühling (‘Sacred Spring’), which employs imagery associated with ancient rites related to the foundation of a new community.13 Whatever the exact origin, it is certainly interesting that in describing the fount of their artistic inspiration, a Latin term was chosen. The Viennese Secession, which from its inception was closely linked to that of Munich, was primarily concerned with its (ultimately successful) quest to break the stranglehold of the Viennese Künstlerhaus on Austrian art. This institution, the equivalent of the Paris official Salon and in effect guardian of Academic and Historicist art, had been slow to reform right into the 1890s. As a result, in its initial stages, the Secession was as much as anything about importing artistic developments that had already taken place elsewhere. But very quickly Klimt

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

and his confederates worked up their own distinct brand of Art Nouveau, which soon became known as Jugend (‘Youth’) or Jugendstil (‘Youth Style’) in a reflection of its principal interests. The preferred form and ideology of this style were codified in several publications, including Otto Wagner’s (1841–1918) influential Moderne Architektur (1896), which rejected historicism outright. But, as we will see in the chapters which follow, that far from precluded the classics from playing a major role in Jugendstil right from the beginning. Finally, we must not forget North America. Things had moved on a long way since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by its last decade there was a significant amount of cross-Atlantic mutual artistic influence. We will encounter a few individual examples in this book, but there is no single figure more relevant to a study like this than Tiffany. Tiffany not only avidly absorbed European developments in Art Nouveau, most notably through his stays in Paris, but transmitted these back to his countrymen, and affected style in America. He also had an important impact on development in Europe, with many of his innovations in glass being exhibited by Bing. Although the Nancy school of glass had created its own unique style, there was nonetheless a degree of mutual inspiration. We also find the cosmopolitan Czech artist Mucha spending time in New York, during which his idiosyncratic brand of poster art caught on in a commercial context in that city, as it had and would elsewhere. Art Nouveau was one of the first truly global art forms, and we must therefore treat it in this light. Indeed, it found an outlet even further afield than the countries we have discussed here, for example in far off Georgia to the east, Tunisia in the south, and even in European colonies in Africa.14 While these represent important (and under-­researched) developments in the history of the style, they are not covered here as they are of no paramount relevance to Art Nouveau’s transformation of the classics. This brings us on to a broader point about the arrangement of this book. While we have given a brief overview of some of the regional development of Art Nouveau here, this book departs from the traditional country-­by-country format of studies of the style in favour of the thematic structure already mentioned. While certain patterns in Art Nouveau’s classical receptions are more pronounced in some places than in others, in general all of its main facets can be found everywhere. Another reason for this is the often very individual nature of artists’ receptions: Beardsley’s inspiration is for example so unique, so unmoored of any particular national style, and so open to all international influences that we would be hard pressed to confine him to a chapter on English Art Nouveau. The same logic is applied to chronology. While some studies have favoured a developmental approach – which is not

Introduction

9

without its merits – this book rejects this in recognition of the fact that the style was subject to different influences in different places at different times. Lastly – it is perhaps an obvious point but warrants mention – some of the ‘greats’ of Art Nouveau will be missed here. This is not a deliberate omission. It is rather in recognition of the fact that there is no dominant classical inspiration in their work of which to speak. This is often because the influence of other styles on their work, be that Japanese, Celtic, Egyptian, Byzantine or national folk, was greater. The presence of the classics should not be found where there is none.

Transforming the Classics The title of this book references the ‘classical tradition’. But this is not intended to be a study in that school. It is rather a recognition of the reality that a majority of the artists considered here would have thought of themselves as working in, or against, that tradition, and still could not divest themselves entirely of the influence of classical antiquity. It is hoped that the study will itself be a contribution to the continually growing field of classical reception studies or – the author’s preferred term – our understanding of the ‘transformation’ of the classics in later history and culture. In recent years, classical reception theory, a derivative of Hall’s broader reception theory (outlined in his Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973)), has increasingly emphasized the role that the contemporary audience of a classical ‘text’ (or, in this case, a work of art) plays in its interpretation. That is to say, the meaning of the text itself is not set in stone, as it were, but is subject to the body of interpretation (one’s experiences and presumptions) that are brought by the reader. Pioneered by a number of classical scholars (in anglophone literature by Martindale and Thomas (2006), Kallendorf (2007), and Hardwick and Stray (2008) most notably), this line of enquiry emphasizes the shifting meaning of texts and artefacts through the ages, and the idea of an ongoing two-­way dialogue between the antique and the modern. The breadth of classical reception studies has grown to be very great indeed, ranging from the use of classical texts in late antiquity to the use of classical discourse in the ideology of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century.15 Classical reception studies have come to be seen as a departure from predecessor studies in the so-­called ‘classical tradition’. This tradition took its cue from the late neoclassicism and classical scholarship of the nineteenth century. This school of thought tended to treat the legacy of antiquity as something more

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

static. The words chiselled into the stone might have faded with time, but their original meaning was not open to challenge. The reader, the archaeologist or the scholar, could only hope to uncover that true original meaning. As Kallendorf (2007: 1) summarizes in the introduction to his volume on the classical tradition: The idea that the classics could be ‘handed down’ derives from the etymology of the word ‘tradition’, which comes from the Latin tradere, meaning ‘hand down, bequeath’. While this is what was understood to be happening for several centuries, however, the idea of a ‘classical tradition’ and a phrase to describe it are actually, as Jan Ziolkowski points out, a modern notion.

Much of the thought underpinning Enlightenment classicism, philosophy and art, and its corollary in Augustan literature, had been predicated on the basis of placing the classics on a pedestal, albeit one worn with time. A turning point in studies of the classical tradition was Highet’s important volume on the subject (1949). Highet’s study limited itself to Western literature alone, but for the first time shone an important light on the nineteenth century’s idealization of the ancient. Highet’s (1949: 453) declaration that the nineteenth century admired classical antiquity, ‘for two reasons: because it was beautiful, and because it was not Christian’, should continue to find a strong resonance in studies such as this one. However, Highet’s perspective remains a linear one in that it gives limited consideration to what those that received the classical tradition brought to it themselves.16 Since Highet’s time, classical reception studies have significantly reoriented our perspective on how we think about the relationship between the ancient and the modern. The very dynamic ways in which Art Nouveau artists reinvented both classical literature and art are just one example that proves the validity of reception theory. Even if, as mentioned above, Art Nouveau artists considered that they had the right not to accept earlier neoclassical and Academic receptions of the classics as being canonical, in the process of reinvention we see that they nonetheless tended to consider that the original meanings of the classics were fixed. It was the same pure source that they drank from, as it were, even if they chose to do different things with the water of inspiration, once imbibed. We should be mindful, too, that the term ‘reception’ has been criticized for not giving sufficient attention to this last point about reinvention, perhaps suggesting overly that – while the reader or observer’s own interpretation may vary – the source itself ultimately remains unchanged.17 This study provides examples of where one classical reception built upon an earlier one, where that earlier reception had altered the original text or artefact’s meaning for the later reception, through

Introduction

11

which it is refracted. To better capture this process, a group of German scholars have suggested the term ‘transformation’ of the antique.18 While this is the preferred terminology here, both terms are used as it is felt that both add different value depending on the context in question. Moreover, classical reception and transformation theory are not the only lens through which the material studied here must be considered. The history of the reception of classical art in its European descendants is too long a tale to cover here. But since Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) first actively contemplated the meaning of the imitation of ancient art, there has also been a long tradition of trying to define and understand what classical art meant to the contemporary observer. The German art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866–1929) theory of the Nachleben der Antike (‘The afterlife of antiquity’), and his approach to the study of iconography, had an important impact in the long term on the development of the classical tradition as it has been applied to art and artefact. While his monumental project, Mnemosyne, a sort of atlas of art, was never finished, it too shows the aspiration to trace the influence of the classical in later cultures. In this book, we will consider examples of how the iconography of classical art has been detached from its original context and transposed to one very different, while it remains reliant on that original context for its meaning.19 Our consideration of the classical receptions to be found in the individual artworks examined in this book should also take account of expression and cognition theory, as these have a bearing on how we consider the transformation process itself. A recurrent question is whether we are we primarily concerned with the careful construction of classical allegories, intended to have specific meanings, or are we more looking at the spontaneous emotional expression of the artist, where the classical is merely a vehicle for this expression? Many of the works discussed in the chapters which follow demonstrate both expression and cognition phenomena, but the degree to which a given artist employs them is often revealing of their broader attitude towards antiquity and the inheritance of classical art. Moreover, in considering individual artists’ motivations, we should also reflect on what value we might draw from the application of gender-­based art theories to Art Nouveau’s transformations of the classics. After all, all the artists that we consider in this book – save two – were male. Does this have a bearing on how the ancient was received, and transformed, here? Does it affect the dominant interests that govern reception and transformation, or how the classical heroic or classical erotic (for example) were articulated? Did the masculine-­oriented nature of the classical tradition affect Art Nouveau’s reception of it? The answer to all these questions is almost certainly yes. But the

12

Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

examples in this book show that while this dynamic was a consistently prominent one, it was also a consistently varied one in its manifestations. And that variation is a testimony to Art Nouveau’s fundamental nature of being flippant, elusive, and defying easy categorization at the best of times. How were the classics received and transformed in Art Nouveau? This will be the subject of the chapters which follow, but it is worth a few preliminary remarks here to indicate the broad outlines. Firstly, how did artists access the classics? In a number of ways, as far as we know. Sometimes their inspiration was taken directly from ancient texts, either in the original or in translation. Some of the artists we consider here appear to have been amateur classical scholars themselves. We know that Wyspiański, for example, translated both Homer and Virgil, and read Aeschylus’ tragedies in French translation,20 and that Beardsley, who translated Latin poetry and read Horace and St. Augustine,21 was wont to use Homeric references in his correspondence, addressing certain of his letters to ‘My dear Mentor’ and signing them off ‘Telemaque’.22 Sometimes the literary inspiration is indirect, involving an intermediate reception. In the chapter on desire we will consider how Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–80) novel Salammbô (1862), an imagined historical drama set in ancient Carthage, was received and transformed by Art Nouveau artists. Wyspiański, who wrote plays featuring classical subject matter based on ancient texts, appears to have relied heavily on neoclassical French tragedy, and Corneille above all, in doing so. Then we have examples of how artists directly received and transformed classical art in their works. Beardsley and Klimt’s responses to ancient Greek vase painting are perhaps the best examples, but there are others too – we might take the representative example of the Czech sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek (1848–1922).23 As Macková (1982: 126) put it: Myslbek was a great worshipper of ancient art, which he knew well from the collections in the Louvre in Paris, and more systematically through the university’s collection of casts in Prague. The constancy of his conception betrays the influence of Polycleitus’ canon of proportions. A draft allegorical nude attests to his admiration of Polycleitus’ athletes, and mainly of his Doryphoros sculpture, whose photograph was found in Myslbek’s estate.24

And, where the influence of classical art is not direct, it may have been mediated through Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo (and their nineteenth-­century revivalist forms), neoclassical or Academic receptions of classical art. Many Art Nouveau artists, despite the direction their later work took, had received their initial training from Academic instructors in the schools of Paris, Vienna, Munich,

Introduction

13

Rome or Prague, where classical sculpture would have been their bread-­andbutter. In many cases, the classical reception and transformation involved in an individual work may well involve several of these processes at the same time. But the last is also an important point. It is more often the case than not that artists were receiving their classical inspiration second-­hand. Even where artists can be shown to have engaged with classical literature or art first-­hand, they would still have been immersed in the very many receptions of it since the Renaissance until their own day, many of those receptions themselves really being refracted receptions of earlier ones. This was the end of the nineteenth century after all, and nowhere was this more the case than in Art Nouveau architecture and architectural ornament, which continued to build on Baroque and Rococo traditions. While we see a partial turning away from the outward forms of the classical here – for example, the abandonment of the acanthus leaf in the decoration of capitals in favour of local or more exotic choices – with the occasional exception of the experimental architecture of Gaudí we largely remain within the basic conception of the classical orders. Another factor to consider is that shortly before and during the period we are considering a number of challenges had arisen to the canonical conception of the classical tradition in art. While Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) may have done much to reinforce a view of classical art based upon the smooth marble harmonies of classical Greek sculpture, the excavation of a set of rather incongruous archaic Greek kouros statues in 1877 inevitably put a dent in the side of this well-­established ideal. As did the restoration of colour to ancient sculpture by German archaeologists.25 As we will see, Art Nouveau artists could be responsive to developments in classical archaeology too. The classical transformations of Art Nouveau that we encounter in this book are consistently the product of a complex process. As we have set out briefly here, this can involve direct or indirect engagement with classical literature and art, or some combination of these at the same time. In most cases that process is linked to broader currents at the fin-­de-siècle, which had already precipitated a renewed intellectual focus on the classics by the early 1890s. But it must be stressed that each case is different. Art Nouveau resists confinement to any overly simplistic framework, and this applies to its classical receptions and transformations too. It is hoped that the reader will recognize in this – if nothing else – a testament to the full richness of this artistic style.

1

Re-­birth In 1898, the Hungarian artist János Vaszary (1867–1939) painted an enigmatic picture entitled, simply, Golden Age1 (Fig.  1). What is this painting about? Something is going on, but it is not immediately clear what. A young couple, evidently in love, embrace in an Arcadian garden setting. The young man, whose very skin seems to be gold, is naked and statuesque, wearing a band beneath his blond hair. His lover, her naked skin as white as marble, reaches out to a censer full of white roses, from which a thin wisp of smoke rises. Their expressions are distant, melancholic, and yet aware of something that we are not. Despite their apparent solitude, in a way they are not alone. Amidst all the green and gold three classical statues stand in a row, receding into the grove beyond. Who exactly they are is not clear, but they look like classical gods. Nearest to us is a naked woman, whose drapery has slipped off. She stands in the contrapposto of a classical statue, and adopts the posture of the Aphrodite of

Fig. 1  János Vaszary, Golden Age.

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

Knidos, her hand covering her genitals in an attempt at modesty.2 To her left another god with a harp – perhaps Apollo – strums away, and to his left in turn we see what appears to be a young woman on the hunt, a stag leaping by her side – surely Artemis. Perhaps that stag is the doomed Actaeon, fated to be torn to shreds by his own dogs after the angry goddess had transformed him. None of this really tells us much about the story of the lovers. What are they doing in this magical garden? Why do they look so forlorn? Are they really forlorn, or do they just share some higher knowledge to which we are not privy? And where and when is this Arcadia in which they exist? We soon begin to sense that there are not going to be any clear answers to such questions. Indeed, it is not clear that the artist has any intention of providing any. And yet, we cannot dismiss the feeling that he has something to say, perhaps something important. Moreover, the iconography is familiar to us. We all know those gods. We all know the heroic lovers of the ancient world. We have all heard of Arcadia, the mythical and blessed region. And we know that grove, that twilight, the scent of the woodland on a summer evening. Or do we? Then come the doubts. Is this the world we share? What really is this Arcadia – might it just be a dream? Love, music, poetry, the hunt. Where are all these things? Perhaps they have been lost. Lost forever to a golden age, a golden age in which we never lived and never shall. And yet, somehow, we know this place. Golden Age is not the earliest example of a painting in the Art Nouveau style, nor does it hail from any of the more prominent – or conventionally considered prominent – of its traditional homes: Brussels, Paris, Nancy or Vienna. And yet, jumping in medias res, this painting seems to reveal something important about the nature of reception of the classical world in its time, and in the art of its time. Vaszary does not expect us to find anything new in the classical iconography that he presents us with. In fact, in some ways it may appear hackneyed to us, but to leave it at that is to miss his point. Successfully or not, Vaszary wants us to look, and to look again. He wants us to see those conventional classical tropes – Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, Arcadia – but then to be caught off guard by his lovers, and the flood of unanswered questions that they bring. They too are statuesque, and yet at the same time they course with real lifeblood, the lifeblood of the young and passionate. Here is the real message of the painting: the Golden Age is not dead. The classical world is not dead. The centuries of its interment in the lifeless statues of cheap imitators has finally ended. Vaszary is telling us that he, and his fellow artists, are bringing what made the classical world what it was – love, beauty, desire, passion, distraction – back to life in their art. It is a challenge to us to reconsider how we think about the classical tradition, and how we think about art in general.

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17

Vaszary’s painting, exhibited at the 1898 Spring Exhibition of the Műcsarnok (Palace of Exhibitions) in Budapest, also won a prize in 1900 at the World Exhibition in Paris. Yet it was not an especially popular work in its time, nor is it well-­known today. As Szabadi (1989: 21) put it, ‘it slipped by just about unnoticed in the mass of contemporary works’. Hungarian art historians have traditionally highlighted its local significance for the development of Hungarian art in bearing the first hallmarks of the ‘Secession’ style.3 But for our purposes in this study, it is a key starting point. Why? Because it reveals something essential about how the artists, architects and craftsmen of the Art Nouveau movement thought about the classical past and its artistic and literary inheritance. Yes, doubtless, that inheritance needed resurrection from what was at times seen as a long stultification since the Renaissance, but beneath that veneer of cold marble, they knew instinctively that the classics had, and had always had, something very much alive to offer. And that something appealed to them intuitively when they came to articulate their own art. The commentary of critics ultimately lent their art the sobriquet, Nouveau, yet they knew that their art was also – at least in part – a re-­birth of something older, and of something essential. From an early stage in Art Nouveau, the obsession with discovery and creation of new styles went hand in hand with this idea of re-­birth, of revivification. This wasn’t an entirely new idea in itself, and was, to a certain degree, inherited from the earlier artistic movements of the nineteenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites had sought to distil something beautiful and pure that they believed was the preserve of medieval art – and something they believed had been bastardized by Raphael and his successors up to their day. In one sense the Impressionists rejected artistic tradition wholesale, and instead turned to nature for inspiration. Much of Post-Impressionism had continued the process of rejecting the old in favour of the new, or just the different. Ultimately much of the motivation for this grand, and proudly self-­proclaimed, reorientation of art was about a rejection of historicism. Ancient history and classical myth had become swept up in the great welter of second-­rate history painting that seemed to be reaching tidal proportions across Europe by the mid-­nineteenth century. Put simply, many artists, if perhaps not so many patrons, were bored of all the Venuses, Cupids and Adonises adorning the walls of palaces, public buildings and museums across the continent. It would be a mistake to suggest that the artists of the Art Nouveau movement were an exception to this rule. Their chief fascination lay in the search for new forms for applied art, wherever they might be: nature, or in the fascinating potentialities of the new technology that surrounded them at the turn of the

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

century. Yet Vaszary’s painting shows us that a certain current within the movement was looking to the past, and moreover to the classical, for that inspiration. This meant rifling through the weeds grown of the Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo and Baroque for the essentially pure forms of the classical that lay behind and beneath them. At a conceptual level, this meant in turn that many artists became obsessed by the idea of re-­birth itself, something which they sought to allegorize in their artworks. In Vaszary’s case, that mysterious re-­ birth of the classical, exploiting as it does the tension between a comfortable classicism and a tragic romanticism, becomes that pleasant estrangement so idolized by Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Across Europe, that re-­birth took different forms, coloured by the local variations of artistic style and national interest that characterize the late nineteenth century. Janis Rozentāls’ (1866–1916) Arcadia (1910) is another similar example of this dynamic.4 Rozentāls was a member of the Latvian Rūķis (‘Gnome’) nationalist and artistic Secessionist movement that operated in St. Petersburg in the 1890s. The wide span of his work encompasses everyday life, portraiture, religion, national romanticism and Symbolism, and he was editor of the influential Vērotājs (Observer) magazine’s art section between 1903 and 1905. In this work, he creates a powerful image of Arcadian re-­birth. Rozentāls put a lot of preparation into his Arcadia, as its two final versions, and several preparatory studies from the first decade of the twentieth century, show. In the 1910 oil version, a host of naked young women and children fill the canvas. True to his wonted style, these bright and ruddy bodies frolic in the strong northern light by the sea shore. We are carried in a swell of movement, following the curves of the figures’ gyrating and reclining bodies, as they dance, stretch, bend down to pick flowers, or sport with children. Rozentāls returns to a classical Arcadia, and re-­casts it as a northern and Latvian vision of triumphant youth, sexuality and renewal. Rozentāls was no doubt influenced by Impressionist forbears, most notably Gauguin, of whose Haitian and Breton visions this painting is in some ways reminiscent. And yet the exaggerated s-­curves that predominate throughout the canvas, most prominently those of the dancers and the women lounging on the grass, but also of the trees and flowers themselves, betray the typical stylistic preoccupations of Art Nouveau. Grosa (1999: 258) has called this work a ‘fluctuating mirage intermingled with light and air’, and Howard (1996: 192) has spoken of ‘woman, water, sky and trees [. . .] chosen to convey the sense of organic unison with nature’. In many ways, there is nothing revolutionary about this Latvian artist’s choice of subject matter. Bathing scenes, often with

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19

mythological overtones, had been a staple of Academic painting, in some cases barely disguised as anything more than an opportunity for the artist to show off his prowess at depicting the naked body. Rozentāls’ painting cannot easily be labelled Academic, and yet it is undeniably classical in some of its most basic features. One of the most prominent female figures in the painting, positioned right of centre with her back turned to us, stands contrapposto in full heroic nudity. The dancing figures in the background, whom she turns towards, appear almost as the pulsating maenads of classical sculpture. Thematically, the eroticism of this painting, and the very present idea of bathing and the sea, carry us back again to a conventional classical association. But this is not a depiction of a scene set in ancient Greece, albeit idealized. Instead Rozentāls takes the concept of Arcadia – one its title readily presupposes that we understand – and makes of it something new. His Arcadia re-­born is an entirely modern vision, an expression of his personal and artistic hopes, dreams, and joie de vivre – and too, it could be argued, an expression of a national or ethnic ideal. The particular cast that Art Nouveau’s adherents put on their Arcadia is both governed by, and has an important bearing on, their artistic ideals in general. Above all else, they believed that art should be brought to everyday life. Art was not just Fine Arts; it could and should be a part of everything people did, and used, every day. Moreover, they believed that there was a power inherent in art itself to ennoble and brighten people’s lives. This had to be found somewhere though, and brought to people through art. Arcadia could be conceived of as that pristine state in which art and nature, and art and life, were one and knew no natural distinction. Unsurprisingly then it is a recurrent motif in Art Nouveau, and Rozentāls’ and Vaszary’s paintings are each in their own ways attempts to capture and distil the essence of this ideal. And underlying such attempts is the presumption that it is actually possible to recover such an Arcadia. Recovering a lost Arcadia came to function as an allegory for the escape from the dull monotony of historicist art that Art Nouveau so longed for. With a sometimes morbid level of interest, artists sought to recover and reignite the actual spark of life that lay buried beneath the ruins of the past. In a word, to steal back that Promethean fire of life that seemed to have been lost to art since the ancient world. One artist took a literal approach to depicting this. In his Archaeology (1896),5 the Hungarian artist Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) chose a strange and somewhat unnerving subject for his representation of an academic discipline. In its upper portion, the painting shows an archaeological excavation. Beneath the pristine white marble ruins of Doric columns, a group of labourers dig up the earth with

20

Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

spades. Above them, leaning against one of the columns, a bearded old man in a long black overcoat and broad-­brimmed hat looks on as he supervises the excavation. Beside him a young man, presumably his apprentice archaeologist, looks over his shoulder in the same direction. He too wears black, in contrast to the obviously Mediterranean sky and landscape. To all intents and purposes there is nothing so odd about the scene, but the lower portion of the canvas changes the whole mood of the painting. There we see prostrate the outstretched figure of what appears to be a classical statue. Beneath the earth, she is obscured in semi-­darkness, but we can easily make out her sleeveless chiton, the ancient Greek tunic, and the fine features of her face. Moreover, her arm, raised behind her to support her head, gives the impression that she is merely sleeping, perhaps waiting to be awoken by the archaeologists. There is much of interest here for anyone interested in how antiquity, and the quest to recover it, were articulated at the end of the nineteenth century, and the dynamic is complicated. Ferenczy definitely has something, perhaps pejorative, to say about archaeology and its motivations. His archaeologists seem a sombre, and somewhat lifeless, bunch, in their long black overcoats. The two are a pointed and deliberate contrast to the brightness of the two columns by which they stand. Their posture and what we can make out of their expressions suggest a certain detachment from the labour of archaeology itself. We are left with the impression of theorists, not interested in getting their hands dirty. From the attitude of the labourers, all that digging looks like rather hard work, but the archaeologists themselves retain a certain detachment and reserve. All of this is in pointed contrast to the corpse-­like statue of the woman, which nonetheless appears very ready to be awakened. Ferenczy may be making a point here about the contrast between the dry severity of contemporary archaeology and the life inherent in ancient Greece which, despite its being long dead and gone, still seems somehow more alive in its ruined state. In so doing, the artist touches upon a wider fascination – an anxiety even – that so many of his contemporaries shared. Were the Greeks somehow more alive than us, for all our contemporary civilization and art? On the other side of the Atlantic, in the still-­green United States, another artist found the same inspiration in ancient Greece as the east European artists discussed so far. The glass artist Tiffany created a stained glass window which employed a similar ideal of ancient Greece to that used by Ferenczy, Landscape with a Greek Temple (c. 1900).6 The explosion of church building across the United States at the end of the century had led to a surfeit of commissions for stained glass windows, which Tiffany’s firm serviced in a major way. These

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21

commissions had encouraged the artist towards greater experimentation in the potentialities of the stained glass window as an artistic medium, but Tiffany’s primary fascination had long been with colour. His chief obsession in his stained glass work was the exploitation of colour nuances to evoke certain moods, often of religiosity or the spiritual, given their frequently ecclesiastical setting. Although his Landscape with a Greek Temple does not illustrate a biblical figure or episode, it nonetheless employs some of the same techniques. As subject, we have instead a Doric temple on a hilltop in the distance, seen through a foreground of columns, which appear to form a garden arcade on an estate. The columns and arcade are laced with ivy and flowers that scintillate in bright green, pink, blue, red and yellow-­gold. Between us and the temple lies a verdant valley filled with poplar trees, and crowned with a bright yellow-­gold sky. Although there are no human figures in the scene, everything is alive. Tiffany’s vision is an idyll of ancient Greece. In every way it is pulsating with life, nature and artistic inspiration. It is clean, pure, bright and untainted, a land of eternal summer. As we shall see, this idyll and ideal of the ancient world is something that he returns to repeatedly, obsessively, in much of his work. It is clear from this work what that ideal meant to him as an artist. Ancient Greece is a repository of inspiration that is still very much alive. This Elysian vision may strike us as unreal, a paradise that never was, or perhaps never was on this earth, but this must be seen in the context of Tiffany’s wider work. His visions of nature and of heaven are rooted in the rugged beauty and youthful confidence of the young nation to which he belonged. The turn of the century was a time of awakening in the United States, an age of optimism and industry, and Tiffany came from an affluent and well-­connected family riding the crest of that wave of prosperity. Just as American architects had found inspiration in the art of Republican Rome (and to a lesser degree, in that of ancient Athens7) when they articulated their visions of nation, republic and state, so too Tiffany turned back to ancient Greece as a source of inspiration in expressing his personal artistic and national visions. There is little doubt that Tiffany was a skilled self-­propagandist who would no doubt have been very satisfied with such a reading of his work. However, it is clear that many of Tiffany’s classical inspirations were first-­hand and the result of travel in the Mediterranean as a young man. In his promotional pamphlet Mosaics (1896), produced by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, he cited the bright colours of the interiors of Byzantine churches he had visited as a major source of inspiration for his use of colour.8 Tiffany had undertaken several trips to countries around the Mediterranean in the late 1860s and early 1870s,

22

Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

including a journey to Spain and North Africa in the company of the watercolour artist Samuel Colman (1832–1920). He later recalled of this journey: When first I had a chance to travel in the Near East and to paint where the people and the buildings are also clad in beautiful hues, the pre-­eminence of color in the world was brought forcibly to my attention. I returned to New York wondering why we made so little use of our eyes, why we refrained so obstinately from taking advantage of color in our architecture and our clothing when Nature indicates its mastership.9

No doubt the lively colours of Middle Eastern architecture, clothing and jewellery had a powerful effect on Tiffany, but he also sketched ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman ruins during his travels, all of which civilizations had a lasting effect on his artwork throughout his career. The orientalist slant of much of Tiffany’s work can be traced back to his having been inspired by the painter LéonAdolphe-Auguste Belly (1827–77) when he visited Paris in 1868.10 Yet despite the strength of Tiffany’s classical inspirations, they always remained in a sense indirect. While he sought to revive the ancient, he was always striving to re-­create it and adapt it to his own purposes where possible. For the artists of the Jugendstil in Munich and Vienna the classical world was also widely conceived of as a repository for vital artistic inspiration and truth, but their approach to distilling its essence in their art could often be much more direct. The Vienna artistic Secession and its closely allied form in Munich were deeply immersed in ancient Greek myth and artistic symbolism from the very start of their movement. The classics were central to the whole Secession and Jugendstil semantic system of artistic re-­birth and renewal. We will return to the individual classical motifs of this system repeatedly, but it is clear that a wide body of artists in Munich and Vienna saw ancient Greece as a reference point and succour in their struggle against the dictates and constraints of the Academy art there. The German artist Franz von Stuck (1863–1928) must inevitably be the starting point for any such discussion. A majority of Stuck’s strongly Symbolist creations engage with classical subject matter, often as an expression of man’s sexuality. His obsession with the classics went so far that his Self-­portrait (1905) is absolutely replete with symbols of classical art and architecture, both of which were a major inspiration for him.11 But perhaps of greater significance in this respect is a poster he created for the First International Exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists of Munich (Secession) (1893).12 This poster was created to advertise the exhibition of the artists’ work to a wider public, so its choice of Greek subject matter is noteworthy. Above the text advertising the

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23

exhibition, which is set against a mock-­mosaic background, we see the head of a ‘Greek’ woman within an octagonal frame. She has dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin and a long straight nose conforming to contemporary belief in the perfect facial plane (believed to have been discovered by ancient Greek sculptors). On top of her head she wears a Greek helmet with a large red and black plume. While the immediate relevance of the image Stuck chose to represent the first international exhibition of the Secession may not be clear, it is an obvious sign of how central the idea of ancient Greece was to what its artists saw themselves as standing for. Arguably more directly and aggressively than in any of its north and west European manifestations, the Viennese Secession was about returning originality and vitality to art. This was in part a result of circumstances. Where art had long been liberalized in Paris by the 1890s, in Vienna until the advent of the Secession the conservative artistic establishment had retained its grip, leading to a growing sense of frustration among a new generation of artists that Austrian art was lagging behind its international counterparts. Yet it is very clear from this and other posters produced by the artists of the Secession for their exhibitions that they saw ancient Greece as central to their ideals of artistic revolution. On initial consideration this may seem surprising, given the overuse of classical myth in the Academic painting from whose mire they were so desperate to extricate themselves. The heart of the new movement was its artistic headquarters. Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession building in Vienna (1898–9) (Figs. 2, 3 and 4), purpose-­built for the artistic association, can also tell us a lot about the movement’s perspectives on the ancient world and ancient art.13 The Vienna city council granted the Association of Austrian Artists, as they were formally known, a plot of land on the corner of the Wollzeile in Vienna to construct an art exhibition centre. Olbrich was the chief architect, but many of the association’s members contributed in different ways. From an architectural perspective, the Secession is no doubt a strange building, even if purposefully so. Moreover, today it strikes a strange contrast with its modern surroundings, dwarfed as it has been by later developments, and yet it inspires a certain conviction in the onlooker, despite its slightly awkward cupola in the shape of a tree. While it is experimental, it also remains very classical in mentality, with Olbrich clearly taking at least part of his inspiration from Greek architecture. As Tschudi-Madsen (1967: 131) put it: ‘The strong classical heritage is obvious in the firm, simple treatment of the masses’. Despite its apparent plainness, on closer observation much of the detail bears the stamp of the classical. In large gold lettering the blazon of the Association, Ver Sacrum, is written in Latin on the exterior wall to the left of the main entrance

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

Fig. 2  Secession building, Vienna.

Fig. 3  Secession building (detail), Vienna.

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Fig. 4  Secession building (detail), Vienna.

to the building. Above its portal are three sculptured faces, representatives of the major arts of painting, architecture and sculpture, from whose hair snakes emanate. We will return later to the ubiquitous Medusa symbolism of Art Nouveau, which bears no real significance here beyond the stylistic, but which is another sign of the debt of this building to the classical. To the left and right of the entrance two great cauldrons stand as sentinels. While in no way specifically Greek in their design, with their swirling patterning, band design and simple duo-­chrome black and cream colour scheme, they are at least reminiscent of Geometric and later Greek vase painting. On each of the side walls of the building a sculptural group of three owls can also be seen, accompanied by a wreath pattern on the wall. This could be an allusion to Athena, a favourite goddess of Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil in particular. Architecturally, though lacking most of the features of an ancient Greek temple, having no free-­standing columns, and no sculptured architrave or pediment, the building shows a number of incomplete features that might have belonged to one. There is a sort of fragmented architrave, modified acroteria and a suggestion of the columnar base of pilasters on the exterior wall. Although the classical references are muted and subtle, the total cumulative effect of the Secession building leaves us with a

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

distinct feeling that we are looking at a Greek temple. Though not obviously so at first sight, given its ostensible dedication to all that is new in painting, architecture and sculpture, it is also a thanksgiving to the classical, one of the sources of the Association’s Ver Sacrum. Across Europe and North America, the birth throes of Art Nouveau were frequently framed by its proponents self-­consciously as a classical revival. Coupled with this idea of artistic renewal, and the unleashing of an ancient passion and creative inspiration, was the notion of learning itself. In a sense, this was part and parcel of a movement that prided itself on the value it ascribed to applied art. Art Nouveau artists returned repeatedly to the motif of the inherent virtue of learning, and considered their proactive furthering of knowledge and skill through greater experimentation in the applied arts as a practical application of this principle. The contemporary concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, uniting all the arts, was also fundamental to the conception of Art Nouveau. As we have seen, it is schematically present in the Secession building in its proclamation of the unity and equality of painting, architecture and sculpture, and the concept played a prominent role in the exhibitions of the Vienna Secession. The thirst for new knowledge and inspiration explains in large part the fascination Art Nouveau entertained with modern technology, and more than anything else the artistic and architectural potentialities of iron. Yet, while the ‘classical’ learning of the Academy was something rejected by Art Nouveau artists as constricting (as it had been by the Impressionists and PostImpressionists before them), it would be a mistake to conclude that this meant they did not see a well of knowledge in the classical world. They did, and believed that they could access and make use of it. Tiffany took perhaps the most direct approach of any of his contemporaries to try to revive the techniques of classical art. His primary interest was in glass. Tiffany drew great inspiration from ancient Roman and Syrian glass, by whose frosted texture he was fascinated. This was something he tried to imitate artificially, and which became a significant characteristic of his range of artisan glass products, which he himself – entirely through his own invention – termed favrile (deriving this from the Latin adjective fabrilis, conveying the character of craftsmanship). A number of his vases also drew inspiration for their form from Greek wine jars and Roman amphorae. Many of his glass product ranges specifically credited his inspiration to classical archaeological finds. Hence his ‘Samian Red Vases’, and his ‘Cypriote’ glass series, imitating the acid and alkali soil action on the surface of ancient glass over the centuries.14 Frelinghuysen (1998: 58) reports a contemporary account of how this effect was achieved,

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involving ‘rolling the parison of molten glass on a marver covered with pulverized glass crumbs, and then exposing the entire surface to metallic fumes to take on iridescence’. To a degree, the popularity of these vases in the American market at the time can be linked to the spate of contemporary collecting of Egyptian, Roman, Syrian and Venetian glass. Tiffany’s work was critically acclaimed as ‘classically beautiful’ by one contemporary, this evidently being the standard against which his work had come to be judged.15 At about the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the French decorator Henri Bergé (1870–1937) completed a stained glass window entitled La Lecture16 (date unknown). The window was originally designed by Bergé for a house in the Rue Gambetta in Maxéville. In it, this multi-­talented artist, decorator, director of drawing and modelling at Daum Brothers, and governing board member of the School of Nancy from 1901, created an image that valorizes artistic learning. The central image of the window is a classically nude woman with red hair, who is seated on a stone bench outside in a garden, a book left idly open on the bench beside her. A great purple robe is draped across her legs and lap, as she reclines against the back of the bench. She raises her left arm, cradling a black cat that rubs against her neck, as she tilts her head back looking up at the sky. She is surrounded by colour: the green poplar trees behind her, the distant mauve hills and white of a lake set against the blue sky. To her left, an ornamental vase overflows with bright green plants. She is framed to the lower left and right of the glass by two separate panes, each featuring a symmetrically placed white peacock and butterfly design, flecked with blue. Russet-­coloured leaves grow upwards from the lower corners of the composition. This window allegorizes learning and the wider realization and understanding that it brings. Its subject has been reading and is lost in a reverie of inspiration. What has she been reading? Bergé leaves us guessing, but would have us identify with that moment of abstraction that her reading has inspired in her. The garden setting – itself a sort of allegory for the fantasy of human creation – invites us into her dream world, and invites us to dream too.17 Beyond her, beyond the confines of that garden, the landscape suggests a wider world of mystery and imagination. Perhaps it is this that she is dreaming of. Yet significantly, while it is art that has led her to dream of that mystery and of that beauty by which she is entranced, the language of that art and its dream is deeply classical. Her idealized nudity and drapery, the bright Italianate landscape, the very idea of literary inspiration, are framed in conventional classicizing iconography – and yet Bergé is able to blend this seamlessly with the new world of Art Nouveau: peacocks, butterflies and wild plants. Art and the classical are one, and have the one same

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purpose of unlocking the beauty of nature and the imagination. In his window Bergé creates the same classical Eden for his art and its revival that his American counterpart had done on the other side of the Atlantic. Art Nouveau artists across Europe and North America articulated their ideals about their art in different ways. But, whether or not they really thought of their art as a re-­birth of something older, or as something entirely new, a large number believed that the classical world held some essence that could be tapped, an elixir that would breathe life into their works, and in so doing breathe life back into art and society. In capturing that first blaze of light that they saw as the birth of their new art, they turned back to the classical for a language that would express their feeling, their joy at a new art that was if nothing else about being alive.

2

Muse What is art? Right from its inception this was a question that animated, troubled and vexed the artists of the Art Nouveau movement. Many believed that an oppressive hierarchy of the ‘Fine Arts’ had existed for far too long. As a legacy of the classical world and Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo revivals of sculpture, sculpture had been elevated, alongside painting, to a sort of pre-­eminence in the arts. These were the Fine Arts, and that was not open to challenge. To a certain extent, the Impressionists, despite their revolutionary return to nature, had maintained this hierarchy by remaining above all painters. By the later 1880s some artists had fallen to questioning this canonical view of art. After all, if art was only about the paintings hung on the walls of the official salons, public buildings and the private residences of the rich, and the seemingly endless imitations of Polycleitus, Praxiteles and Lysippus and their bastardized descendants, what did art really have to do with everyday life? But for the new generation, who had already felt that wind of change wafted their way by the Impressionists, this was never going to be enough. Art was about life, nature and humanity as it really was. So, art was nothing if it was not about everyday life. And yet the official art that surrounded them didn’t seem to have much, if anything, to do with everyday life. Maybe it did once upon a time, but it did not any more. It had to be back to the drawing board. There was simply no other way. But where to turn? In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelites had first shown that all through the history of the Fine Arts, the applied arts of jewellery, gold and silver work, mosaic, stained glass, glassware, woodwork, book and manuscript illustration, and so much more, had always existed and had grown and flourished, albeit relegated to the status of lower arts. Yet their art, and the theories of John Ruskin, had initiated the Arts and Crafts movement there. That movement had flown in the face of any understanding of the hierarchy of arts, sending ripples out across the European continent and beyond to North America. The consequences for art were profound. Art Nouveau’s proponents took up the call with enthusiasm, experimenting in new media, and new combinations of media

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never tried before, or – as we saw in the last chapter – trying to revive and better historical artistic techniques that had fallen into desuetude. This didn’t solve the problem of what art was, though. After all, while art had a definite place in everyday life, and a moral purpose to elevate people’s lives, art couldn’t be anything and everything. Nor was it a random arrangement of material, but the product of skilled craftsmanship and artistic learning. Their ideal of the arts as a broad church, many and various in their technique, application and usages, but united under one roof, wanted theoretical and artistic articulation as a concept. In the attempt to do so, many artists turned back to the classical concept of the Muses. They appear frequently and in very varied incarnations and material guises in Art Nouveau, often loosely interpreted and detached from their original symbolism. And yet, whether clinging to the side of buildings, illuminated in stained glass windows, or coiled around bracelets or lampshade stands, the Muses share a common classical ancestor and common purpose in Art Nouveau: they are a bold statement about a universal ideal of art. This was an ideal true to its age, and found its correlate in the literary, musical, and dramatic productions of the time. We begin this chapter with an artist and an artwork of vital importance for any study of Art Nouveau and its relationship with the classical: Klimt and his Allegory of Sculpture (1889)1 (Fig. 5). As is well-­documented, Klimt’s relationship with the classical world was profound and the influence of the classics can be traced in a large part of his oeuvre.2 The Allegory is both a work of art in its own right, and a study of classical art – or rather, a homage to the study of classical art. In it, Klimt wholly acknowledges his artistic debt to that tradition. Yet at the same time, it is a challenge to artistic orthodoxy. The composition is centred on a statuesque female nude in contrapposto stance. ‘Statuesque’ is perhaps an understatement; her slender proportions, marble skin and classically beautiful face, make her the ultimate ideal of the symmetria (‘well-­proportioned form’) of classical Greek art, according to Klimt. He adorns her with ancient Greek gold jewellery, and places a small bronze statue of a winged victory in her outstretched left hand. Although given the name of Allegory, she is really Klimt’s classical muse incarnate. Behind her, Klimt juxtaposes a number of identifiable works of classical art, both as a demonstration of his own classical learning, but also as an explanation – or perhaps apology – for the female nude he places in the foreground (Klimt was of course not alone in his use of the classical as a pretext for the erotic3). Immediately behind her we see the famous Spinario (Boy with Thorn), a bronze sculpture in Rome probably based on a third century Hellenistic original.4 This

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Fig. 5  Gustav Klimt, Allegory of Sculpture.

sculpture, never lost since antiquity, was influential throughout the Renaissance and beyond, and many derivative versions exist. By placing it just behind his nude ideal, its black polished finish in prominent contrast to her pale skin, Klimt allots it pride of place in his canon of classical sculpture and pays homage to the

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virtuosity of its ancient sculptor. Behind the Spinario in turn we see two marble sculptures of Athena. We will return to the figure of Athena in more detail later, given her primary importance as a Secessionist idol. Here Klimt includes a variant of the Athena Parthenos statue from the Parthenon in Athens, overshadowed by a larger head of the goddess. Her overawing presence is also reflected in the winged Nike which his nude holds in her hand. In the background, partially in view and partially obscured, is the Athena, Apollo and the Nine Muses Roman sarcophagus from the Glyptothek in Munich5 (Fig. 6). This is a complex and allegorical artwork, as its name suggests, replete with reference to classical myth and symbolism. In a way, given the manner in which the different artworks gradually beat a retreat into the background, we might feel as if we are working through an archaeological museum, full of the artefacts of a dead civilization. But this would be to misunderstand Klimt’s intention. Through this arrangement, he is at once stressing the continuity of his own work with the ancient tradition of sculpture, and doing much more than this. Far from simply re-­stating the artistic canon pure and simple, Klimt is asking us to see the life that he intends to breathe back into that artistic tradition. His muse may be classical, but she is also flesh and blood. She may be statuesque, but she is also alive. Despite all her classical trappings, her erotic allure is undeniable. In another version of the Allegory of Sculpture, a drawing similarly featuring a female nude as centrepiece and studded with references to classical art, she is still more sexually alluring. As Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 30) point out, this aspect has been toned down in the painted version, with her hair no longer let loose, her

Fig. 6  Athena, Apollo and the Nine Muses sarcophagus, Glyptothek, Munich.

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pubic hair (a Klimt trademark) removed, and no longer standing ‘as if caught naked in her bedroom doorway, summoning the viewer to caress her’. And yet, while toned down, the erotic charge of his nude in the painted version is far from absent. Moreover, in bringing alive ancient sculpture as a living woman, he seeks to make her more ‘Greek’ with jet black curly hair and dark languid eyes. As elsewhere, Klimt is making a bold statement about his art as fundamentally erotic, but he is also saying this of his classical artistic muse too. This is art history as revision, and a challenge to the old Historicist orthodoxy of the ostensibly asexual classical nude. Klimt’s Allegory, and its juxtaposition of the ancient and the living, is deeply revealing of the broader attitude of many Secession and Art Nouveau artists towards the classical and the inspiration they could find in it. It also tells us something about their conception of the nature of art, and the role that the Muses played in this. The choice of a Roman sarcophagus featuring the Muses, and two goddesses of inspiration, Apollo and Athena, is no accident. The message of the immortal nature of the Muses is clear. In a related series of murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Klimt similarly acknowledged his deep debt to classical art. Part of a series of representations of the art of different civilizations, the murals are placed in the spandrels of the archways over the main staircase of the museum, which also include figures inspired by ancient Egyptian art. In one of these we again see the figure of Athena, imperiously brandishing a spear in her outstretched left hand and a winged victory in her right hand, the gorgon’s head emblazoned on her chest. In another, known as The Girl from Tanagra6 (1890–1) (Fig. 7) just adjacent and placed between two large columns, a young red-­haired woman peers out at us, a bunch of laurel in her left hand. Behind her we see a small golden statuette and a large black-­figure Greek vase. Once more we are face to face with Klimt’s muse, his eternal ideal of ancient Greece and ancient Greek art: youthful, delicate, yet proud, brimming with inspiration and, above all else, alive. Even if it finds its clearest articulation in Klimt’s work, this classical paragon of artistic inspiration was shared by many Art Nouveau artists. We have already seen it in the slightly later work of Ferenczy and his Archaeology. That paragon was by no means limited to the Secession movements of central Europe. In the Ixelles district of Brussels, still considered by many to be the capital of Art Nouveau, we find the Muses emblazoned on the external mural of the house of the architect Paul Cauchie (1905) (Fig. 8).7 In the upper register of Cauchie’s house, surrounding a horseshoe arch window typical of the Belgian Art Nouveau architecture of the time, we see eight female figures arranged in a

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Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition

Fig. 7  Gustav Klimt, The Girl from Tanagra, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

symmetrical formation. Although all of similar stature and of similar size, such that they are visible from street level, they are placed at different elevations, giving the impression that some of them are perched on the side of the horseshoe arch window. When we look more closely, we see that each has a different attribute indicative of the art that she represents. At the top right we see one

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holding a lyre representing music, the wind billowing through her cloak and hair – perhaps a reference to Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, and his classical association with the lyre. Beneath her we see one of her sisters balancing a model of what appears to be a temple in her hands, suggesting that she symbolizes architecture. Opposite her, another holds a small statuette in her hand, representing the plastic arts, and so on. We are left in no doubt that this is the house of a man who believes in the arts. It is a loud statement of belief in the tradition of craftsmanship – one that, through the Muses, asserts itself as having a classical origin. The interpretation of the Muses is no doubt modern, and in some ways loose – they have after all come on a long journey from the Roman sarcophagus discussed above to the clearly Pre-Raphaelite inspired beauties of Cauchie’s house – but there is an acknowledgement here too, as in Klimt’s work, of the debt of Art Nouveau to a classical conception of the arts. This is not at all to suggest that he is thereby constrained by its dictates. After all, this mural features on a building that is one of many in the Brussels of the time that broke new and experimental ground in architectural design. Yet it is clear enough that the artist saw no contradiction between the ancient and the modern in conceiving this design.

Fig. 8  Paul Cauchie, Paul Cauchie’s house (detail), Brussels.

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One French artist who also found poetry in the theme of the Muses, and saw its relevance to modern life, was Maurice Denis (1870–1943). In his The Muses8 (1893) he takes a contemporary scene and elevates its significance through reference to a classical paradigm. In his painting, Denis shows us a woodland scene in St. Germain-­en-Laye, the town where the artist lived his whole life. It is perhaps afternoon or dusk. The leaves of the chestnut trees have turned yellow and the ground is strewn with red leaves. In the foreground three women, variously attired, sit together on chairs. To the right, a woman with bare shoulders wearing a long dress turns away from us, looking to her companion, who also wears a long dress. A book or newspaper lies open on her lap, but she now appears to be otherwise preoccupied with something else she holds in her hand. To her left another woman, dressed wholly in black, stares thoughtfully into the distance, another open book in her hands. Elsewhere in the wood, pairs of women stroll between the tree trunks, each preoccupied by their own thoughts. In the far background, we see an enigmatic tenth woman, her arm raised to the sky. The autumnal scene, the pale colours and the mystery of the scene conspire to lend it an ethereal and enigmatic quality. The whole painting is pervaded by an inescapable sense of ennui. But what does it all mean? The Symbolist qualities of this work suggest we are not necessarily meant to discover its meaning in a straightforward way. It is still more confusing to learn that the woman the artist married in June 1893, Marthe, features twice as two of the most prominent women in the painting – both the one with her back turned to us, and another that this woman turns towards. The implication of this may be that the artist’s wife was his personal muse. And there might be a broader message here, of woman herself as the artist’s ultimate muse. At one level, Klimt’s Allegory also appears to convey the same message. Yet Denis’ muses, while they do have the ethereal and detached quality of classical muses, are somehow still real women – in the case of those that represent his wife, actual women too. And more so than Cauchie’s, Denis’ muses wear identifiable contemporary fashion, as if he had seen them passing by on the terrace of St. Germain-­en-Laye, or in evening wear at the opera house. It is perhaps no accident that as we retreat further into the background, the scene becomes more surreal. There is an inescapable notion here of the boundaries between the real and the unreal being blurred. This is a recurrent theme in both Art Nouveau and Symbolist art. In Denis’ case, it is a way of saying that for him true beauty and the mystery of artistic inspiration exist in everyday life, if you only know how to look for them. Through the classical reference of his title, he elevates the beauty of his everyday world to the higher realm of inspiration.

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In the same period, a number of Polish artists also engaged with the concept of the muse in different ways. Józef Mehoffer’s (1869–1946) Muse9 (1897) employs much of her standard iconography. A female figure, dressed completely in white, moves towards us bearing a green lyre in her hand. There is nothing unconventional about the way Mehoffer’s muse looks. But the painting as a whole is quite unconventional for a representation of a muse, because of its setting. In neoclassical painting we would expect to find the Muses in an idealized Arcadia. However, there is something quite uncomfortable about the feeling of this painting. This derives as much as anything else from its colour scheme. The painting is a wash of deep green oils – the canopy of the trees, the grass, bushes, and water of the stream, the lyre itself and the muse’s headdress – in which only the bright white light of her robe stands out. The trunks of the birch trees seem somewhat dour, as is her expression itself. On the whole, this painting feels rather cold, as if we were caught out late walking in the woods. Whatever Mehoffer’s exact meaning, we are already a long way from the comfortable world of the neoclassical muse. This is perhaps Mehoffer’s point. His muse, and the artistic inspiration that she brings, are wrought from nature itself, not the comfortable conventions of artistic tradition. Her green lyre, representing music (and by extension, all art), emphasizes this sense of the seminal and natural power of art as something organic. This was an important concept in many artistic movements at the end of the nineteenth century, as artists looked for genuine inspiration to create a genuinely new form of art. Interestingly, a second version of this painting from the same year, today in Poznan, also exists. In this version, the face of his muse is clearly identifiable as that of his wife’s sister, the singer Wanda Janakowska, demonstrating that the painting may have been intended as a portrait. Considered from this angle, we also see how versatile the concept of the muse had become in the hands of contemporary artists. And it shows how clearly artists of the time understood their painting, sculpture, and graphic work to be kindred art forms to music, an idea we will return to later. This brings us on to a very important but much-­overlooked Polish artist, Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929), whose work straddles both Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Malczewski, a native of Krakow, where he completed his early studies with Jan Matejko and others, later studied in Paris, at the École des Beaux Arts under Henri Lehmann and at the Académie Suisse. During travels in the early 1890s, he expanded his knowledge of both contemporary and ancient art,10 after which he returned to Poland where he held a series of positions at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. As many Polish artists of his time, he was deeply influenced by a growing sense of national consciousness, something which is

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frequently a central theme of his work, and was closely involved in the Young Poland patriotic movement. But his work is at least as deeply affected by the classics, which likewise appear to have had a profound effect on his world view, certain classical motifs recurring again and again in his art. The result is that his painting is often a heady blend of national, folk and classical motifs, whose symbolism is dense and at times so complex as to be confusing, or so personal as to be impenetrable. Nonetheless his work received a certain amount of international attention in his time, and he was honoured at international exhibitions in Berlin in 1891, Munich in 1892 and Paris in 1900.11 He made frequent visits to Paris, Munich and Vienna, but also to the Mediterranean, to Italy, Greece and Turkey, even taking part in one archaeological excavation, something which no doubt also directly influenced his work. Malczewski produced hundreds of self-­portraits. These take all sorts of forms. While he is always the centrepiece and always clearly identifiable as himself, he is forever sporting different outfits, alongside various companions, sometimes not entirely human – various mythical classical beasts make an outing in his works – cavorting in different landscapes, but which are most often Polish in some shape or form. The muse is also a recurring motif in his work, and there are several works with variations of titles involving muses. One example is his SelfPortrait with Muse and Buddleia (1912)12. This self-­portrait has Malczewski in a sunlit garden, together with a young red-­headed woman leaning on a scythe. Their figures loom large and fill most of the painting, though behind them we also see a hedgerow sprouting purple flowers. The sun is shining brightly, and it is clearly summertime, with butterflies everywhere (Malczewski has marked ‘May 1912’ on the canvas, beside his signature). It is a powerful personal idyll, but it is also a slightly unsettling one, given the prominent presence of the scythe upon which the woman leans. Does she represents death? The title tells us that she is a muse. Can death and the muse be one and the same? Or is Malczewski trying to tell us that death is his muse? As ever with Malczewski’s work, we are left guessing. One significant fact though, which certainly has a bearing on his intended meaning in the painting, is the identity of the woman that is his muse. The same woman, possibly his lover Maria Balowa, appears repeatedly throughout his work in various, sometimes mythological – and often erotic – guises. She is frequently imagined by Malczewski as a sort of muse, as she is in this painting, but often a rather terrifying muse who seems to bear some untold but ominous, and perhaps fatal, purpose. Maria clearly exercised a strong effect on the artist’s imagination, and his depictions of her range from the beautiful to the bizarre. In this painting,

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Malczewski’s and her contented expressions, combined with the beautiful summer day, suggest an idyll – the artist’s personal Arcadia – and yet we cannot help but feel that something is off. It is not only the scythe that is ambiguous in its meaning; so too is the wedding ring that the muse wears on her hand. The exact symbolism here is unclear, but we note the absence of a similar ring on the artist’s own hand. Moreover, it is unclear what the muse is looking at – presumably the artist himself, but the meaning of her gaze is elusive. Above all else in this painting, we see how far the classical muse has departed from her original conception, and the degree to which an artist like Malczewski could invest her with personal meaning. Turning away from explicit representations of the Muses by Art Nouveau artists for the time being, it is also necessary to consider their broader attitude towards the arts in general to understand better how they conceptualized their own work as art. While they exalted the art forms in which they worked – be it painting, sculpture, architecture or the applied arts – they also sought to specifically represent other art forms in their work and to venerate them. This was influenced by a widespread current of ideas at the time relating to the inherent kinship of all the arts, and to the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Another art form whose influence Art Nouveau perhaps felt most keenly of all, in many different ways, was music. Indeed, some Art Nouveau artists went as far as seeking to represent a sort of visual-­auditory synaesthesia in their work, as a representation of the deep relationship between the visual and musical arts. And classical iconography and mythology played a key role here. A typical example of this is the bronze sculpture Music13 (1892–4) by the Czech artist Myslbek. Myslbek was perhaps the most important sculptor of the Czech Secession, and has been argued to be the most important Czech sculptor of the whole second half of the nineteenth century,14 a highly innovative period in the history of Czech sculpture. Close to the Czech artists Vojtěch Hynais (1854–1925) (whose The Judgement of Paris (1893) influenced a whole generation of Czech artists) and Václav Brožík, their correspondence shows a shared interest in contemporary French Academic art, and he visited Paris in 1878. Yet his work is in many respects experimental, showing a preoccupation with the human soul, and the effects of art upon it. Many of his compositions show the figure in various states of poetic exaltation or despair, as an allegory of human emotion. His Music is a classic example of this and is also a symbolic representation of art itself. A tall graceful woman with a wreath upon her head, draped in a long classically-­inspired garb leaving one of her shoulders and breasts bare, tilts her head back, an expression of ecstatic inspiration on her face. She stands beside the

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stump of a tree, out of which a branch grows, looping behind her neck and coiling around her shoulders and outstretched arms. She herself almost seems to be growing with the tree, or at least moving in harmony with it, as the growth of the branch echoes the movement of her arms, and the sway of the tree trunk the sway of her body. The symbolism of this sculpture is complex and requires Myslbek’s own explanation to elucidate its meaning. The sculptor wrote that his original idea, in both this and another version of the same work, had been to try to demonstrate syncretism between the ethereality of music and the physicality of the fine arts, but ultimately that he had had to resign himself to the impossibility of achieving this aim.15 This explains, in part, the unavoidable sense that this sculpture is in some way incomplete. Myslbek had prepared many versions of it, apparently hesitating between a number of different potential compositions. It is clear from his correspondence that he had the idea of linking a female personification, perhaps representing literary inspiration, to a mythical tree, considered as the original musical instrument – this in turn representing the fundamental relationship between art in its various forms and nature. At one stage, he considered including strings stretched across his sculpture, with the names of famous composers, including Czech ones, to be inscribed thereon. Another alternative would have been an allegorical figure carrying an ancient stringed instrument, the Czech varyto (a small lyre). By way of explanation in one of his notebooks Myslbek wrote, quite simply: ‘Music – the soul – spring – the flower’. This is somewhat allusive and a little opaque in its meaning, and ultimately that is what the sculpture itself remained. Yet it does give a clear sense of the ideals that the artist held dear, whose associations were perhaps more immediately intelligible to his literary and artistic contemporaries than they are to us today. The influential Czech art critic Karel Mádl (1859–1932) wrote of the beauty of this and other works of Myslbek’s, describing them as fine by the standard of their being perfectly classical in their conception.16 There is perhaps a clue for us here. It is interesting to see Myslbek, in the 1890s, continuing to be held to a classical standard. Mádl was highly interested in the contemporary development of Secessionist Czech art and was always keen to give the more experimental art of his time a decent hearing. However, he seems to have recognized the fact that Myslbek’s work, while it is experimental, remains fundamentally classical in its ideas. In a volume on the classical tradition in Czech art, Kotalík (1982: 132) has described the Czech sculpture of the time as ‘remaining in a continuous dialogue with classical art’, and names Myslbek as its link with that art, via French tradition.17 In the same

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volume, Macková (1982: 114) speaks of Myslbek’s having personally brought a sense of ‘revision to the relationship between modern sculpture and antiquity’, and the former’s whole conception of the ethos and values of the latter.18 Music is an example of that revision, showing how Secessionist Czech art could retain certain classicizing elements in its form, while at the same time using them as a vehicle to convey a contemporary concept of the soul and of artistic inspiration. Another Czech artist whose work was deeply immersed in the classics, and to whom we will return several times in this book, is Jan Preisler (1872–1918). A more conventional side to this classical inspiration is shown in his illustrations to Gerlach and Schenk’s volume Allegories and Emblems.19 First published in Vienna in 1882, it went through a number of editions, including a new series edition in 1896, with several artists (including Klimt) contributing illustrations. Preisler’s charcoal drawing for the volume Music and Song20 (1895) gives a good idea of the traditional starting point that many Art Nouveau artists would have had in approaching allegories of music and the arts. His drawing is an unconventional sort of triptych, a favourite device of the artist, which is really more two windows onto unrelated scenes featuring female figures, framing a central roundel with a male one. As the title indicates, the left window shows ‘Music’. She is seated, half-­turned away from us, her head resting on her right hand as she looks distractedly into the distance, as if taken with some inspiration, her upper body naked as her robe drops to her waist. With her left arm, she leans on a balustrade, which appears to be that of a balcony, perhaps in a palace, beyond which we see trees and the open sky in the distance. By her side, a small naked boy plays a flute. The woman in the window on the right turns her semi-­ naked body towards us, draped in a classical chiton. She tilts her head to one side and appears distracted by some thought or feeling. She rests a lyre against her leg, around which we see she has draped her right hand. Her long hair is tied back behind her and she wears a wreath of laurel on her head. There are two swans in front of her, one of which rests its long neck and head on the other’s back, almost echoing the woman’s expression. The other looks up at her as if it wants her attention. Behind her we see the waves of the sea. She is ‘Song’. In contrast to these two dramatic female personae, in the central roundel we see a faun lying back on the grass playfully, his face upside down. He holds a horn in his right hand and an amphora in his left. Beneath him, outside the roundel itself, a young faun boy is also perched, playing the double aulos, the ancient Greek instrument consisting of two pipes. His head is cocked in the direction of the older faun in the roundel as he pipes up at him. At the top of the drawing, arranged like a trophy on an imaginary wall above the roundel, are

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various trappings that seem to represent the classical tradition of music and song. In the centre is a tambourine, and behind this another double aulos has been fixed, together with what appears to be a thyrsus – the ceremonial wand of Dionysus – a nod in the direction of his role in inspiring poetry and song. We can also see panpipes, reflecting the Arcadian setting in a reference to the god Pan. The image is awash with classical symbols, and we can see the clear influence of Rococo style, still very much alive in this hybrid work. Preisler, a student of the school at which Myslbek taught, was destined for other things, as we shall see, ultimately becoming what has been considered the ‘model artist of the whole (Czech) Secessionist movement’.21 Yet, while the classics remain present in his later work in other ways, this drawing is important for what it shows about the very classical terms in which many Art Nouveau artists continued to think when they conceptualized the arts and their own craft. In seeking to break the canonical hierarchy of the arts, elevating the status of the applied arts, they nonetheless retained a sense both of the kinship of the different arts, as classically defined, and of their origin. In this drawing, Preisler demonstrates an understanding of the arts that emphasizes poetry, expressed through music and song, as essentially tragic, noble and beautiful, but at the same time whose inception, inspiration and continual rejuvenation is reliant in some mystical way on the Dionysian, the festive, the playful, and perhaps sometimes the ribald and the erotic too. And it is precisely in this that one of the greatest attractions of the classical lay for Art Nouveau artists. It was not a literature or an art that was contained, or that was prudish, unable to acknowledge and accept the nature of man. It was a liberating acceptance of all sides of man’s nature as a source of art itself (we are reminded of Highet’s comment quoted in the Introduction). As a result, there is something very transitional about this work. On the one hand, in its iconography, it retains many of the classicizing platitudes of the Rococo, and yet real human emotion is present in it, both a powerful melancholy and a playful joie-­de-vivre. As Wittlich (1992: 38) described it: ‘If this composition attempts to satisfy the elegance of a salon, it nonetheless gives off, through a subtle use of charcoal, a real poetic nostalgia’.22 Ultimately such recondite expressions of the arts, and their intended meanings, were only intelligible to the classically-­educated. For they smack somewhat of Academic painting and its vaunting erudition. Indeed, this later came to be one of the criticisms levelled at Art Nouveau and Symbolism too, being arts only ever intended to be available, and understood by, an intellectual (and sometimes, in the case of Symbolism, mystically-­initiated) elite. But it would be unfair to characterize their usage of classical myth as identical to that

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of Academic painting in this sense. More generally what we see is more of an interest in where classical myth can express something essential about the human condition and about human emotions – where art itself is very much seen as based upon, and communicating, these things. In the case of music, this explains a strong fascination with the figure of Orpheus on the part of Art Nouveau artists. Orpheus’ myth was already well-­known in literature and the arts. Yet attention was given to Orpheus’ story, and what it might mean, in a new way. After all, it neatly captured many of the things that preoccupied the artists of the time, above all the overpowering nature of art and of music, which could at times verge on the magical; the power of love, and of melancholy, as an inspiration for artistic inspiration; the relationship between art and nature, expressed in the power of Orpheus’ music to sway wild beasts; a certain fear of women, or of the sexuality of women, ultimately expressed in Orpheus’ tragic death. Nor was this generation of artists the first of the nineteenth century to show such an interest in the tragic hero: the Pre-Raphaelites had also exalted him as a sort of ideal. Most notably Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), whose portrayal of Orpheus had conveyed that sense of the magical power of music and art so beloved of Art Nouveau. It is perhaps no surprise that he was such a formative influence on one of the artists who features most prominently in this study, Beardsley. The Hungarian artist Ferenc Helbing (1870–1958), in his Orpheus23 (c. 1904), created an image that is in many ways typical of this ideal. His Orpheus is powerful, muscular, heroically naked save for a cape dramatically blown out behind him in the wind. We see him in profile, his eyes cast down in an expression of intense concentration and inspiration, as he strums on the lyre held up high behind him. In the background, a Mediterranean landscape recedes into the distance beneath a vast open sky, across which a flock of geese fly in formation, apparently inspired by the harmony of his music. This is a powerful and imposing ideal of art, and of an art that is healthy, youthful and dynamic. Helbing is less interested in engaging with the more melancholic sides of Orpheus’ story in any real depth. This is rather a programmatic statement about the energy of contemporary art, and the work of the artist, than a numbing re-­hash of the story of another classical hero. Szabadi (1989: 97) describes this work as ‘a veritable compendium of Art Nouveau trappings [. . .] the mythological subject perceived only in its externals’. The artist has put both himself and his world into his hero. As a point of comparison, we might also consider Stuck’s slightly earlier Orpheus24 (1891). The theme was clearly of enduring fascination for the artist,

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who returned to it in two further versions in 1897–8 and 1924. Kosinski’s (1989: 85) characterization of this work as one of ‘serene classicism and calm grandeur’ rings very true. Another naked and muscular Orpheus, his body half-­turned away from us, strums intently on a five-­stringed lyre. Characteristically of Stuck, he makes his hero emphatically ‘Greek’, with dark curly hair encircled with a band. He is surrounded by all sorts of wild animals. Two lions stand right before him – the hero apparently not in the slightest perturbed, absorbed as he is in his music – one of which appears to bow its head as if in reverence before Orpheus. Behind him, an even more vicious looking crocodile has crept up, turning its malignant little eye up in his direction. A small bird perches on its head, while a collection of rodents gather at its feet. We can also see a flamingo and a little frog. None of them seem in the slightest bit bothered by, or even aware, of each other; all are transfixed by Orpheus’ music, which they seem instinctively to identify as divine, and are drawn to as a result (after the fashion of Orpheus’ depiction in ancient mosaics). As Helbing’s, Stuck’s rendition of Orpheus is both an ideal of art and an ideal of man. Long gone is the pale and effete Orpheus of earlier painting, fainting at the sight of his Eurydice led back to the Underworld by Hermes, or fleeing terrified before the furious Lesbian women. Just as they imagined their art, so too is their Orpheus strong, calm, sure and, above all, young. One composer in whom many contemporary artists saw all these traits combined, in tune with so many of their literary and philosophical contemporaries, was Richard Wagner. In his operatic spectacles, Wagner had captured perfectly the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. Combining high drama, music and art in his stagings, it seemed to them that he had brought back to life the dramatic spectacles of ancient Athens. In his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche had conceptualized Wagner’s work as a re-­birth of Greek tragedy’s (in his view) perfect synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian polar elements of human existence.25 Nietzsche identified the effective combination of drama and chorus in tragedy, respectively representing order and revelry, as the ultimate artistic ideal and embodiment of mankind’s true condition. We will return to ancient drama in a moment, but it is worth pausing to reflect briefly on the impact Wagner and his interpreters had during the period we are considering. One consequence of this for many contemporary visual artists, was that it prompted consideration of and reflection on – we might even say crisis, in some cases – the relationship between the visual and other arts. Sometimes this was related to an anxiety about their visual art being inferior in some way to music or, in other words, Nietzsche’s Dionysian tragic chorus. After all, if we are concerned with the soul and what

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moves it, what art form could ever speak as directly to the soul as music could? The response of some artists to this challenge was to try to bridge the gap between visual art and music. Were the two not part of some greater yet intangible whole? If they were, could the one not represent the other? This led to many experimental attempts by Art Nouveau artists to either infuse their visual productions with the spirit of music, or else to attempt to literally represent the feelings and emotions inspired by music in the graphic or plastic arts, and in some cases this led to significant contortions. Perhaps one of the most complex attempts to achieve this, and on the grandest scale, was Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze26 (1902) (Fig. 9). The frieze was exhibited as part of the Fourteenth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, under the direction of Josef Hoffmann, and was Klimt’s keynote contribution. As the title suggests, Beethoven was the central theme of this exhibition, with works by twenty-­one artist members of the Secession all centred on a great statue of the composer by Max Klinger (1857–1920). The frieze was exhibited in the left aisle of the main exhibition hall, which was the first room visitors entered, so had pride of place. The original intention was that the frieze have only a decorative function, the plan being that it would be removed after the exhibition, but in the end it was purchased by the industrialist August Lederer following the Klimt retrospective Eighteenth

Fig. 9  Gustav Klimt, ‘Poetry’ (from the Beethoven Frieze), Secession building, Vienna.

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Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, and later installed in 1986 in a custom-­built room in a basement of the Secession building, on permanent loan from the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, where visitors continue to flock to see it to this day. The frieze is a bizarre work. Its allegory is complex, and its meaning not immediately obvious to anyone coming to it fresh. The theme is taken from Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and is in essence concerned with mankind’s quest for happiness and fulfilment. It is a work of high imagination and intense emotion. In a series of separate but interconnected murals, which we are intended to follow from left to right (their display in their current location has been arranged to imitate that of the original exhibition), Klimt shows an allegorical journey of man from helplessness to a state of poetic and artistic exaltation. Without labouring the interpretation of this frieze, which is already well-­trodden ground, a brief summary will suffice here before we turn to a closer examination of its classical elements. At the beginning of the frieze we see the naked figure of a standing woman and a kneeling couple, representing the initial state of mankind’s helpless suffering, imploring the aid of a ‘Knight in shining armour’ who, spurred on by two allegorical females ‘Ambition’ and ‘Compassion’, sets off in search of happiness on behalf of humanity. On the narrow wall a jumbled scene of ‘hostile forces’ represents the dangers and temptations humanity faces. We see the giant Typhoeus, and to his left his three daughters the Gorgons, and above women’s faces representing ‘Sickness’, ‘Madness’ and ‘Death’. To Typhoeus’ right we also see further women representing ‘Lasciviousness’ and ‘Wantonness’ and, perhaps the ugliest figure of the scene, ‘Intemperance’ with his distended belly. Further right we also see another figure representing ‘Gnawing Grief ’. A lot for mankind to overcome. But, floating at the top right, we see its genie showing that these hostile forces are ultimately vanquished, with the remainder of the frieze intended to show humanity’s triumph. In the next panel a female figure, bearing a lyre, represents ‘Poetry’. Importantly, though the frieze’s current arrangement does not indicate this, a vacant space then followed through which Klinger’s statue of Beethoven could be seen, continuing the theme of the genius of poetry. In the final scene, female representations of the arts, essentially Klimt’s personal take on the Muses, lead the way into the realm of art, in which humanity finds its ultimate fulfilment, represented by a kissing couple before a chorus of angels – a reference to the ‘kiss to the whole world’ of the final chorus of the Ninth Symphony, words drawn from Friedrich von Schiller’s Ode to Joy. In the Beethoven Frieze Klimt’s art is typically uncompromising. The density of its symbolism is at times almost impenetrable. As Rogoyska and Bade

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(2011: 62) comment: ‘Again, Klimt’s purpose in choosing precisely these subjects for a tribute to Beethoven remains obscure, but they contain the seeds of many a later work’. Yet for all the individuality of Klimt’s iconography – iconography that he would go on to develop more fully in subsequent works – he also draws on conventional, classical, motifs. Perhaps the most obvious of these is ‘Poetry’ herself. The young woman holding the lyre, her head bowed in intense concentration and inspiration, is as ‘Greek’ as Klimt could possibly make her. We might even go so far as to say that she is ancient Greece for Klimt, that endlessly deep well of inspiration for the artist. The very simple manner in which she is conceived, giving the impression that she has been drawn in profile, and the delicate detail of her wrist and her hands as they strum the lyre, are strongly redolent of Attic vase painting. Klimt has also included a number of details to emphasize her Greek character even more. Her thick dark curly hair, stylized as it is in vase painting, the golden wreath on her brow and the elaborate patterning of her dress, all reinforce the overall impression. The great golden lyre, exaggeratedly large in size, is also given a highly-­stylized pattern of swirls, perhaps a hint at ancient Mycenaean or early geometric Greek vase painting. Florman (1990: 310) argues that Klimt was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to the point of trying to revive in painting those primal qualities of ancient drama so admired by the philosopher. She makes the case that as a result in his early career Klimt shows a strong preference for ‘primarily Archaic motifs as opposed to the more restrained and highly mimetic works of the Classical tradition’. However, the simple colour scheme of black, brown and gold, and the vacuum of the simple plaster itself, following on from the hectic jumble of the previous scene, is also strongly reminiscent of the elegant designs of later classical Greek white-­ground lekythos vases (whose inspiration we will see elsewhere in Art Nouveau) (Fig. 10), and so what we have in this work is really more a synthesis of classically-­inspired elements. There is no doubt that there is also a deliberate or unconscious reference in the Beethoven Frieze to a Christian conception of heaven and hell, drawing on the medieval and early Renaissance artistic legacy of depicting the last judgement. To a certain degree Klimt’s salvation of mankind is a reinterpretation of paradise – and the conception of Christian grace – as it was imagined in Christian art. Yet it is fascinating that, in the midst of this highly allegorical and intentionally timeless scene representing humanity as a whole, Klimt reaches directly back to ancient Greece at the very moment that he wishes to symbolize the triumph of mankind over adversity through the arts. It almost suggests that for Klimt (as it had been for Nietzsche and many German philhellenists before him) Greece was

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Fig. 10  Greek white-­ground lekythos vase.

the birth of original art, from which all later great art, for example that of Beethoven, is derived. This motif of ‘Poetry’ as a woman with a lyre was an enduring one for Klimt, and we see it appearing elsewhere in his work in two compositions both entitled Music,27 where he similarly emphasizes the classical aspects of this allegory of the arts. We have already met the ideal of the heroic and youthful bard, lost in a melodic revelry and strumming upon a symbolic

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lyre, in Art Nouveau imaginings of Orpheus. Klimt’s ‘Poetry’ has much in common with these representations because it is the same ideal. What sets Klimt apart from others who aimed at that ideal, is that he deliberately juxtaposes it to the ugly hell of what drags down humanity. And here too he turns to the classics as a reference point in his use of the giant Typhoeus and the gorgons, who dominate the scene on the narrow wall. More generally, the whole Symbolist quality of this frieze, with its allegorical representations of the forces of nature and emotion to which man is subject, is strongly suggestive of classical epic in its quality, as is its basic conception of a romantic quest by a hero, variously encouraged and thwarted by godlike forces beyond his immediate control. Klimt’s originality – making him very much the artist of his time – is to thrust art itself into this scheme of mankind’s travails, making it in itself a godlike force that may come to the aid of man in overcoming evil.28 This is a new conception of art, of the great muse, that never really existed in this way in classical art, literature and myth. Klimt’s frieze describes a world in which the muse plays a positive role in the salvation of mankind. This is a grand and bold conception of art as a force for good in the world and his ultimate incarnation of this ideal is of art as poetry as music. His visual art becomes merely a vehicle to express this. Yet the highly theatrical nature of the frieze, with its almost set-­piece scenes and progressive narrative leading to a climactic denouement, reminds us that another art form was highly influential for Art Nouveau visual artists: drama. The stage was a major influence on artists during this period. Drama as an art form was similarly undergoing a period of significant experimentation and change at the time. Since Wagner’s successful combination of multiple disciplines in his operas, many artists had been inspired by the artistic potentialities of the stage, looking to borrow elements from it for their own work. Some Art Nouveau artists, such as Mucha, began their artistic careers as stage set designers. In his case, this formative influence never really left him. In the case of Wyspiański, he was himself a playwright that seamlessly combined a very wide repertoire indeed in his theatrical productions: ancient Greece, Shakespeare, the Polish national struggle and the avant-­garde. Even for those who were not themselves playwrights, or who had not worked on theatrical productions, the result of their presence in the cultural milieu in which they worked was such that the very conception of their art came to have a lot in common with drama; that their art too was ultimately no more or less than a representation of the drama and passion of human existence, or the inner workings of the human mind. In this search to capture human experience and feeling on the stage, in music, and in the visual arts, it was natural to many art theorists that they should reach

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back to classical drama, and above all to the ancient Athenian tragedies. We have already mentioned Nietzsche’s distillation of this ideal in The Birth of Tragedy, which had a powerful impact on many critics. In tragedy they saw something primal, forceful and timeless for their representation of human nature, and accordingly elevated it as paragon. This train of thought is widely present in the critical literature on art of the time. In the Czech journal of contemporary art, Volné Směry, the critic F.X. Šalda (1903: 170–1) is typical in the concern he shows for the eternal quest to try to re-­capture the essence of Greek tragedy, doubt about whether this is possible at all, and ultimately of a belief that contemporary art might finally have achieved this – and a renewed faith in art as a result. In an essay entitled, ‘The New Beauty: Its Genesis and Character’, he comments as follows: The theorists agree that it is not possible that a true modern tragedy could arise, which could articulate our everyday life, its practice and organisation, in the great tragic format and typical form, to criticize it with that seriousness and loftiness of ethical criticism that ancient tragedy achieved through its Greeks and demigods, and then along comes Ibsen and creates it.29

But what was this essential quality of ancient tragedy that Šalda’s theorists believed in? Another Czech critic, Miloš Marten (1903: 222), in a further essay in the same volume of Volné Směry, ‘The Joy of Resonance’, hints at what he thinks the answer might be: The example of Greek art, which drew its inspiration from these same principles [of his theory of ‘resonance’], which professes the same governing idea, with a common concept of heroism, the erotic, tragedy, as it felt them and understood them, professed them and believed them.30

Marten clearly believes in the same ideal of Greek art as inherently noble that Šalda does, defining this through reference to its human qualities: heroic, erotic and tragic. Again, implicit in this, is an idea that in the long years since the days of ancient Greece art may have departed from the truly heroic, erotic and tragic. Is it in the reach of contemporary art to revive these essential qualities, qualities that made the drama of ancient Greece so great? It seems it might be. Perhaps all it takes is that we believe it, as the ancient Greeks believed in their art too. This is not really about ancient Greece and ancient Greek drama; it is about contemporary society and its art. Yet the assumed brilliance of ancient Greek civilization and its art remains the ultimate yardstick of great art in the present. As such, Greek drama and literature exercised a powerful influence over many of

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the artists of the Art Nouveau style throughout the period we are looking at in this book, and we will see its influence popping up in many places. In various ways, artists tried to re-­capture something of the magic of ancient drama in their work. Some did so as their predecessors, the History Painters, had done, by simply playing back the recognisable themes of the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Many Symbolists also attributed specific meanings to these dramas too, although that is too broad a topic to cover here.31 Other artists tried to bask in the reflected grandeur of ancient tragedy by allusive iconography: we have seen the example of Klimt’s ‘Poetry’ in the Beethoven Frieze. And, as the art works considered in this book attest, some simply sought to imitate the spirit of ancient tragedy by focusing their works as far as possible on the eternal themes that Šalda identifies above: the heroic, the erotic, and the tragic. Klimt was evidently fascinated by the power of Greek theatre. While this is not something explicit – but nonetheless still very much in evidence – in the Beethoven Frieze, in two earlier works the artist explored his interest in Greek drama more directly. An early example may be found in the commission awarded to Klimt, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch’s studio in 1886 to decorate the staircase, ceilings and lunettes of the new Burgtheater in Vienna. As part of this commission Klimt completed a ceiling painting, Taormina’s Theatre32 (1886–8). The commission meant the first official public recognition for the artist and, as was standard for such a commission, a series of classical themes were chosen. Together with the theatre painting, other paintings on the themes of The Cart of Thespis, and The Altar of Dionysos and Apollo, were also included, as well as an Elizabethan performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe theatre in London. Klimt includes his Taormina’s Theatre in his visual history as an early stage in the development of drama, thereby attributing an ancient pedigree to the present-­ day Viennese theatrical performances staged in the Burgtheater. Klimt’s title references the ancient theatre of Taormina on the east coast of Sicily, whose (Roman) remains are still extant. The theatre, believed to have originally been built by the Greeks, given its design, is represented by Klimt at the height of its splendour. While he is true to the theatre as it might have been in some of its details (for example his inclusion of Corinthian columns), this painting is not primarily intended to be an archaeological reconstruction of the theatre as it might actually have been. Klimt instead let his imagination run wild, and the scene is overflowing with symbols of classical art. There are winged Nikes, statues of athletes, Venuses and sphinxes, but what we see in the foreground is not in fact a dramatic performance at all: instead we see a nude female dancer, a crouching flute girl playing the double aulos, and another woman rhythmically

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thumping a tambourine. On a couch nearby, two (rather bored-­looking) aristocrats recline, looking on at this performance. In the background, several togate figures mill about gesturing to one another, and in the background beyond we can see more architectural features, including a triumphal arch and a victory column. The Sicilian coast stretches away further into the distance. Flowers grow from the left of the scene, while everything we see is a state of high opulence, from the rich carpets to the multi-­coloured marble of the columns, and the golden wreaths held by the Nikes. This painting has less to do with Art Nouveau and much more to do with history painting. For despite being largely Klimt’s own fantasy, it still pays lip service to an established image of the ancient world. By cramming it with recognizable motifs of the classical past, Klimt sticks well within established conventions. The artist has given his official imperial patrons and wealthy Austrian public exactly what they had come to expect when they pictured the classical world: a sunlit Mediterranean land of eternal summer, wealth, beauty and aristocratic leisure. This is the imaginary golden age of Virgil and Horace, and the patrician ease of Pliny the Younger. All of this is true save in one respect, the undeniably erotic character of this work. Undeniably the dominant force of almost all of Klimt’s painting (as is attested by his well-­known adage, ‘All art is erotic’), we see the early emergence of the erotic in the focal point of this painting, the dancing nude. This is not to say that there are not erotic elements in the sort of history painting which is Klimt’s starting point here – but its thinly-­veiled presence, indeed prominence, here is something new. And the context is important, because this was not the Moulin Rouge. The Burgtheater was one of the cultural focal points for the conservative Viennese elite. Klimt’s later confrontations with that elite and with the artistic establishment in Vienna are well known, but it is worth noting how at the end of the 1880s we can see the seeds of this later efflorescence already budding. And we can also see that in the classical world Klimt found a rich bed of soil to plant those seeds. We encounter some of the later offshoots of that growth elsewhere in this book. As for Marten, so too for Klimt the erotic was a vital element of ancient art, and he does not shy away from giving it pride of place even in this early conception of the history of drama. What then of Marten’s other elements, those that supposedly explain the grandeur of ancient art, the tragic and the heroic? Another of Klimt’s works throws important light on the contemporary conception of these supposed classical qualities by visual artists. This is his study Tragedy33 (1897) for his Allegory of Tragedy, of which there are several preparatory versions. A later work than Taormina’s Theatre, which betrays something of his

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more mature style, in it we have a more direct conception by the artist of ancient Greek drama itself, and more specifically of tragedy. As befits what it was for – the new series of Gerlach and Schenk’s Allegories and Emblems, the first series of which we have already encountered above – it is a highly symbolic work. A pale-­ skinned woman with dark curly hair and dark eyes, wearing a long dark robe that almost completely conceals her figure, is set in a rectangular patterned frame with the word ‘Tragedy’ inscribed as if in marble above her head. She faces us in a full frontal posture, staring out at us vacantly as if she sees through us, her small mouth pursed and set firm. In her hands, she holds a tragic mask whose expression, in pointed contrast to her own, is full of terror and fear. As we have seen already in the Beethoven Frieze, so here too Klimt fills his image with the trappings of ancient Greece. She wears golden earrings, a bracelet and necklace, and by her side we see an Ionic stone column, upon whose side Klimt has drawn a leaf pattern very similar to that which can be found in the border designs of sixth-­century bc black-­figure Attic vases. So, too, the dark forms that we can dimly make out beside her head. And the manner in which she and the column are drawn, as the figure of ‘Poetry’ in the Beethoven Frieze, is strongly reminiscent of the outline drawing attested elsewhere in Greek vase painting, in particular of white-­ground lekythos vases. All of this adds a certain solemnity to the scene, but to relieve its ominousness – and almost as a reminder that tragedy was a festive art – Klimt paints flowers above her head. What does all of this mean? Klimt’s stern, almost cold, representation of tragedy is certainly a very powerful one, but it also belies a certain faith on the part of the artist in both ancient Greece and the power of drama as an art form. This is, after all, an abstract allegory for the tragic, which Klimt has chosen to dress up in the costume of ancient Greece as in his view its primary representative. We should not neglect the borders of this version of the theme though. In them he has drawn two female figures in profile, on either side of the rectangular frame and facing one another, who appear to show various states of suffering such as we might see in a tragic performance. One of them cocks her head back in evident agony, while the other buries her head in her hand. In a bizarre twist, typical of both Klimt and of Art Nouveau more generally, they seem to be engulfed by a giant sea monster, and they themselves may be mermaids. This monster is more a sort of Japanese dragon, drawn as if in a Japanese woodcut of the type that inspired many Art Nouveau artists, its sprawling tentacles stretching out around the mermaids and its claw closing around the body of the mermaid on the right. A strange – and perhaps unique – combination of ancient eastern and western art, Klimt thereby expresses his vision of tragedy as an overpowering

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force and as an allegory for heroic human suffering and endurance. There is something implacable, almost inevitable, about the principal female allegory who seems unmoved by and unaware of what is happening in the borders around her. This is Klimt’s modern (and rather novel) way of capturing the power of the Fates in ancient Greek tragedy, that will ultimately, one way or another, bring down man’s misdeeds, or those of his ancestors, upon his head. Yet he remains traditional, and true to the legacy of earlier personifications of the Muses in art, in retaining woman as the vehicle for his allegory. The muse took many shapes and forms in Art Nouveau, at times departing significantly from the Muses as they were actually imagined in the ancient world. Yet for all its protean mutations, the muse of Art Nouveau remained essentially classical. The movement’s artists never lost that classical sense of the division, and fundamental kinship, of the arts. Nor did they ever completely lose their awe of the greatness of classical art itself, and of Greek tragedy, in whose shadow many believed that they still worked – in a way that subsequent generations of artists did not. As we will see in the chapters which follow, this belief had a profound impact on the mentality of Art Nouveau artists, and as such it casts a long shadow over the style.

3

Hero In the last chapter, we spoke about the erotic, the heroic and the tragic as defining elements for Art Nouveau artists in their understanding of the power of ancient art. This chapter will explore in more detail what the heroic element of that triad meant for them, and how this was reflected in their art. In the following chapter we will also explore another aspect of this same obsession, that of its interest in the bloom of youth. For the heroic is really a subset of Art Nouveau’s obsession with youth. This is a very important point and needs emphasis. As the sobriquets given to the style across Europe and North America attest – Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Modernismo – this was a style concerned with what was young. It is almost something of a paradox then that it should have been in the ancient above all else that there were so many artistic paradigms of youth available to modern artists. As we will see in this and the following chapter, the dependence on and revivification of those ancient artistic forms was widespread in the style. Yet it would be a mistake to think that the influence of the classical stopped there. At an ideological level, the ethos of the new style drew deeply on ideas that are essentially classical in their origin. Youth really meant two things to Art Nouveau: strength and beauty. The first was really about rejuvenation, and rejuvenation of art. As it had originally been to Renaissance artists, so classical myth, literature and art once again became an eternal font of youthful renewal for contemporary artists. This inspiration takes many different forms in Art Nouveau. A primary aspect with which we will begin this chapter is classical youth as a symbol for Art Nouveau itself. More specifically, this is about a concept of the heroic strength of youth representing the virtues of an art renewed. This is a recurrent motif in the style, often allegorized as one of struggle against monsters, which in many cases can be seen as a symbol of the Historicism from whose shackles Art Nouveau sought to wrest itself. Beginning with its most common emblems though, we find these in a series of conventional classical allegories, which were now given new meanings. Turning back to classical myth, artists found there a number of

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figures who could readily stand in to perform these allegorical functions. A major source here were the classical gods and goddesses, indeed most frequently the goddesses. At one level a natural reflection of Art Nouveau’s fascination with the power and artistic potential of the female form freed of its former artistic straitjacket, the symbolic meaning of the classical goddess came to be focused principally in two of their number: Athena and Diana. In his Diana1 (1908) Preisler captures well many of the characteristics of this goddess that appealed to Art Nouveau artists. We see the youthful goddess as she glides through the woodland in pursuit of a stag, which moves alongside her in the deep green of the background. Diana is naked to the waist and wears a long bright yellow skirt that billows in the breeze. Her hair is tied back and she turns away from us, focusing intently on the stag as it tries to flee. Her hands hang by her side, a bow gripped in her left hand. She has not yet taken aim at the stag as she continues her pursuit, waiting patiently for the right moment. Her whole body, young, swift and fleet, poised upright and alert, exudes a sense of confidence and boldness. The whole scene is a welter of bright pastel colours. While she is the undoubted focus of the scene, Preisler echoes the yellow of her skirt in the yellow autumn leaves that fill the canvas. The wildly climbing branches of the trees, through which the goddess spies her quarry, and the bright flecks of the leaves against the deep woodland green, all create a sense of movement and of great dynamism. It is almost as if the goddess, in her hunt, moves the whole forest with her. This painting belongs to a group or works by the artist, all completed in late 1908, in which he grapples with some of the problems of form that artists had begun to engage with at the time. As Kotalík (1982: 137) comments: ‘References to antiquity in Preisler’s work are always linked to an artistic reflection on problems of a contemporary nature’.2 Compositionally, the painting is certainly interesting. Preisler places his Diana prominently in the foreground such that we almost share her perspective, as we gaze with her into the deep woodland at the stag. But while this painting is clearly for the most part an experiment in colour and form (another variant sketch of the same theme exists from early 1908, featuring a white stag instead of the pale green we see here), for our purposes it matters for the ideal of a classical goddess that it presents. We have here many of the things that Art Nouveau held dear: dynamic movement, wild and untamed nature, the pale colours of autumn, and the young – and partially nude – female form. These represented many of the things that Art Nouveau artists associated with the style in which they worked: something inspired by nature, dynamic, free, subtle and beautiful. That these qualities come naturally by

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association with a classical goddess such as Diana is significant. As we will see elsewhere, such qualities are sometimes assumed to be inherently classical in some way, or the classical is considered to be the most convenient vehicle for their expression. Together with her sister of the hunt, Athena was the favourite choice of classical goddess for Art Nouveau artists. Above all else Athena, goddess of wisdom and valour, presented in youthful female form two essential traits that Art Nouveau artists believed should be native to all of their art. As with Diana, a raft of heroic and artistic qualities is assumed by association with her person. This was nowhere more so the case than for the Jugendstil artists of central Europe, but she crops up often in other places too. She features for example as a statue on the entrance portico of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, the seminal work of Art Nouveau architecture built by Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) in 1905–11. We saw above how Klimt’s Allegory of Sculpture makes multiple direct references to Athena and notably the statue of Athena Parthenos. The latter is an important point to register, for Art Nouveau’s reception of Athena is not only about engagement with the literary figure of Athena from classical myth. It is also about the reception and transformation of the Athena Parthenos sculpture of Phidias and its many sculptural derivatives. As we will see in the examples that follow, the lost giant chryselephantine sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens remained very much alive in Art Nouveau. The monumental plastic application of gold and ivory would have appealed as a paragon in and of itself to the applied artists of the movement. It is likely no coincidence then that it makes its appearance in their art most often in relation to programmatic statements about what their own artistic creation was about. To return to Klimt first and his Pallas Athene3 (1898). Despite his references to ancient sculpture in his Allegory of Sculpture, this work is in many ways a more direct engagement with Phidias’ statue. Above all, we see this in the almost overwhelming use of gold in this painting, as was increasingly becoming a feature of Klimt’s work more broadly, but here the use of gold directly references its classical antecedent. While we do not see the whole figure of the goddess, only her upper body, we see that she holds a long golden spear in her raised right hand, and a statuette in her left hand, as Phidias’ Athena had. Facing the viewer frontally, as the ancient statue did her worshippers as they entered the Parthenon, she wears a golden hoplite helmet on her head and a golden breastplate featuring the face of the gorgon. Her red hair flows out from underneath her helmet, and seems as if it were made of strands of gold. In the dark background behind the figure of the goddess we see the indeterminate forms of other figures moving in

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the shadow. There is what appears to be an owl – one of the conventional attributes of the ancient goddess – just behind her left shoulder. Further beyond we can see the black outline profile, again drawn as if copied from a black-­figure Attic vase, of a bearded man who grasps at someone’s arm. Behind her left shoulder, a young Greek woman, wearing a Greek tunic with her black hair tied back with a band, looks towards this scene. This could be an oblique reference to the foundation myth of the Athenian Acropolis, and the competition between Athena and Poseidon, but the exact meaning is unclear. The whole painting is set within a golden frame, the top of which is inscribed with the words ‘Pallas Athena’, and upon whose sides Klimt has included some mock-Greek patterns. Klimt’s recreation of the Athena Parthenos is not a simple reconstruction of an ancient statue. While in some ways his painting is a reworking of that statue, it is also the goddess herself. His Athena is a flesh-­and-blood woman, albeit invested with a divine power that shines through in the power of her victorious gaze. Moreover, he has reinvented Athena in other ways too. The most salient of these is probably the winged Nike that Phidias’ statue had held in its hands. He has preserved the overall form of a statuette of a woman, and following convention for a Nike stands her upon a globe, which Athena holds in her hand. But beyond this he has completely reinvented her. Instead of a statue of a (clothed) winged victory, we have the figure of a naked red-­haired woman, who stands with her arms boldly outstretched and her head tilted back as she faces up towards the sky apparently in a state of ecstatic inspiration. The motif of the red-­ haired female nude is not unique to this painting, as it appears frequently in Klimt’s work from this time onwards, the most important example perhaps being his Nuda Veritas (1899) which – with great controversy at the time – had depicted a red-­haired female nude in full frontal nudity, her pubic hair on prominent display. But the inclusion of a version of this figure as a Nike in his Pallas Athene is a completely original reception of the classical goddess. Why did Klimt choose to depict Athena in this way, and what is the meaning of the nude female that has replaced the Nike? In the intervening years since his Taormina’s Theatre and The Girl from Tanagra, Klimt’s transformations of the classical have become much freer and much more individual. But we also see in Pallas Athene the extent to which a classical goddess has become a vehicle for a programmatic statement by the artist about his art. Klimt’s deliberately controversial use of full-­frontal female nudes was intended as a statement about what art should be about; that it should be bold and uncompromising, showing humanity and its passions as they actually are, free of the sort of conservative restraint propagated by the outmoded and conservative Viennese artistic

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establishment that he so despised. As Levy (1996: 53–4) puts it, the presence of the nude is ‘in keeping with his shift from a “liberal” outlook to a subjective anti-­ rational one’. The painting was exhibited in the second exhibition of the Viennese Secession (26 March–15 June 1898) in the Secession building. This context is indicative of the fact that by this time Athena had come to be a mythological mascot for the artistic ideals of that movement. Her bold youth, her conviction and her triumph over the forces of darkness (including her mythological role in helping defeat the giants), had become something of a beacon for the artists in what they saw as their own struggle. Moreover, as Néret (2011: 30) points out, as Klimt was not working to a patron’s commission in this painting, his choice of subject matter is much freer.4 It is unsurprising then to see Klimt using as his Nike a naked woman. The erotic – the key driver of all his art – has found its fair expression in the allegorical victory that the Secession considers itself to be winning against the old artistic order. His Athena becomes a subtle way of communicating that message, where the reinvented language of classical art is the vehicle for the new. Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 88) are right to call this work: ‘One of the first examples of Klimt’s fully pronounced Secession style’.5 Given the proximity of the Munich and Vienna Secessions, and of the artist Franz von Stuck to the latter, it seems natural that we should find him painting the very same theme as Klimt. From the same year, his Pallas Athene6 (1898) is another flesh-­and-blood Athena. The colour scheme here though is almost the inverse. Instead of a gold Athena on a black background, we have a black Athena on a gold background. But like Klimt’s version, we see only her upper body and no more. Somewhat less stern, and a little more human, she looks out at us, again with a full-­on stare but this time more the kind protector than the goddess of arbitrary power, the edges of her mouth curling upwards into a smile. This time, true to the ancient sculpture in a way Klimt’s Athena is not, she wears the tri-­ pronged crown on her head that Roman marble imitations of Phidias’ statue attest to. Klimt has topped these with red plumes, to match the red of her mouth, and the spear that she holds in her right hand. Her long dark curly hair flows out from under her crown onto her chest. On her breastplate we see again the trademark head of the gorgon, and this time she holds a far more conventional Nike, black too and apparently made of bronze, in her left hand. What can we say of the differences between these two Secessionist ideals of Athena? First, each woman is the artist’s respective ideal, as we see in their other works. For Klimt, this is the red-­headed femme fatale, brimming with an ineluctable power. For Stuck, it is the dark-­haired, dark-­eyed, sultry Italian beauty. Each has constructed the goddess as she came most naturally to them,

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and as each understood the ideal of their own art, just as if she had appeared to them in a vision shared by no-­one else, but in neither case is it true to say that the goddess is a sexual icon here. This is worth remarking upon only because women are so consistently sexual icons in the work of both artists, and the reason for this must be that she represents something else, their artistic craft and vocation itself, for which she is the protective deity. That is not to say that the erotic is absent. As we have discussed, for Klimt it is present in the form of the Nike as a symbol of his art, but it is clear that Athena herself has come to represent an artistic ideal here that has some significance beyond the carnal alone – this being consistent with her generally de-­sexualized representation in antiquity. Both Athena and Nike seem to share some higher awareness that we do not. And yet, although we do not wholly understand the meaning of their gaze, we know we cannot avoid its power. There is almost a sense here that we, together with Klimt, Stuck and all their comrades in art, are being summoned by that gaze. Summoned to some great deed. And we know deep down that that is art itself. We also find this ideal of Athena outside of Germany and Austria, where we see it appearing for example in the work of Bohemian artists too, in a derivative form. Preisler completed a cover for the eleventh edition of Volné Směry in 1899 which strongly shows the influence of the creations of the German and Austrian Secessions.7 In his drawing we see a giant Athena looking down upon a much smaller man who has raised his hands towards her in a gesture of supplication. Preisler’s Athena is simpler than those of Klimt and Stuck, wearing only a black robe, but she wears her helmet on her dark hair and in her left hand she still holds a spear, making her immediately identifiable as the goddess. The man supplicating her turns away from us but we can make out his reverential expression as he looks up at the goddess. Athena’s presence is imposing, filling much of the cover design, but her expression as she looks down at the man is one of compassion. In his volume on the artist Žákavec (1921: 10) spoke of the ambiguous combination of woman and the ‘greatness and severity of art itself ’ in this drawing, to which the artist is drawn by a combination of desire and desperation.8 Although a very different design, and less a direct reception of Phidias’ statue as what had apparently become a more generalized Secessionist conception of the goddess, Preisler’s portrayal of Athena is likewise that of a protective deity for the arts. The context of this being used for the cover design of a journal dedicated to modern art is also significant in that it reveals that this ideal of Athena had already become widespread by the end of the century. Nor is this an isolated example; another prominent Czech artist of the time, Maximilián Pirner (1854–1924), completed a work entitled Head of

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Pallas – Art Historical Fable9 (1895) which engages with a similar conception of the goddess. For all the seriousness of the way that these artists reverenced Athena, one example demonstrates that she was not beyond satire. In his Quer Sacrum, Organ der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Irrlands10 (1899), the Austrian artist Bertold Löffler (1874–1960) created his own mock version of a Pallas Athena allegory. He was one of the artists of the Vienna Secession, having worked under Carl Otto Czeschka and Koloman Moser (1868–1918), then as a freelance illustrator contributing amongst other things to Ver Sacrum and to Gerlach and Schenk’s Allegories and Emblems new series. He created his satirical illustration as a student joke for the Vienna Spring Festivals, which that year included a ‘Secession Village’ located in the Rotunde (a large steel building constructed to host the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition). As its title indicates, the illustration satirized Ver Sacrum, substituting Austria for an imagined ‘Error-­land’. Löffler’s illustration plays with the conventional attributes of Art Nouveau’s reception of the goddess that we have seen employed by Klimt, Stuck and Preisler. His Athena wears a hoplite helmet, from under which her hair flows, and a breastplate complete with gorgon (this time, after the fashion of its classical precedents, rudely sticking its tongue out at us!). But rather than beaming with an expression of divine determination or serenity, she instead looks afraid, as if terrified at what the artists of Error-Land are going to do next. And instead of holding a Nike in her hand, she has something rather different. The globe is there, but sitting on top of it we see a statuette of one of the mischievous art students of Error-Land. An eccentric figure in a three-­piece suit and a pointy hat, he is crowned by a sort of halo, and carries a mixing palette and brush in his hands. Clearly a bit of a jibe at the expense of the occasional pomposity of the Vienna Secession, it nonetheless betrays how well-­known its reception of the Athena Parthenos had become by this time. Athena’s role as protective deity of Art Nouveau was sufficiently established, in central Europe at least, to be ridiculed as such. It doubtless hints a little too at the way Klimt had used Nike in his own portrayal of Athena as a means of expressing what the art of the Secession was supposed to be about. Löffler, for his part at least, may have had a slightly different understanding of what that was.11 Art Nouveau’s interest in the heroic and youthful potential of classical mythology did not stop at the two goddesses discussed. Classical literature was also a catalogue of the heroic deeds of the great men and women of the golden age. Some of these stories, such as that of Hercules, had been practically done to death by the time that the 1890s came along. Since the discovery of the Farnese

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Hercules in the Renaissance, his story had been a favourite of neoclassical artists. The same was true of a number of other classical heroes and heroines, either directly inspired by ancient art depicting them or, more commonly, as a result of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other classical poetry. Art Nouveau took a new look at some of these figures, and in so doing its artists widened their classical repertoire further in the search for new mythological archetypes for the emotional and psychological states that increasingly became their main interest. To help us get a better idea of the sort of mind-­set with which artists approached classical heroes and heroines, we might turn to an illustration by the Vienna and Munich painter Irma von Dutczynska (1869–1932). In her Der Suchende12 (1903), a design for the Ver Sacrum edition of 1903, Dutczynska created an image that characterizes an Art Nouveau view of the classical world as essentially youthful and heroic. It is a simple image, completed in only black and yellow ink and white where the page has been left uncoloured, and depicts a naked athletic youth standing on an open plain. With one foot forward he raises his right hand to shield his eyes as he looks out into the distance searching for something (as the title suggests), presumably his quarry, while in his left hand he holds a spear. In the background on a hilltop we see a Greek temple, as an indicator that we are in the heroic world of ancient Greece. A strong sun shines on the plain and on the body of the youth, as we see from its stark shading, and by the shadow that he casts. This small scene is framed by two Doric columns supporting a mock entablature, on which the words ‘Ex libris’ are inscribed, and a base below with a Latin inscription and mark of the Loeb classical library, indicating the intended use of the design. There is an implicit idea here both of classical learning as in some way inherently noble, and of a bright and bold Greek ideal of youth. All of the Art Nouveau depictions of heroes and heroines that we look at in this chapter are really shades of this ideal. Turning now to Belgium for a further example, one Art Nouveau architect who incorporated a heroic and classicizing ideal into his work in a prominent way was Paul Hankar (1859–1901). In his Hôtel Ciamberlani13 (1897) (Fig. 11), built for the mother of Albert Ciamberlani (1864–1956), a Symbolist painter with whom he collaborated on the project, he includes a series of seven sgraffito medallions in the upper register of the building with scenes of animals and certain of the labours of Hercules. These were designed by Ciamberlani and executed by the Belgian sgraffito artist, Adolphe Crespin (1859–1944). The building is novel in many of its features, as was typical of the sort of Art Nouveau architecture that was being constructed in the Ixelles quarter of Brussels at this

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Fig. 11  Paul Hankar, Hôtel Ciamberlani, Brussels (detail).

time, and incorporates new elements such as horseshoe arch windows. It also captures that irregularity of design between individual features of the construction so sought after by contemporary architects, following the original inspiration of the White House in Tite Street, London, built by Edward Godwin (1833–86) for Whistler in the 1870s. Masini (1984: 106) speaks of the late Renaissance revivalism we see in Hankar’s work, and of the ‘mixture of ornate surface decoration and near symmetry in the overall design’ of the Hôtel Ciamberlani. A major feature of that design is this surface decoration. We have already seen something similar in Paul Cauchie’s house, also in the Ixelles quarter of Brussels. Hankar’s design here includes an elaborate sgraffito mural on the second floor façade, featuring an idealized scene of the ages of man from childhood to old age centred on a great symbolic tree with two peacocks, and the upper register’s sunflower and medallion frieze. Of the twelve labours of Hercules in the medallion frieze, we can make out perhaps three: the Cretan bull (second-­to-left medallion), the Stymphalian birds (third-­to-left medallion) and Diomedes’ man-­eating horses (third-­to-right medallion). The other scenes feature fighting animals or hunting scenes. Each of the scenes in the medallions is full of movement, which lends the whole frieze a very dynamic feel. Indeed, the style of the figures and the general compositional

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approach is strongly reminiscent of Roman mosaic hunting scenes,14 many of which feature very similar designs – both of men hunting animals and animals hunting one another – although it is unclear whether this was Ciamberlani’s exact inspiration. Completed in an elegant colour scheme of russet brown, cream and golden tones, the frieze, as too the sgraffito completed by Ciamberlani himself for the second-­floor ages-­of-man design, is full of life. Here we are looking again at an Art Nouveau valorization of the virtues of youth. It is perhaps unsurprising that in the second-­floor design Ciamberlani has relegated old age to a corner of the composition, focusing instead on childhood, flowers, industry (a young man kindling fire from wood) and eternal love (the peacocks). The presence of the hero Hercules and the animals in the frieze above is part of the same narrative about youth, in this case its athletic and muscular qualities. Hercules had long functioned in art as an allegory of the virtuous struggle of man against all adversity. Something of this idea is also present here, but Ciamberlani – as we would expect of an Art Nouveau artist – is above all interested in movement and its compositional potential where Hercules, as a paragon of the athlete, captures these qualities in his labours. Moreover, given that this frieze was intended to be seen from street level, rather than up close as we may choose to examine it today, it is the dynamic movement of the medallion scenes that are their most important characteristic. A very different take on Hercules can be found in a painting by Malczewski, Hercules at the Crossroads15 (1920). Malczewski returns to a conventional artistic trope in showing the classical hero faced with the choice between virtue and vice. This had been a favourite theme of neoclassical art, where the hero ultimately makes the choice for virtue. In the painting we see Hercules, dressed in a medieval suit of armour, standing on a road beside a lake in an unspectacular Polish landscape. We can make out a church in the distance and some other figures behind him on the road. Beside Hercules are two women, who appear to half embrace. One of these, nearest to him but facing away from him towards the other woman, is dressed colourfully in blue and red, with ribbons in her blond hair. She appears to be whispering something flirtatiously to the other woman who, dressed by contrast in a long white robe and bearing a large satchel on her back, has a sad expression and downcast gaze. But on top of her headdress, to shield her from the sun, a golden ribbon is bound, perhaps a symbol of her true value as an allegory of virtue, while the other woman appears to be an allegory of vice. Hercules has physically and morally arrived at a crossroads, represented by the choice between the two women. Helmet in hand, he deliberates upon that choice.

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There are three levels at which this painting can be analysed: artistic convention, the personal, and the national. As ever in Malczewski’s Symbolist painting, these meanings may overlap in complex ways. As mentioned, the painting is at one level not unlike earlier artistic representations of the allegorical choice of Hercules between virtue and vice and, as some artists before his time had done, he makes his Hercules more modern (in this case medieval, as per Malczewski’s usual dislocation of time and period in his paintings). At a personal level, we may wonder about the degree to which Malczewski applies this allegory to himself here. This is reinforced by the presence of his beloved Maria Balowa as the allegory of virtue. We have discussed in a previous chapter how she was his primary muse, and we will meet her again. It is unclear who the other woman is, and whether she is someone identifiable in Malczewski’s own life, but it is significant to see Maria imagined as a symbolic opposite to this anti-­ideal of vice. Yet, unusually, Malczewski does not portray himself as Hercules, this being one of the rare occasions when he does not insert himself into such an allegory. This can be explained by the third layer of meaning in this painting, the national. Hercules is identifiable as Aleksander Wielopolski (1803–77), a Polish aristocrat. Wielopolski was a conservative, pro-Russian politician, who had been a proponent of Poland’s pre-1830 autonomy and saw the way forward for Poland’s national ambitions in constructive engagement with the Russian government to extract concessions, while falling short of supporting Poland’s full-­fledged independence – a stance which ultimately led to his flight from the country during the 1863 Polish January Uprising. As we explore in a later chapter, for Malczewski, a fierce Polish patriot, he would have been an historical figure with an ambiguous legacy. By portraying him as Hercules the artist transforms the conventional reception of this theme in art into both a moral and national choice, while at the same time – as ever in his work – introducing a personal dimension too. This example shows how flexibly Art Nouveau artists could engage with such an artistically overdone motif as Hercules’ choice between virtue and vice, and make it their own. Returning now to the Vienna Secession, we see the appeal of other heroes too as allegories for the art of this movement. In the monstrous Minotaur, and Theseus’ heroic slaying of it for the good of his people, Secessionist artists had a ready-­made metaphor for their own artistic struggle. For their first exhibition in 1898, Klimt created a poster which used this theme in such an allegory.16 Using Art Nouveau’s new sense of spatial composition for graphic art, much of the central portion of the poster is left blank. Save for the colour figure of Athena, who appears in profile to the right of the poster (complete with conventional

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attributes of helmet, spear and gorgon – this time emblazoned on her shield). In the upper portion of the poster, upon which the goddess looks in watchful oversight, we see Theseus battling with the Minotaur. The muscular hero has pinned the Minotaur, a human figure except for its bull’s head and tail, to the ground and is about to deliver the coup-­de-grâce with his sword. The Minotaur struggles to fight back, but faced with the power of the hero, and his patron goddess who seems to inspire his strength through her gaze, we know that the monster is doomed. Decorative lettering in the lower portion of the poster announces the advent of the first exhibition, while the scene of Theseus and the Minotaur is simply described as such together with the title of Ver Sacrum alongside. We are left to infer the significance of the theme. Once again Klimt successfully managed to court controversy in this work by including Theseus’ genitalia. Ultimately, Viennese officials were able to force Klimt to censure the poster by removing the genitalia and in a later version he includes the shadow of some trees to cover the space where they had been. Despite this controversy, the first exhibition itself was a great success, drawing 56,000 visitors and leading to sales worth 85,000 guilden. As Kossatz and Koschatzky (1974: 29) put it, this poster was very clearly ‘intended to symbolize the battle between the Künstlerhaus and the Secession’. But we should not imagine the struggling Impressionist painters of Montmartre of a generation earlier. It is clear that from its inception, Klimt’s approach, and the interest he was thereby courting from a wealthy public, was paying off financially. It is an open question whether it is correct to refer to the Vienna Secession’s art as truly anti-­establishment. After all, the artists of the Secession soon found wealthy patrons, but it was certainly anti-­art establishment – or more specifically, antiKünstlerhaus. However, it is significant that in making one of the Secession’s first public statements of artistic intent, in the poster for their first exhibition, Klimt chooses to express this allegorically through classical myth. In a sense, by choosing a theme with a classical hero, Klimt is aggressively moving into the art establishment’s own territory, and throwing down the gauntlet by showing how different classicism could be. Moving now to Britain, we also find one of the most important artists for this study – Beardsley – similarly revolutionizing the reception of classical heroes and heroines. Beardsley’s transformations of the classics, while heavily inspired by those of earlier art (and by classical art directly), are utterly original and deeply personal, and we encounter multiple examples in this book. Perseus17 (1890–8) is, for example, Beardsley’s modern take on a classical hero. Bucking convention, his is the mauve hero of the fin-­de-siècle projected back onto

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classical myth. Beardsley’s illustration retains the basic elements of the myth – the severed head of the Medusa with its snake locks, his polished shield and the hero’s averted gaze – and also gives his Perseus the physique and contrapposto stance of a Greek statue. But beyond this the image has little to do with its more conventional neoclassical predecessors. Beardsley is still very much working in the style in which he completed his illustrations for Thomas Malory’s (c. 1415– 71) Morte d’Arthur (1485): Perseus stands in a dark forest, with branch, leaf and briar growing thickly around him. The flowing and coiling movement of root and branch throughout the drawing has a strongly medievalist feel (its lower portion, in which Beardsley has included a banner with the work’s title ‘Perseus’, even employs snake coils in the decorative manner of a medieval manuscript). The heavy use of ink and attention to minutiae (Perseus’ flowing locks are each meticulously drawn) has a very unclassical feel. In its upper portion, Beardsley also includes a scene showing Medusa before her head was cut off, her long snake hair spreading out around her, and crouching figures on either side who have been petrified.18 Although not as blatant in its meaning as Klimt’s Theseus, Beardsley’s very contemporary-­looking Perseus may also implicitly hint at a feeling of being stifled by artistic convention. We can easily imagine what the idea of Medusa – with her stultifying gaze, depriving the onlooker of movement and life – could be imagined as having in common with the sort of art that Beardsley and others were trying to move away from. Beardsley, as Klimt, faced criticism from some quarters for the erotic quality of his art, which we will explore in more detail in a later chapter. But more so than Klimt ever managed, Beardsley was able to create simple designs which project a certain heroic quality (and which also have far more in common with actual classical art). Nor is the erotic always a quality of Beardsley’s art. This is apparent in his classical heroines, something we can explore in two of his takes on the myth of Atalanta, the persecuted and proud huntress of classical myth, both from 1896.19 In his Atalanta in Calydon, Beardsley gives us an idealized view of the heroine as she strides through the wilderness on the hunt. Wearing a short tunic, a bow in her hand and quiver strung over her shoulder, she is tall with dark hair, her locks tied together in front of her on her chest. She seems at once both delicate and strong, as we see her in profile looking out ahead either at her prey or at some impeding danger. She walks barefoot through grass where flowers spring about her. In the far distance, we see trees and mountains. The drawing was intended for publication in the ill-­fated fifth volume of the Yellow Book, and likely draws its inspiration from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s (1837–1909) poem Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a work

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steeped in the classics, and above all in Ovid.20 In one passage, Swinburne evokes the coming of springtime by describing Atalanta in the spring landscape: ‘Maiden most perfect, lady of light’. In his Atalanta in Calydon with the Hound the heroine is again out on the hunt, wearing a short tunic and with a bow in her hand, this time accompanied by her hunting dog. Yet, this Atalanta has now become a lot less classical and a lot more Rococo (arguably Beardsley’s favourite artistic epoch, at least for costume) in her general appearance. In this version, she wears a flamboyant hat on her head, sporting a large plume, while her tunic now has frills on its edges, and rather than being barefoot she wears plush boots. The dog is also rather well-­dressed, with its own patterned jacket. Both these drawings are highly idiosyncratic transformations of a classical heroine, and in the latter Beardsley certainly indulges his highly fertile imagination for costume design. However, in its conception the first betrays much of the idealized noble images of youth that we see in ancient Greek vase painting, particularly that of Attic funerary white-­ground lekythos vases. And the second, while its subject matter may seem quite different on the surface, shows in its simple outline drawing and plain background a similar inspiration. Above all in the first, but also to a lesser extent in the second, Beardsley demonstrates his appreciation for the heroic qualities of classical myth and art and shows an ability to draw on this creatively in his own work. As Sutton (2002: 178) points out, the indebtedness of these works to Greek vase painting can be traced to the artist’s studies in the British Museum a few years earlier in 1894. So far here we have looked only at the individual stories of the mortal heroes and heroines of classical mythology. In general, Art Nouveau artists were not as interested as their predecessors had been in classical epic, the heroic deeds of the Trojan War and the romantic wanderings of Odysseus. But there is one very big exception to this rule in the form of the Polish artist and playwright Wyspiański. Wyspiański’s engagement with Homer was a deep one. Indeed, his fascination with the Bard was so intense and prolonged that it merits a short overview, before we look at an example of how he used the heroes of Homer’s Iliad in his art. The son of a minor sculptor from Krakow who became both a playwright and artist in several different media, much of his work was nationally-­oriented as a result of his involvement in the Young Poland movement (we will explore this in more detail in a later chapter). But from an early age the classics were arguably as great an – if not a greater – inspiration on both his literary and artistic output. As early as 1885 he was making his own translations of both Homer and Virgil, later pursuing his classical interests during three study visits

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to Paris. A number of the plays that he wrote are on subjects drawn from classical myth, including his Meleager (1899), Protesilaus and Laodamia (1899), Achilliad (1903), Acropolis (1904) and The Return of Odysseus (1907), the latter intended as part of a trilogy he never finished on the life of the Homeric hero. Although only one of these plays was ever actually staged in his lifetime (Protesilaus and Laodamia in Krakow in 1903), a number of his wider repertoire of non-Greek plays either borrow structural elements from Attic drama (for example his use of the chorus) or include classical figures as allegorical personages in plays on non-­ classical themes (for example the gods Hermes, Ares and Demeter in his play November Night (1904) about the Polish November Uprising, or Hestia in The Wedding (1901), or characters drawn from Roman history, such as Brutus and ‘Demos’ in his The Legion, which deals with Polish history around 1848). Terlecki (1983: 6, 115) highlights how the Galician High School attended by Wyspiański did much to foster this interest in classical literature (mainly Homer and Attic tragedy), as did the mediation of French drama and the classically-­ oriented milieu of the Parnassian poets, which he encountered during his stays in Paris. Of Homer’s Iliad he wrote in a letter in 1896: What a marvellous work! [. . .] what colossi of nobility and greatness. I adored and still adore the heroes of Corneille, but how extraordinarily great is Achilles.21

This seems to have been combined with a fascination for Greek sculpture too. He further wrote: Greece is now the ideal for me – nothing attracts me more than Greece, nothing enchants me more than Greek sculpture . . . Greece is truly becoming the queen of my dreams.22

During his stay in Paris he went to see Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex four times, so fascinated was the artist by the ancient drama, writing that: ‘There is only one absolutely marvellous drama in the world and that is Oedipus Rex’.23 Yet when we turn to Wyspiański’s plays we see that for the artist this was not simply a matter of copying ancient drama, either in form or in subject matter. Instead we see him genuinely transforming ancient epic in his work. In this way, his The Return of Odysseus not only converts the epic form to a dramatic one, but also (as others had done before him, notably Dante) completely reinvents Odysseus’ story – and indeed, his whole personality. Instead of a homecoming to Ithaca in which he slays the suitors and is happily reunited with his wife and son, a scene ensues in which Odysseus, in a fit of psychological despair, forces himself again into self-­ imposed exile. Moreover, in his other plays, classical heroes and heroines, gods

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and goddesses, are freely re-­invented to suit the needs of his nationally-­oriented dramas. A certain free and individual transformation of classical epic and myth is also a marked quality of his visual art, of which we encounter multiple examples in this book. Indeed, his re-­imaginings of Homer are a potent illustration of the inherent variety and flexibility of epic and myth. One important example of this dynamic are his illustrations to Lucjan Rydel’s (1870–1918) translation of the Iliad24 (1896–8). Rydel, the Polish playwright and poet of the Young Poland movement and close confederate of the artist, had commissioned Wyspiański to illustrate the first book of the Iliad when he began translating it in 1897. Ultimately, Rydel was slow in completing his translation, so the artist instead published the fifteen drawings that he had completed with an 1846 poetic paraphrase of Homer’s epic by the Polish romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809– 1849). The black-­and-white illustrations have an idiosyncratic character, being in some ways reminiscent of the drawings of William Blake. One of the ways in which Wyspiański brings his personal stamp to the Iliad is by picturing some of the deeply emotional states of Homer’s protagonists. The illustrations, which depict the full range of Homer’s characters, including Achilles, Agamemnon, Apollo, Thetis, Zeus and many others, are all very psychological in character. In this way in one scene showing Achilles and Thetis, we see the hero’s mother, her feet in the waves of the ocean, imploring her son, who is sitting with his knees drawn right up to his chest, his arms crossed and his hands clapped around his head, as he shows physically how he has completely withdrawn into himself. In all the illustrations, much as in Blake’s work, the dynamic movement of the figures is reinforced by the restive, at times frenetic, motion of the line drawing of ocean, earth and sky, or of the protagonists’ own costume or hair. Looking at one example in more detail, the Agamemnon illustration (Fig. 12), we see the king of the Mycenaeans and leader of the Greek alliance in his tent. He stands facing away from us but with his head in profile. His expression is stern and proud as he frowns at something or someone – likely Achilles – that has angered him. He has a black beard and his black hair is tied back behind him in a royal headdress. One of his powerful shoulders is bare and on his bicep and wrist he wears bracelets. Over his other shoulder a large patterned cape is slung and by his side we can see swords and a shield, behind which one of his companions – perhaps his brother Menelaus, looks out, his hair also bound with a similar headdress. Fixed onto the wooden columns and wall we see another great shield above Agamemnon’s head, and spears attached to this. On the shield, Wyspiański has let his imagination run wild – as he has done for Agamemnon’s

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Fig. 12  Stanisław Wyspiański, Agamemnon (from illustrations to the Iliad).

costume – in designing what he believes ancient Mycenaean armour might have looked like. Yet given the proximity of the design the artist has used here to actual bronze age Greek vase painting (principally the bulls and the swirling patterns, set in concentric circles), we may suspect that the artist had seen such examples of excavated pottery somewhere during his travels. An illustrative example to demonstrate this can be given in the form of a painted terracotta krater found in Mycenae25 (Fig. 13). As Terlecki (1983: 130) rightly points out, Wyspiański’s illustrations occupy ‘a special place in the history of the Iliad’s reception’. The Agamemnon illustration gives us an example both of how an Art Nouveau artist could be deeply engaged with classical literary subject matter, seeking to bring this alive through the new stylistic potential of Art Nouveau, while simultaneously drawing on the legacy of classical art itself to bring their ancient text to life. Stylistically, the artist’s design is a marrying of Art Nouveau and ancient Mycenaean design, albeit as he imagined it. As is his use of ancient myth and drama in his plays, so too are Wyspiański’s transformations of the heroes of classical epic in his illustrations for the Iliad completely original, and unprecedented in the reception of Homer.

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Fig. 13  Mycenaean terracotta krater.

Turning away from Wyspiański for the moment (we will return to him in another chapter) and his reception of Homer, in the last part of this chapter we will look at how Art Nouveau artists found models for their artistic rebellion in classical myth. We have already seen how they could valorize a number of classical heroes and heroines for the ideals that they represented, sometimes using them as allegories for their own artistic production. Here we are more concerned with how they quarried classical myth for figures that prefigured their artistic struggle to free themselves from the Academic art that was their starting point. This meant a return to some familiar personalities from classical myth, but approached in a new way. Before we turn to looking at concrete examples of this dynamic, we should return to Aubrey Beardsley and one of his works which shows how versatile and personal artistic engagement with a classical paradigm could be in the 1890s and the role that classical art could be made to play in that process. Beardsley’s illustration also embodies (literally) at a personal level much of that spirit of rebellion that was characteristic of art in the 1890s. Beardsley’s ink drawing simply entitled A Footnote26 (1896) is a self-­portrait of the artist. He stands in a field beside some trees – apparently part of an estate

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somewhere – dressed as if he were taking an afternoon walk (with a few frills added to his outfit for good measure). He has caricatured himself, making his ears exaggeratedly large, and included his trademark straight centre-­parted hair. However, the most curious feature of this simple drawing is that his feet are tied by a rope to a sort of classical herm, which stands a few feet away in the background. This appears to be the muscular upper torso of Pan, or of a satyr, who is turned away from Beardsley, facing into the distance behind him. Walker (1967: 72) has interpreted this illustration as ‘a self portrait in which the artist has fatefully bound himself to the god of Nature’. The meaning of his being so bound is certainly ambiguous. Could this be a reference to Beardsley being unable to escape the sort of carnal fantasies that seem to dominate a large part of his work (and of which he appears to have repented in later life)? Or alternatively, given the increasingly poor state of Beardsley’s health and his inevitable awareness of the impending death that awaited him a few years later, is this a reflection upon his own mortality? Both are possible explanations, but Beardsley is undoubtedly expressing a certain frustration here with his lot – reflected in his devious sidelong glance – and with something related to nature, or with his own nature, from which he knows he cannot escape but is perhaps trying to nonetheless. Whatever the exact identity of the herm, and we will encounter it again elsewhere in Art Nouveau in relation to the symbolism of sexual desire, Beardsley chooses to use classical iconography as a means to express a highly personal reflection on the nature of his fate. This idea of frustration with oneself or with one’s fate is commonplace to the movement, as indeed it is to much fin-­ de-siècle art in general. One figure from classical myth for whom Art Nouveau artists had a lot of sympathy was Prometheus. The primal myth of the titan had a natural appeal to them. After all, Prometheus had created humanity and then chosen to help it by stealing celestial fire and making a gift of it to mankind. It was a bit of a drawback being caught by Zeus and then being chained to the Caucasus Mountains and having his innards gnawed by an eagle every day for all eternity. Or at least until Hercules appeared to rescue him, a sort of vindication for his kindness from that paragon of mankind. And why should mankind not be liberated of its blighted darkness of ignorance? In this narrative, we hear the ring of the progressive narratives of the fin-­de-siècle, something which is no coincidence. Art Nouveau was a style which embraced modernity, a major reason for which was its adherents’ firm belief that technology would ultimately be of benefit to mankind. This was reflected in their exploration of new technology in their own art (examples of which we have discussed in earlier chapters). In Prometheus, they

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found a classical prefiguring of mankind’s desire to be free of the night of ignorance and to embrace the modern, which they firmly believed was something bright and beautiful. We must see this in the context of the optimism of the 1890s. There had been other new artistic movements in the second half of the nineteenth century that had developed more reactionary tendencies. Most notably Pre-Raphaelitism, with its flight to medievalism from an industrial present it deeply distrusted, had meted out a different path for its followers, but Art Nouveau’s thrust was predominantly in the opposite direction. As a result, Prometheus’ rebellion is conceived of as a liberating force, and his unhappy plight is represented in sympathetic terms. The Polish sculptor Xawery Dunikowski’s (1875–1964) Prometheus27 (c. 1900) is an interesting and original departure from neoclassical depictions of Prometheus and his cruel punishment. As Olszewski (1989: 22) points out: ‘Dunikowski broke the mythological iconographic convention by imparting the vulture’s role to another man who tears at the body of the hero falling into the abyss’. His sculpture, which does not show the full body of the titan but instead only his upper torso, upended as he falls, shows Prometheus’ face writhing in agony as another figure crouches over his belly apparently consuming his insides. In departing from the artistic convention of showing the eagle as gnawing at Prometheus’ innards, the artist makes his fate still more cruel and bizarre than it already was. Dunikowski has invested a certain amount of feeling in this work, and we are left feeling rather sorry for Prometheus. Olszewski describes such sculptures of Dunikowski as ‘generalizations of man’s destiny since their principal hero is a man whose somewhat deformed shape, effaced in details, enhances their power of expression’. This is a sculpture that makes a strong impression and we are left wondering what its exact meaning may be, or what suffering of man Dunikowski is referencing here. Szubert (1995: 56) has argued that the sculpture has a more personal significance and that it can be read ‘as a vision of the fate of the artist’. Whatever interpretation is favoured, we have a clear example in this work of how Prometheus could be transformed into a vehicle for expressing truths about mankind and his destiny. Another artist who shows a repeated interest in the expressive potential of Prometheus is the Czech František Kupka (1871–1957). His Prometheus Blue and Red28 (1908–10) is characteristic of his creative transformations of classical themes. Completed in bright blue and red colours, his watercolour presents us simply with the naked figure of Prometheus, who stands squarely on his two feet in a landscape surrounded by plants. He is heroically muscular, as we would expect a titan to look, his long blond hair flowing out behind him, and sporting

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a blond beard. Kupka has brightened his eyes with green highlights and the red and blue of his body is complemented with flecks of gold. This Prometheus almost seems to be on fire and indeed behind him we see golden waves rising as a reference to the gift of fire that he has brought to mankind. Yet somehow he seems to blaze benevolently, bringing life to everything around him (the plants almost seem to bend to his presence, sprouting colourful flowers everywhere). This is the ultimate idealized Prometheus of Art Nouveau as creator and helper of mankind. Kupka is making him stand as a symbol of the great ideals of the art that he espoused. Prometheus was clearly an idol for the artist, and we find him returning again to his story in his illustrations for an edition of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound in 1911, which included thirty-­six etchings and aquatints.29 But at the turn of the century, Prometheus equally gained a wide appeal among artists for the external expression his story gave to anxiety about a new age. Many Symbolist artists also picked up on the theme, using it as a vehicle for their psychological allegories. One prominent example is Klinger. In his Brahms Fantasy, he includes an illustration entitled Prometheus Freed30 (1894). The Brahms Fantasy illustrates Johannes Brahms’ Song of Destiny (1871), an orchestrally-­accompanied choral setting of Friedrich Hölderlin’s (1770–1843) Hyperions Schicksalslied (‘Hyperion’s Song of Fate’) from Hölderlin’s unfinished novel Hyperion (1797). In Klinger’s engraving we see Prometheus just after he has been freed from the rock to which he was tied, with Hercules standing by his side. The naked Prometheus sits on the rock, bent over with his head in his hands, apparently still traumatized by the experience of his punishment. Hercules, also naked, stands by patiently, still holding the scythe he has just used to free Prometheus, while down in the ocean below sea tritons sport in the waves while they too look up at the titan. In the distance, we see the peaks of the Caucasus against an icy sky. As ever, Klinger’s symbolism is very complex, but Frisch (2005: 105) offers the following interpretation: The import of Klinger’s freed Prometheus is similar to that of Brahms’s postlude: for Brahms as for Klinger there is no simple return. Time, experience, life move forward. Resolution does not imply recapitulation.

As Dunikowski had, Klinger makes Prometheus a symbol of human experience and human suffering. Frisch (2005: 106) additionally supports a theory which sees Klinger as having included a self-­portrait in this drawing in the figure of Prometheus. As he points out, the other depictions of Prometheus in the Brahms Fantasy bear little resemblance to either the Prometheus of this illustration, or to

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Klinger’s own physiognomy. If the Prometheus in this illustration is a self-­ portrait, this would reinforce the sense we already have of the very personal way in which the artists of the fin-­de-siècle transformed Prometheus. Again, we have a very high degree of empathy for the titan that went against the wishes of the omnipotent father of the gods to do what he thought was necessary for the advancement of mankind. In the depictions of Prometheus we have looked at in this chapter there is no explicit parallel drawn between the titan’s struggle and that of artists against the art establishment. However, we can at least see why they might have valorized his struggle to such a great degree and why they found value in reviving this classical myth.31 In this chapter, we have examined why the heroic qualities of figures drawn from individual classical myths, Homeric epic and the myth of Prometheus appealed to Art Nouveau artists, how they transformed these in their allegories, and how often these transformations could acquire individual personal or artistic meanings. Most Art Nouveau receptions of heroic figures from classical mythology are, however, really a subset of its reception of an ideal of classical youth. To complete this picture, in the next chapter we look at the other side of this reception, Art Nouveau’s interest in the bloom of youth.

4

Bloom When we talk about beauty in Art Nouveau, we are most often also talking about youth and vitality, and it is for this reason that the title of this chapter has been chosen. Nor is the floral metaphor accidental; Art Nouveau’s concept of the beautiful was also something overwhelmingly associated with nature. Nature, and all things floral, gradually became a metaphor for life itself, or at least for the vital and youthful conception of it that many Art Nouveau artists valued. In the previous chapter, we saw one classical expression of that vitality in its adoration of the heroic qualities of classical myth. This chapter’s exploration of Art Nouveau’s favourite classical allegories of efflorescence is really another side to this same interest in all that was vital, and all that was young. In this book, we will not discuss Art Nouveau’s imaginings of nature in a separate chapter, and there is a good reason for this. For its artists, nature was something inherently beautiful, something inherently noble. In a certain sense, it was beauty. Hence the proliferation of natural forms in everything from the glasswork of Tiffany and Lalique to the willowy female beauties of Klimt, Mucha and Toorop, who at times almost seem to grow as the trunks or branches of a tree. And one major artistic allegory that Art Nouveau artists inherited from their predecessors, but took very much further, was the seasons. We will begin this chapter then by looking at how the different seasons were imagined in Art Nouveau, and the meanings that were ascribed to them. What relationship does this bear to the classics? A significant one, given that artistic allegories of the seasons from the early Renaissance onwards were deeply inspired by classical literature and in some cases by classical art. That inspiration is not always directly obvious in Art Nouveau, but it often is. And in many cases, we are also dealing with the legacy of an intermediate artistic reception of a classical conception of the seasons, to which Art Nouveau is in turn responding. A key thing to realize at the outset, when we talk about Art Nouveau’s use of nature, is that we are not dealing with Impressionism. Allowing for the fact that Impressionism itself ultimately took many directions, at its heart there is a basic

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difference between its response to nature and that of Art Nouveau. While the Impressionists also sought beauty in nature, and wanted to capture its immediate effect on the senses – this being their great innovation – Art Nouveau was from the start about stylization. In this respect, they are much closer to the artists of the English Arts and Crafts movement. While they wanted to incorporate the forms of nature into their own designs, their primary interest in nature was as a foundation for the art that they were trying to create. In a word, to take what nature had provided and to improve upon it. In this sense, Art Nouveau is much closer to the spirit of classical art and architecture itself, which uses the forms of nature primarily for decorative purposes, where, for example, even in what little survives of Roman wall paintings of gardens the interest is primarily in how nature is arranged to maximize aesthetic pleasure. What is innovative about much Art Nouveau is that it directly subordinates the human figure to the forms of nature in a way that classical art and its derivatives rarely, if ever, did. In this way, the female figure may coil about the leafy stem of a lampshade, rather than the other way around. Art Nouveau also found in the classics a number of convenient allegories of the seasons that appealed to its aesthetic. These were closely linked to certain stock artistic metaphors which, while not entirely new to Art Nouveau, arguably found as great a place in the style as they had ever done in any other. One of these was that of the woman and the flower, popularized by the artists Eugène Grasset (1845–1917) and Mucha in their work. But while these two artists do not lean overly on the classics for their inspiration here, others found in classical mythological allegories for the spring and summer a rich source of inspiration. Spring and summer had long been conventional referents for beautiful youth, where Botticelli and others had revived what was originally a classical theme. As a result, the goddess Flora naturally became a favoured choice, and her image recurs in Art Nouveau design, representing vernal rejuvenation and the beauty of youth. In The Procession of Flora1 (1897), Elisabeth Sonrel (1874–1953) presents us with a very typical imagining of the classical goddess. Flora, a beautiful blond-­ haired young woman clad in a yellow robe and bedecked in flowers, walks through a spring landscape, a group of cherub-­like children leading her and carrying branches heavy with flowers. In her wake a long procession of similarly beautiful young women follow, led by three women immediately behind Flora, two of whom strum on harps and one of whom plays a violin. They too wear long robes and are adorned with flowers, as are all the other women behind them, stretching off into the distance. A cherry blossom is coming into flower above them and

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doves gather around the figure of Flora herself, who also has a halo. The procession appears to be following the course of a stream, and from the gentle light we may guess that it is morning or evening. Where the procession is heading is unclear, but the look of divine inspiration in Flora’s eyes as she progresses show that she is led inexorably onwards. As Mathews (1999: 155) aptly describes, the painting ‘is not a radical work’. For our purposes though, that is what makes it interesting, for it shows the survival of a lot of the conventional post-Renaissance artistic imagery of the goddess in Art Nouveau. The association of the flower, springtime, heavenly music (the harp), the beautiful young woman and children, continues to be a strong one. The painting bears the strong influence of English Pre-Raphaelitism, and in some respects we might consider this more a Pre-Raphaelite work. The procession of heavenly women is very reminiscent of Burne-Jones, even if they bear Sonrel’s individual stamp. Mathews also makes the link to other French artists such as Puvis de Chavannes – an artist who was heavily influenced by classical art – and describes Flora’s women as ‘neither sterile Classical bodies nor female phantoms’, but rather ‘embodied, functioning women’. These meanings may have been intended by Sonrel but, returning to the point made above, it is important to recall how theme is so often subordinate to form in Art Nouveau. In this way, Flora is more interesting to Sonrel for the decorative (and chromatic) potential of the flower in her painting, than she is for her mythological significance. It is important not to lose sight of what drives Art Nouveau’s interest in classical allegories of the seasons, for we see the same dynamic at work in the male artist Tiffany’s take on the same theme, The Blossoms of Spring (Flora)2 (1887–98), where the artist is again primarily interested in the chromatic and decorative potential of the goddess. This time she is instead an androgynous child, sitting in the midst of a woodland on a throne of flowers, as a procession of female children bring offerings of flowers to her. These all wear the Greek chiton and appear to age progressively the further back in the procession we go, until we reach two older women at the rear who wear heavier cloaks (indeed the final figure, in contrast to the nude or semi-­naked children, has even her head covered). Around the procession the whole woodland has erupted in flower. The canopy bursts with white and pink blossom, while tulips sprout in all different colours around the feet of the children and at the foot of Flora’s throne. Tiffany’s canvas is a heady palette of pale pinks, purples, greens and yellows. The presence of the angelic children dressed in their chitons and adopting various poses and gestures, and the stately figure of Flora herself, clad in a sort of toga, wearing a

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wreath of flowers and holding a staff, all leave us with the impression that we are looking at a classical frieze depicting some Elysian vision. What Tiffany brings to this fantasy though – and which would be lacking in a classical frieze on a similar theme – is his individual trademark usage of colour. As in his stained glass windows, so too in this canvas he gives himself free rein to experiment with the most beautiful combinations of colours he can imagine. The floral imagery that we see in these two canvases played a major role in that staple medium of Art Nouveau, the poster. We have already mentioned Grasset, the Franco-Swiss painter, sculptor and illustrator. After studies in Lausanne and Zurich he worked in Paris designing fabrics, ceramics and jewellery. From an initial interest in architecture he ultimately achieved his finest results in poster design, in which he employs very versatile floral designs, usually in combination with a female face or figure. His interest in plant motifs was such that he even published on the subject in his La plante et ses applications ornementales (1896).3 Some of his poster designs are also strongly classicizing in their motifs. One such example is the poster he designed to advertise Encre L. Marquet, La Meilleure de Toutes Les Encres4 (1892). In this poster to advertise ink, Grasset depicts a pale red-­haired woman, her hair flowing behind her, gazing up at the sky. She wears a long pale yellow-­green dress and a wreath in her hair. Her elbow propped on a harp, she rests her head on her wrist and holds a quill in her right hand, while in her left she absent-mindedly clasps some blank sheets of paper as she ponders what to write. Below we see an inkwell resting on a slab of marble on which the name of the ink company, ‘L. Marquet’, is painted. In the background the sky is dark, shot through with pale streaks of green, as if on a stormy night. Grasset has transposed the familiar ideal of the beautiful young woman we have already met in Sonrel, and which we find elsewhere in Grasset’s own work, to a commercial context. In so doing, he has sought to preserve all the associated notions of vitality and youth that she brings with her, in this case as a means to suggest that L. Marquet’s ink may bring a similar sort of literary inspiration to the consumer. However, what we should not miss here is the way that Grasset leans so easily on a number of apparently by now well-­established classical tropes. We have discussed the symbolism of the harp in relation to the muse in an earlier chapter, and Grasset draws on this here. The wreath also reinforces this conventional symbolism. It is unclear whether there is any direct inspiration from classical art here beyond these elements, but the image of a woman with a stylus, as a symbol of literary inspiration, is known in ancient Roman painting (for example, in the Sappho Fresco5 from Pompeii). Grasset shows how elements

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of classical symbolism had survived even in the new graphic commercial context of Art Nouveau. In his L’Enigme6 (1898), the French graphic artist Henri Bellery-Desfontaines (1867–1909) similarly created an idealized image of classical youth, closely integrating this with floral imagery. The image appeared as part of a collaborative print album, L’Estampe Moderne, a series of twenty-­four monthly portfolios of four prints each running from 1897 to 1899, which was produced by the French publishers Charles Masson and Herni Piazza in a limited edition print run of 150 copies. Bellery-Desfontaines’ print shows a young couple embracing. A young red-­haired woman looks up lovingly into the eyes of an athletic youth, whose hair is crowned with a laurel wreath. He has placed his left hand against her cheek, while she embraces him with both her arms around his neck and raised to his face. Bellery-Desfontaines frames this idealized scene of young love on either side with two banners of leaves, acorns and white flowers, around which white ribbons have been tied. Behind them we can see the deep-­green stems of tall plants growing against a yellow background. Here we have returned to the same territory as Vaszary’s Golden Age, although divested of its latent melancholy. Bellery-Desfontaines’ image is a portrayal of the perfect love, but it is at the same time a depiction of the symbolic power of youth and love to renew and rejuvenate all things. The floral imagery – the white flowers behind the woman and the acorns behind the man – extend this symbolism further. Moreover, the simple addition of the laurel wreath worn by the youth lends the whole scene a heroic and ennobling quality that it would not otherwise have. Again, we have a strong link between the classical and an ideal of youth, beauty and renewal. In this case, the artist seamlessly combines this symbolism with the more generalized semantics of plant and flower in Art Nouveau, which function equally as symbols of fertility and renewal. Returning to allegories of the seasons, and the role that classical gods could play in this, we might consider the Latvian artist Kārlis Brencēns’s (1879–1951) great stained glass window depicting the Greek god of the sun, Helios, in the Hotel Europa in St. Petersburg (c.1908)7. Brencēns, a member of the Latvian Rūķis movement, had been commissioned to provide décor for the newly-­ renovated hotel at 1 Mikhailovskaya Street. Brencēns’ team used the commission as an opportunity to apply a new technique, whereby they stained the glass pieces themselves with ceramic-­based dyes, elsewhere using coloured glass in a mosaic design. The result is an epiphany of colour as the great god makes his appearance. We see his great, golden, youthful figure astride his heavenly chariot, as he rides across the welkin surrounded by a rainbow. His outstretched arms

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and flaming hair express the rising of the sun as he puts the clouds before him to flight. The whole upper section of the window, in which the god appears, is golden, as if filled by his presence. Below him we see an earthly landscape and the sea. Besides green fields and mountains by the sea, topped by a fortress, three Viking ships snake past following the cliffs. In his glass mosaic, Brencēns brings out all the colours of sunlit ocean and coast. In some ways, this work is a strange combination of the classical and the medieval. Typical of the Baltic and Russian artists, his Art Nouveau combines universalizing classical motifs such as Helios with more local and national themes. Indeed, although riding a classical chariot, with his cape flying out behind him as a god or a Roman general at his triumph, there is nonetheless something of Baltic paganism about him, and we may wonder whether this image is really more a depiction of the Baltic sun god than it is of the classical one. The rainbow, and the rugged northern landscape below, also make this scene feel less classical than its theme would suggest. Brencēns has taken a classical allegory of the sun and made of it a northern one. This is not something that should surprise us. It is another reminder of the plural nature of Art Nouveau as a style, and its universalizing tendencies. Howard (1996: 199) points out in his analysis of this window that it has a lot to do with local style: ‘Through his Helios window Brencēns revealed formal, compositional and subject similarities to the painted cosmological symphonies of his Russia-­settled compatriot Rūdolfs Pērle.’ Art Nouveau artists consistently took the symbolic values attached to classical iconography but made them their own. Elsewhere in Europe, we see a similar dynamic in the work of Preisler. As many Czech artists at the time, Preisler was very interested in allegories of the seasons. He too employs conventional classical iconography here, but re-­invents it to fit his individual style. In multiple paintings, he returns to the idea of the seasons, including in his Spring8 (1900), Spring Evening9 (1898), Autumn10 (1897) and his The Wind and the Breeze11 (1895), attaching symbolic meaning to them. As Wittlich (1982: 72) comments: Spring and Autumn, the morning and the evening – seasons and moments of transition – here take on a deeper significance. Autumn, whose richness in colour may connote the melancholic end of life, is undeniably the favourite subject of painters of the first half of the 1890s.12

Wittlich hits on something very significant here. In general, Art Nouveau, with its interest in subtle shades of colour and meaning, was not primarily interested in the bright and brash colours of summer – the light of Greece, as it were. As we

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have seen in Sonrel’s painting, they were interested in the graceful tones of morning and of twilight, both for their chromatic novelty and artistic potential but also – as Wittlich suggests – for their symbolic value as indicating liminal states. Spring, one of the artist’s most important works, and recognized as such in its time, takes the form of a triptych, one of his favourite formats for his work (he had also used it for one of the first works he exhibited, Easter (1896)). Exhibited in 1900 in the third exhibition of the Czech art society, the Mánes Society (named after the Czech artist Josef Mánes (1820–71)), it is focused around an allegorical theme of youth whose exact symbolic meaning is left open. Its large central panel shows a handsome adolescent youth sitting in the midst of a rural Bohemian landscape, propped against a birch tree. He is dressed as if a peasant in his Sunday best, but he has taken off his jacket, and hunches over as he stares into the distance as if lost in his melancholic thoughts. What are these thoughts? A slender young woman who stands beside him leaning against another birch tree, who is naked save for a robe from the waist downwards which she draws up to partially cover her chest, suggests this might be it, but this is not clearly suggested, as the two figures seem to exist independently of one another, as if unaware of each other’s physical presence. She looks as if she has just stepped from a classical relief, statuesque and with spring flowers gathered in her robe, while he looks like he is on his way to church. Behind them a little brook streams away into the distance, where we see trees and a small cottage with a thatched roof. In the side panels, Preisler has painted two individual scenes each featuring a young woman (this time clothed) in a similar landscape setting. The triptych’s left panel shows a blond-­haired woman sitting on a grassy bank looking off into the distance. She seems in some ways the counterpart of the young peasant, assuming a similar posture, with her hands folded anxiously in her lap and with an expression of melancholic distraction. Her blond hair coils as it is blown in the spring breeze, complementing the long slender form of her figure, so typical of Art Nouveau. The woman in the right-­hand panel is similarly slender with blond hair, and likewise rests on the grass. She too seems distracted by the same unexplained melancholy as the other figures in the triptych as she turns away from them. We can see flowers growing all about her and in her right hand, resting unconsciously in her lap, we see two daisies that she has picked. The two women in the side panels seem to be similarly preoccupied by their own thoughts as the young man is. The semi-­naked woman beside him is almost certainly then the allegorical figure of Spring herself. But who are the other figures, what relationship if any do their bear to one another, and what is the unutterable

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sadness that seems to possess them, if that is what it is at all? Preisler leaves us guessing. The enigmatic quality of this work was noted and praised by critics at the time, being recognized as a new departure and turning point in Czech art. The artist would continue in this direction for the rest of his career, as we shall see in some of his other works too. These share the quality of being increasingly symbolic and yet mysterious as time goes on. In this case, Preisler takes a very original approach to representing the spring, which appears to be primarily associated with a certain melancholy for him, metaphorically represented in the form of the young man and the two young women. We may ponder whether this is an awareness of mortality that has overtaken the adolescent as the spring arrives. Or perhaps he is lovelorn, and as such he finds no joy in the spring landscape. Is the object of his love itself the allegory of Spring that stands beside him, and if so what does this suggest? It is certainly a very ambiguous spring. Preisler also completed another work on the theme of springtime, which was exhibited together with Spring in the third Mánes exhibition and later appeared in the publication Golden Prague13 (1899). This is his Spring Evening, which was for a time mistakenly entitled The Death of Icarus. Its slightly earlier date shows us that Preisler had been toying with different ways of representing this idea of the beautiful but melancholic spring in his work. As its erroneous title suggests, this time we have what appears to be a dead or dying Icarus imagined in a spring landscape. The prostrate figure of Icarus or of a genius/angel, which appears to be female, lies on the ground. Her foreshortened naked body faces away from us so that all we can see is the top of her head – which strong compositional resemblance to John William Waterhouse’s (1849–1917) Saint Eulalia (1894) of four years earlier suggests a likely inspiration. As in Waterhouse’s painting of the dead saint, her arms are stretched out – in this case not as a result of her crucifixion but rather from her fall – while beneath her arms we can see her white feathered wings. Also as in Waterhouse’s painting, her long centre-­parted hair trails out on the ground, and her lower body is robed. As in Spring we again have Preisler’s trademark birch trees dotted throughout the landscape, and spring flowers grow close by the dead Icarus/angel. Again, the exact meaning of the painting is left open. Even if the painting seems to be drawing more on the iconography of Christian martyrdom, the figure of the human with wings fallen to earth does inevitably invite speculation as to whether this is meant to be Icarus, or if not a fallen angel. Whatever Preisler’s exact intent, if he had a specific meaning in mind for this painting at all, we again see the same link being made between the spring landscape and some cause for sadness. In this case, this is presented to us more starkly than it is in Spring, in the form of death. Moreover,

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a certain consciousness of mortality, deliberately juxtaposed to the vitality of youth and the springtime, was a commonplace of many Art Nouveau artists and we encounter it elsewhere in the work of Malczewski and Beardsley above all. Whether or not the inspiration of Preisler’s work was directly classically, we are reminded of Virgil’s concept of death in paradise14 – something directly referenced by Beardsley in his work, as we shall see. Preisler did not limit himself to the theme of spring though. He also showed an interest in autumn in another painting of that name, which later featured as a print in the Gerlach and Schenk volume already discussed. The central panel of this triptych shows the allegorical figure of Autumn, who stands in a landscape that reflects the time of year she represents. She is again a young woman, who this time transfixes us directly with her gaze as she raises one hand to her face and places another behind her head. She is clad in a long robe which has caught in the autumn breeze and flows out to her side. In her hair she wears a wreath. Trees dot the landscape behind her showing their autumn leaves, and a group of swans flock around her as they appear to be taking flight to leave the plain. At her feet we see the last petals of the summer flowers, soon to be all gone. Though there is a last brightening of the sky in the far distance, we see that elsewhere it is turning darker and that colder days are ahead. What is really interesting about this triptych though are its side panels and, as he had done in other works before this, Preisler uses these to make a symbolic commentary upon the main theme. In the right panel we see a shepherd, accompanied by his faithful sheepdog, as he backs himself up against a tree and leans on his staff to rest. We cannot see much of his face but, as Preisler’s figures in Spring, he seems to be pensive. Meanwhile in the left panel, with the typical bizarreness of Art Nouveau, he has included a separate scene of two crouching satyrs resting among some rocks where flowers grow. One of them appears to be trying to warm himself over a fire as the colder weather comes. Preisler has used a mixture of different motifs, including classical ones, to conjure up a personal image of autumn. Again, while we may identify certain metaphors of the seasons here, its full meaning remains – perhaps intentionally – illusive. As we have seen in other works already, for example BelleryDesfontaines’s L’Enigme, the addition of the wreath often adds a heroic quality to such allegories without clearly attributing any more specific meaning, and Preisler has done the same here. However, the inclusion of satyrs feels slightly incongruent. This almost seems a comic addition on the artist’s part, as we see the satyrs, the summer now gone and their habitual frolics over, trying desperately to keep themselves warm as autumn arrives, threatening the cold of winter to

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come. Together with the shepherd in the right panel and the allegorical figure of the central panel, we again have recourse to a semi-­mythological landscape in which the real and the fantastical are blurred. This may be another form of liminality of the sort which Wittlich refers to. Matějček (1950: 49) also speaks of an ‘ancient Arcadia and northern fairy tale in syncretism’ in this painting.15 It was certainly a very influential painting for Preisler’s Czech contemporaries, as Spring had been.16 We can also find this blended world of landscape, flowers and allegorical figures in his The Wind and the Breeze. Exhibited in the annual exhibition of the Krasoum Society in Prague in 1895, it was the first public presentation of Preisler’s work. The three landscape panels of the triptych all feature semi-­naked figures floating through the landscape, representing the wind and the breeze. The central panel shows two male figures gliding through a field in which the plants seem to sway with them as they pass by, while in each of the side panels two women swim through flowers, one facing upwards and one downwards. Their long hair streams out behind them as they are supernaturally swept along, floating above a ground we cannot see. Their robes billow around them weightlessly, as if they were the moon goddess Selene descending from the heavens. Following the triptych from left to right we are almost swept along ourselves in the gentle but inexorable motion of this scene. Although Preisler’s reference is not always explicitly classical – even if, as we have seen, it often is – his broader style in his allegorical work draws heavily on both classically-­inspired ideas and on classical iconography. Turning away from the seasons as proxies for a classical ideal of beauty, we will now look at another of its manifestations. For Art Nouveau was not only concerned with female beauty, whether it was made to stand for allegories of the seasons or not. The style also showed a keen awareness of what is originally a classical concept of the beautiful youth, or the ephebe. In ancient Greece, this noun had indicated an adolescent at first puberty, at the first onset of manhood. Frequently referenced from Attic vase painting onwards (and arguably in the earlier kouros statues of archaic Greece) this had become a predominant and conventional motif of beauty in sculpture and the other arts in the ancient world. Not a prominent feature of medieval art for its hedonistic and homoerotic associations, it was partially revived by Renaissance artists – we might think of Donatello’s (c. 1386–1466) David (c. 1435–40) as the High Renaissance beautiful youth par excellence – and some earlier Victorian artists such as Lord Leighton (his The Sluggard (1885) being a typical example). In the 1890s it came to the fore again in a big way as an important artistic motif in Art Nouveau.

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The beautiful youth appealed to artists in this period for many different reasons at the same time. The athletic expression of male beauty was one reason, and we have already seen one example in the Bellery-Desfontaines print discussed earlier in this chapter. On the whole, however, the fascination was less with the male athlete – as it would be for a later generation of artists in the 1930s – but with adolescent beauty, and often for the introspective qualities with which it could be associated. And as in much of Art Nouveau’s use of the classics more generally, there is a strongly psychological feeling to such depictions. It is no accident that the ephebic youth is often portrayed by night or twilight, or in connection with states of liminality or transition. While not in any way himself classical, Preisler’s distracted peasant youth in his Spring is nonetheless a very good example of the sort of melancholic ideal that fascinated many Art Nouveau artists. It goes without saying that they drew heavily on classical myth, literature and art when creating their modern ephebe. However, two mythological figures can be highlighted, in whom they saw the perfect expression of this ideal: Narcissus and Endymion. To begin with Narcissus, the appeal of his story is perhaps obvious in some ways. The perils of becoming enamoured of one’s own beauty found a strong resonance in an age so self-­conscious of its vanity. In their works that depicted Narcissus in some shape or form the artists of the time show a strong interest in the lonely and often tortured nature of the sort of self-­love that his myth represents. In this respect one important work must not be overlooked, the Belgian Symbolist sculptor Georges Minne’s (1866–1941) Fountain with Five kneeling Boys17 (1900), of which two versions exist. Minne, who also made illustrations for the work of Maurice Maeterlinck and Grégoire le Roy, had earned criticism for the apparent primitivism and rudimentary workmanship of his art. This sculpture is true to his style, simply showing five identical statues of skinny youths arranged around a pool, which they gaze into mournfully as they clasp themselves tightly with their bony arms (a symbol of self-­love). Unsurprisingly the sculpture has also come to be known as the Narcissus Sculpture. The sculpture was originally commissioned by Van de Velde for the German Art Nouveau patron, Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921). Apart from the finished versions of the work, a large number of studies are known in various media for both the kneeling boys (for example his bronze statuette Boy Kneeling at the Spring18 (1898)) and the water basins. This included five different versions of the basin in plaster that he made in his studio in Vorst. The motif had first appeared in his Man and Woman Kneeling (1889), and its final version first appeared in the exhibition of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels in spring 1899. A second version was exhibited with the Vienna Secession in 1900.

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What does Minne’s sculpture tell us about the Art Nouveau take on Narcissus? Primarily, that it appreciated what the myth revealed about the tortured nature of self-­love, something that Minne has painfully wrought in his medium. It is not a pleasant sculpture to look at. The figures are so emaciated as to seem anorexic, wasting away in their vanity. Its message is a powerful one. Schmutzler (1962: 13), in the context of a discussion of the Folkwang version of this sculpture, has spoken of how: ‘Unconsciously Art Nouveau was influenced by no other mythical or symbolical figure as strongly as by Narcissus.’ He quotes the poet Karel van de Woestijne’s description of the fountain as ‘Narcissus in fivefold reflection’. But why five Narcissuses where one was not enough? No doubt this is a stylistic device on the part of Minne, but it does feel as if the artist wants to amplify maximally Narcissus’ psychological self-­torture. Whichever angle we view the sculpture from, we are presented with multiple profiles of his body and his face, simultaneously showing his anguish in as many different respects as possible. Another artist who entertained an interest in the story of Narcissus, without labelling it explicitly as such, was the Latvian, Rozentāls. In his painting At the Source19 (1914), he shows a naked young man and a young woman by the side of a pool, into which they gaze curiously at their own reflections. The man crouches with his face to the surface of the water as he gazes intently at the man that stares back at him. By his side a pale red-­haired beauty stands, also contemplating her own reflection. She runs her hands through her long hair as if marvelling at its beauty. The rest of the scene is an impressionistic depiction of a leafy grove. Once again, we are in Rozentāls’ Arcadia, but this time there is perhaps cause for concern, given the clear reminiscence of the Narcissus story in this idyll. In many of his works, the artist shows an interest in the expressive potential of water and its chromatic reflections, something in evidence here too. But the primary interest of this painting is its theme. Who are these youths? Have they discovered their reflection for the first time? And what will this mean? Does it ultimately spell their doom? We do not know, but cannot help feeling that there is trouble in paradise. The Darmstadt sculptor, founding member of the secessionist Free Society of Darmstadt Artists, and member of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse’s Darmstadt art colony until 1906, Ludwig Habich (1872–1949), created a bronze statuette Narcissus20 that shows something of the same interest in the theme of self-­love as that of Minne. A young male nude stands in contrapposto stance, hunched over in introspection as he looks down at the ground (presumably into a pool which we cannot see). As Minne’s Narcissuses, he crosses his arms on his chest as he clasps himself. Habich’s Narcissus is a handsome figure, not emaciated

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as those of Minne, but he shares their same discontentment. We are nonetheless very much in the realm here of an idealized and classicizing male beauty, which verges on the voyeuristic and homoerotic – this is common to Habich’s works, something we see for example in his Siegfried (1905) and Goethe Memorial (1903), which are really Germanicized updates of the Donatello David we discussed above. Habich made a number of bronze statues during the time he spent at the Darmstadt colony. This statuette was exhibited in the art colony’s first exhibition in 1901 and had also been exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900. In her study of Art Nouveau in the colony Ulmer (1997: 66) identifies this work as one of Habich’s ‘early, lyrically-­pitched statuettes’.21 This is a work which tries to capture the poetic ideal of youthful male beauty that Art Nouveau so worshipped. Endymion, the mortal loved by the moon goddess Selene, was also a favourite classical myth of Art Nouveau. In the ancient world, this myth had come to function as an allegory of the blessed afterlife, with Endymion falling into an eternal blissful sleep to be wedded with the moon goddess. The obvious poetic and religious qualities of this allegory made it a favourite theme in Roman art, where we see it repeatedly used in the decoration of sarcophagi. For Art Nouveau, Endymion’s appeal was of a related but slightly different nature to that of Narcissus. It was likewise attractive for its ideal of male beauty. What the myth also had, which the Narcissus story did not (or did not have as a core element), was its demonstration of the power of male beauty over woman, even a goddess. Doubtless for male artists there was a certain vanity in the theme itself, but perhaps its greatest appeal was its association with night time and the light of the moon. Lunar themes are common in Art Nouveau, above all in graphic art and in jewellery. Endymion brought with him the evocative image of the bright moonlit night, whose appeal rested in soft tones and gentle contours and was so different to that of the bright sunlit day the Impressionists sought, as we have discussed above. Some Art Nouveau artists associated this kind of beauty with that of the ephebe. In his cover design for an edition of the poetry collection Endymion (1922) by the Czech poet Jiří Karásek z Lvovic (1871–1951),22 for which he also illustrated the decorative lines and end vignette, the Czech illustrator and writer Josef Richard Marek (1883–1951) created an image of the eponymous youth that captures many of these associations. We see the beautiful naked Endymion standing out in a field by night beside a tree. His white skin contrasts with the black of the night, as does the large pale white moon that rises behind him. In a curious and typical Art Nouveau twist to this conventional portrayal, a large

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crustacean-­like creature appears to be crawling up towards Endymion, who withdraws at the sight of it, his arm reaching back towards the tree (likely a subject drawn from the poems themselves). Beneath his figure the title, ‘Poems of Jiří Karásek z Lvovic’, is inscribed in white letters. This representation of Endymion, given extra emphasis because of its black-and-white ink design, deliberately plays upon the relationship between his beauty and the night-­time. Endymion is more handsome by the light of the adoring moon than he would be by day. And his appearance is the essence of the more emollient type of beauty that Art Nouveau so favoured both in the figure and in nature. We have spoken already about the obsession of Art Nouveau with vitality, and how this explains in large part its interest in youth and in beauty. Another more direct manifestation of this was a closely linked ideal of health. In part, this was a reflection of what artists felt about their art itself. It was something liberating, and therefore something healthy and revitalizing. One conventional and very classical motif to express this, not the creation of Art Nouveau but still very much favoured by it, was bathing. Tiffany’s The Bathers23 (c. 1912) presents us with a standard image that contains many of the motifs that we frequently find elsewhere. Destroyed in a fire at Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall residence in 1957, we are now only able to study the window from photographs. In this stained glass window, intended for display at the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco but ultimately installed at Laurelton Hall instead, we see a group of four nude female bathers in a stream somewhere in the woodland. They are accompanied by four other women who appear to be their attendants, as well as a peacock (see discussion below). The composition centres on the image of a radiant female nude. She is fair with long golden hair, which she is in the act of arranging, her arms raised. She appears to have just finished bathing, and we see her attendant, dressed in a long Japanese silk gown, standing by her side with a robe outstretched towards her. By their feet another blond-­haired nude is sitting on the banks of the stream with her feet in the water. A further nude is seated on the opposite bank, while one more bather stands in the stream, toying with some lilies in the water. On the right of the scene another attendant sits, trying to draw the attention of the peacock at her feet, and we see two more standing in the shade of the trees behind. As ever in Tiffany’s glass work, the window is a feast of colour. The bright golden hues of the bathers contrast with the glowing greens and dark tones of the woodland. Pink and purple flowers are scattered through the scene and it appears to be summertime, with all the trees covered in green flowers. The water glints as if it were real running water, an effect Tiffany favoured in many of his windows.

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This work certainly retains a strongly academic flavour in its composition, and we should avoid the sort of ‘fancy footwork’ that Eidelberg (1989: 89) criticizes for seeking to avoid this fact. Tiffany was after all a product of his time, and this is one of his latest works – by which time it was almost certainly outmoded. As Eidelberg relates, Tiffany was proud of this work for its realistic flesh tones, and we could concur with his view that the sort of Tiffany windows of which this is a prime example are ‘hopeless anachronisms’. Yet even if its style is old-­fashioned for its time, it nonetheless gives us a good sense of a specifically Art Nouveau conception of this theme. The colours are perhaps the most significant element of The Bathers, through which the artist draws attention to the radiant health of the central figure. He links this deliberately to the verdant beauty of the natural setting, of which the peacock is also a proxy in Art Nouveau. Some of these elements had been present in Academic painting, but especially by the later nineteenth century they had become somewhat dulled. Artworks like this are an ultimately doomed attempt to breathe life back into conventional themes like bathing by using new artistic techniques. The German artist and guest member of the Darmstadt colony, Ludwig von Hoffmann (1861–1945), entertains a very similar ideal to Tiffany in his Idyllic Landscape with Bathers24 (c. 1900). The artist, who was strongly influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, presents us with another – this time painted – scene of bathers in a woodland stream. In the centre of the painting, in mid-­stream, we see the face of a young woman happily emerging from the water as she looks up at her companion, another nude with golden hair who stands in the river leaning against the side of the bank. We see the clothes that she has just divested herself of lying on the bank, as she ponders whether to take up her friend’s invitation to join her in the water. In the background, another woman is disrobing on the river bank, while behind her another nude sits on the bank reaching for something in the water. Except for the pink and gold of their bodies and hair, and the red of one of their robes, the scene is an oil wash of cerulean blue and green, with a touch of yellow on the grassy banks. The scene is framed by two caryatid nudes, one female and one male, who appear to support the frame, which has been carved and painted to look like it was the blue lapping waves of the stream. Although novel in its colour scheme, as Tiffany’s window the painting retains a very classicizing and academic flavour, even if it relates to a specific ideal of youthful beauty and health. As Selz (1957:180) put it in his book on German Expressionism: ‘Von Hoffmann’s idyllic, harmonious landscapes, peopled with a supernatural race, must have appeared like the measured Apollonian counterpart to Stuck’s Dionysiac Olympus.’ What of such a Dionysiac Olympus? Does it too

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play a role in Art Nouveau allegories of health? We find the answer in Klimt’s Medicine25 (1900–07). Destroyed by fire in 1945, Klimt’s large painting was the result of a commission from the University of Vienna to decorate university buildings, and was part of a trio of paintings known as the ‘Faculty Paintings’ (the other two being Jurisprudence (1903) and Philosophy (1899)). None of the allegories were readily intelligible – indeed often the link to the subject illustrated was not easy to make out at all. Much has been written already on the significant controversy that arose when the university didn’t get quite what it had been after – probably, as Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 42), describe it,‘a series of dignified, formal paintings in classical style depicting the wisdom of philosophers, the healing virtues of medicine, and doubtless a statuesque blindfolded female figure holding a pair of scales and representing justice’. In the case of Medicine, as photographs attest, they instead got a hectic allegorical jumble of figures all ranged vertically behind a representation of Medicine herself. Male and female, young and old, the figures seem to show humanity in every possible state of anguish and suffering, all muddled up. There are even some skulls thrown in for good measure. And of course – the straw that broke the camel’s back – a rather gratuitous full-­frontal female nude floating separately to the left of this human mass, her long hair let loose, flailing her arms about, as she seems to thrust her naked body forward at the observer. Klimt again throws down the gauntlet before the Künstlerhaus and Viennese intellectual officialdom. In contrast to all this Dionysian madness and Stygian suffering is the figure of Hygeia (Health). She stands at the bottom of the composition, her figure upright and her head proudly held high, wearing a long robe of red and gold. In a reference to the ancient healing cult of the god Asclepius, a snake coils about her raised right hand reaching towards a shallow dish that she balances on the palm of her left hand. Assuming the posture of an officiating priestess (a recurrent motif in different contexts in central European Art Nouveau), she is seemingly oblivious to the throng of humanity around her. Yet at the same time she seems to have some magic power over them; that power being the power of healing. Klimt’s allegory, complex as it is, is no doubt intended to convey the salvation of that otherwise all but lost mass of humanity in the human skill of medicine. Unfortunately, no one got it, and the debate went so far that it reached Parliament. As Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 48) put it: ‘This art nouveau woman, enlaced in gold ornament, looks more like a priestess likely to sacrifice a sick person than to heal them.’ Art Nouveau artists tried both to reinvigorate traditional figural allegories, and invent new ones, in their attempt to represent their ideal of health. Ultimately,

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this may not have been entirely successfully, but it would be erroneous to consider that such allegories could only extend to the human figure, or to plant and flower. We have seen how Tiffany included a peacock in his window. We have also met them in the Ciamberlani façade in Brussels. Certain animals, principally birds and insects, and above all the peacock, assumed an important symbolic value in Art Nouveau which was closely linked to this ideal of youth, beauty, and health. The system of animal semantics used by Art Nouveau naturally drew on the traditions of earlier art, but it also developed in new directions. The prolific peacock is perhaps the best example of this. As TschudiMadsen (1967: 32) highlighted: In the peacock the feathers, rather than bird itself, proved of paramount interest. The plumage represented the magnificence of vanity and, with its gorgeous colours and closed oval shapes, the bird was tailor-­made for Art Nouveau artists.

While peacocks were first used in a major way as a facet of design by Whistler, largely on the inspiration of their widespread use in Japanese art (something he demonstrated in his Peacock Room (1877)), there was a precedent for the symbolic and decorative value of the bird in classical myth. The peacock had after all been the favourite bird of Hera, queen of the gods, on whose wings she had cast the eyes of the slain monster Argos. And as a symbol, the peacock had also had other meanings in the Roman world (for example vainglory in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History).26 Ancient legends concerning the apparent lack of decay of its flesh had led to its conventional symbolism of immortality and resurrection in medieval Christian art – the latent notion of which may underlie the peacock’s association with exuberant vitality in Art Nouveau. Probably largely on the inspiration of Whistler, Beardsley also took up the motif of the peacock in a big way, as did the French stained glass Nancy artist Jacques Grüber (1870–1936). We have also seen Tiffany’s use of the bird in his work, and there are many more examples that could be given than the window discussed in this chapter. It would be erroneous to attribute the use of the peacock to a directly classical inspiration – it is rather the legacy of the profound influence of Japanese art upon Art Nouveau – but occasionally its use by Art Nouveau artists shows an awareness of its significance as a classical emblem too. For no artist was this more the case than for Tiffany. In his later life, he organized a series of extravagant festivities at his expense, and largely in his own honour. This included an Egyptian Masque in February 1913 at Tiffany Studios (themed around the reception of Mark Anthony by Cleopatra), a feast at Laurelton Hall in May 1914, and a great birthday party in February 1916 (themed on a Roman

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supper). The Laurelton Hall feast of 1914 was an elaborate affair, featuring women dressed in ancient Greek costume and carrying peacocks. Tiffany’s favourite historical epochs for his exclusive masques were evidently ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome or some combination of these (in the Egyptian masque Tiffany’s guests were obliged to play the roles of Romans, Syrians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Egyptians and Arabs, with John D. Rockefeller a Persian nobleman and his wife appearing as Minerva!27). It is interesting to see how Tiffany used the peacock here if nothing else as a symbol of prosperity, but also how it was associated with an imagined classical world. However, while such associations can be found if looked for, these should not be pressed too far. On the whole, the peacock remains primarily a decorative feature in Art Nouveau, its ubiquity in the style being more the result of Whistler and his followers’ mediation of Japanese art than of any specifically classical inspiration. We have encountered a variety of abstract Art Nouveau conceptions of the bloom of youth in this chapter which are either wholly or in part transformations of something originally classical. Often but not always figural in their conception, and greatly variegated in their exact meanings, they most often connote an ideal of youth which was itself really a metaphor for vitality. Together with the conception of the heroic in the last chapter, we have seen two sides of this interest in youth. Yet considered from one angle, these abstract ideals and personifications are really only an extension – albeit in often very novel ways – of the artistic antecedents of Art Nouveau. But the style was also directly concerned with human nature, laid bare, in a way that no Western art (with the arguable exception of the classical) had ever been before, and there is no more obvious example of this than the erotic.

5

Desire This chapter is not only about sex, but the erotic plays a big role in Art Nouveau, in many different contexts. In this chapter, we look at how its artists expressed desire, both romantic and sexual. This is a big topic, and not all the ground can be covered here. What we are most interested in of course is how Art Nouveau used the classical in its exploration of human sexuality and desire. It is no overstatement to say that a lot of the sexuality of Art Nouveau was classical, or at least that it was imagined in a classical mould, through classical bodies, or with a classical frame of reference that was sometimes not more than a thin veneer covering what really verged on being soft pornography. We must speak of the romantic and the sexual, because these are the two forms of love that exercised the imaginations of Art Nouveau artists in connected but different ways. Both betray a certain fascination with the power and beauty of the human body, particularly the female, and the pull it could exercise on the human mind. This interest mapped neatly onto a classical preoccupation with the power of erotic love. It also shared the classical interest in the tyrannical but irrational power of desire, and its (often tragic) consequences for the individual and society. This classical conception of desire manifests itself in multiple ways in Art Nouveau, as we shall see in this chapter. It both inherited the conventional allegories of love of Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical art, reinventing them in new ways, and went further in developing a marked interest in Bacchanalian and Dionysian sexual symbolism. As the artists of previous generations, but in new ways, those of the 1890s and early 1900s found in classical literature – and more than anywhere else in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – a whole armoury of symbols to serve their sometimes complex erotic metaphors. In so doing, they revived, in the visual arts, a century-­old romantic debate about the power of reason and the power of feeling. Just as at the time in literature and in the nascent science of psychology others were exploring the same questions. There is no better place to start such a discussion of the sexuality of art at the fin-­de-siècle – indeed perhaps no more correct place – than that much-­discussed

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Fig. 14  Gustav Klimt, Danae.

but timeless sexual icon, Klimt’s Danae1 (1907–08) (Fig. 14). A lot has been read into this work. Koja (2006: 171) even went so far as to describe it as a ‘metaphor for female masturbation’. It is easy to see why this work has attracted so much attention since it was first painted. Klimt’s painting of the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos, at the moment that she is impregnated by Zeus in a shower of gold, is the ultimate expression of the artist’s perennial fantasy, the hyper-­ sexualized redhead. We see the sleeping woman up close, her pale flesh filling nearly the whole canvas. She is curled up and apparently blissfully unaware of the shower of gold that falls between her legs. What is she dreaming of? We do not know, but her red lips, flushed cheeks, curling fingers and shock of red hair, her slightly open mouth and raised eyebrows, are all unavoidably suggestive of sexual pleasure. To emphasize this still further, Klimt makes much of the rest of his canvas black, including a dark veil decorated with imagined Greek ornament,

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which appears to have slipped off Danae’s body. As Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 122) put it: ‘There is an extraordinary sense of voyeuristic intimacy as we are brought close to the apparently sleeping form of Danae.’ In their judgement, Klimt’s version of this myth surpasses even the notorious Renaissance rendition of Correggio. Harris (2003: 58) speaks of Klimt’s mythological eroticism as belonging to ‘a grand artistic tradition stretching back at least as far as the 16th century’.2 While Danae is at one level about the sexuality of woman, at another level it is also about the absent god. Despite having no physical figural form in the painting, Zeus’ presence in the form of the shower of gold is really a metaphor for the power of erotic desire itself. Danae is undoubtedly an object of sexual desire, but she is also a romantic ideal of the beloved, indeed the beloved of the chief of the gods. She is not then a femme fatale, but a straightforward symbol of the overpowering nature of erotic infatuation. Despite much speculation, we will never quite know what this painting meant to its artist. What it does reveal though is a certain reliance on the mythological background to the myth for its deeper significance. The god is absent but ironically it is in the presence of the divine that we find Klimt’s real commentary on the nature of human desire. Gods and goddesses, either themselves abstracted as metaphors or in the very human stories of their amorous adventures, were a rich seam of inspiration for Art Nouveau artists as they explored the power of romantic and sexual love. Another popular example of an erotic myth that involved the physically absent god was that of Leda and the Swan. Klimt also made a painting on this theme in 1917 (destroyed by fire in 1945), but here we will examine another artist’s rendition of the theme in Preisler’s Leda and the Swan3 (1909). Preisler’s Leda lies on the banks of a stream under a tree in flower, locked in an embrace with a large swan, one of her legs wrapped around its great white wing. This is again a very literal interpretation of an erotic classical myth, one which Preisler returned to again in another oil painting of 1913–14. As in Klimt’s Danae, we again have the absence of the physical god, or in this case the god present in disguise. And again, where Leda’s naked body is a metaphor of the sexually-­ desired object, we also have an allegory of erotic desire itself in the form of the bird. The swan is a powerful bird, and in this painting it seems to have almost overpowered Leda. A strange (and in some ways almost ridiculous) image but also a metaphor for the overpowering and irrational nature of human sexuality, which was so much the fascination of Preisler’s contemporaries. Considered in this way, the attraction of the Danae and Leda myths is perhaps obvious.

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Aphrodite was naturally a widespread and important figure in Art Nouveau imaginings of romantic and sexual love, as she had consistently been since Botticelli and others rediscovered her during the Renaissance. Yet whereas she had traditionally appeared as part of larger compositions treating epic or mythological episodes, such as ‘The Judgement of Paris’, in Art Nouveau she was for the most part either transposed into entirely new contexts, or instead the interest was primarily in her own erotic potential. To start with a radically different example to how she had been received in earlier art, we might consider Beardsley’s Frontispiece for Venus and Tannhäuser4 (1895). Venus and Tannhäuser (1907) was an erotic novel of Beardsley’s own authorship, drawing on Wagner’s 1845 opera on the same theme. This had in turn taken its inspiration from the medieval legend of Tannhäuser, a knight that worshipped the goddess Venus. As Clark (1978: 41) summarizes: His longest piece of writing was in prose, a so-­called romantic novel entitled Under the Hill. It is an expurgated version of an extremely indecent original, The Story of Venus and Tannhauser, which he seems to have written to console himself immediately after he was sacked from The Yellow Book and which remained in manuscript during his lifetime.

The frontispiece was one of twenty-­four illustrations created by Beardsley for John Lane’s planned publication of his novel, which ultimately did not materialize. Beardsley at length chose to print the text privately instead. Despite the bawdiness of the tale itself, his Venus is really a totally new conception of the goddess as Beardsley saw her. A very androgynous Venus, with a mass of thick black hair and a long pale white robe leaving her shoulders bare, stares out at us as she stands between two herms. Two identical figures of what appear to be represen­ tations of the god Pan, bearded with long curly hair and great horns, they too stare out at us in an almost malevolent way. On their plinths, rams’ skulls have been set with wreaths, lending the whole scene a distinctly pagan feel. And on their heads Beardsley has placed baskets brimming with fruit. All of this is set against a dense and intricate backdrop of a garden trellis upon which a great rose bush has grown. Beardsley has also drawn roses onto Venus’ dress. Some of these roses have grown to support the crown they hold above Venus’ head. This is certainly a very original drawing of Venus. Clark’s summary (1978: 41) of her wearing ‘a chastely shapeless garment, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’, is perhaps overstated, but it does show just how far we are with Beardsley’s Venus from her soft porn neoclassical predecessors. Moser’s Venus in the Grotto5 (c. 1914) is arguably another such asexual transformation of the

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goddess. She is a slender dark-­haired adolescent nude who appears to be emerging from a rocky grotto, in which she has been encased, womb-­like. She raises her arms as she wrests her way out of this prison, and seems as if she is making her first advent into the world. The rest of the canvas is a wash of bluish-­ green and white, perhaps in reference to the goddess’ sea birth. Moser, who had studied under Otto Wagner and subsequently turned his hand to a variety of different media, particularly excelling in poster design, here shows something of the inspiration of his Viennese Academy training.6 Yet his Venus, although not as sexually-­charged an image as Klimt’s Danae, is nonetheless a new take on the goddess – albeit in a different way to Beardsley’s – and is still an emblem of erotic love. Moser’s Venus, who seems as if she is just born from the grotto, is really an allegory of first erotic awakening. In this version, and an alternative that exists, she seems as yet unaware of her blooming sexuality. We are returned again to that classical interest in the first dawn of adulthood as a moment of efflorescence. By way of contextualizing such Art Nouveau representations of Aphrodite we may turn back to a slightly earlier work. Arnold Böcklin’s (1827–1901) The Birth of Venus7 (1868–9) is really the very early work of a Symbolist artist, but it is worth considering briefly in contrast to the representations discussed above by way of illustrating how the traditional reception of Venus was being transformed in art in the second half of the nineteenth century (Böcklin would return to the goddess again a few years later in his Venus Anadyomene (1872–3)). On the surface, The Birth of Venus is not much more than a nineteenth-­century reinvention of Botticelli’s eponymous painting. A pale red-­haired woman rises spontaneously from a deep blue ocean, holding a blue veil and with her hand covering her genitals (as the ancient Aphrodite of Knidos had done in an oft-­ repeated motif from Botticelli onwards), apparently suspended by two cherubim that hover above her. Interestingly, this work was repeatedly criticized by Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) for its being unfinished (it seems that the artist had deliberately left it so). In this we may be able to trace the beginnings of a greater interest in isolating the figure of Aphrodite herself, focusing attention on her and attributing to her a new significance independent of the allegories she had to date often been made to serve, as we see in the later Moser painting. As Marchand (2003) highlights, Böcklin, alongside Nietzsche and others, was an important figure in revitalizing the classics for the generation that followed, beginning a process of universalizing and psychologizing myth that would reach its later climax in art in fully-­fledged Symbolism. Moving away now from direct representations of the goddess and returning to Aubrey Beardsley, in several artists we also see a strong interest in the mad

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things that love makes people do. Classical myth also provided a rich source of inspiration here. Beardsley took a vicious and satirical delight in portraying the reduced state of man in love, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses came to his aid here. In his simple drawing, Apollo pursuing Daphne8 (c. 1896) (Fig.  15), Beardsley captures all the absurdity of Ovid’s rendering of the tale in the first book of the Metamorphoses. Completed at the same time as his illustrations to the Athenian playwright Aristophanes’ Lysistrata9 (1896) (see discussion below), Beardsley’s drawing shows the god of poetry (and ideal of beauty himself) all

Fig. 15  Aubrey Beardsley, Apollo Pursuing Daphne.

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in a fluster as he chases after the elusive Daphne. We see him in profile, naked save for the cape that has slipped off his body and flies out behind him, as do his long curly locks. His head cocked back, we clearly see the anguish and despair in his face as he looks into the distance at the vanished Daphne. In his hand, he clasps the remnants of his love, presumably already turned into the laurel tree (Clark’s (1978: 156) interpretation is that ‘the mysterious objects in Apollo’s hand are some rushes and the nipple of Daphne’s breast’). Beardsley’s Apollo is his fin-­de-siècle allegory for the futility of reason before erotic love. Moser chose a different classical myth to express the same idea. In his drawing A Modern Tantalus10 (1895), he updates the classical myth of the ever-­thirsting miscreant condemned to be by ever-­receding waters, giving it a fin-­de-siècle outfit. In a roundel beneath the calligraphic title we see a scene of a rather repulsive man in evening dress earnestly beseeching a beautiful red-­headed young woman in a yellow dress. She turns away from him in evident disgust, raising both her hands to push him away as she shuns him. Moser achieves a strong satirical effect by having his spindly bearded bespectacled male emerge from the side of the roundel, very evidently leaning into her space more and more, as Tantalus, as she struggles to escape from the frame (we almost feel she might disappear altogether from the scene at any moment), as the ever-­receding waters of the myth. We can actually see that water too, whose waves Moser includes as a stylistic overlay to the scene in its lower portion. The whole background is red, as if expressing the heated frustration of the ardent lover. Although transforming classical myth, Moser and Beardsley’s images are essentially of the same ilk as Toulouse-Lautrec’s satirical visual commentaries on the sexual absurdities of contemporary life.11 This is not to say that the satirical side of unrequited love was the only instance of where the erotic got a classical outing in Art Nouveau. Josef Mařatka’s (1874– 1937) bronze sculpture Ariadne abandoned12 (1903) is for example a very versatile sculptural exploration of the physical anguish of such love. We see the figure of the young woman, just after her abandonment by Theseus, bent double as she slumps against a rock. Her tense and taut figure, which seems as if it is literally wasting away (her ribs being visible), projects a great sense of suffering as she almost seems to have become as jagged as the rock against which she rests. Stylistically, the influence of Rodin is clear, as the sculptor moves away from classicism,13 but in its subject matter Mařatka picks up on all the melancholy of the abandoned classical heroine before her redemption by the god Dionysus.

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Despite its close association with the great ‘Decadence’ of the fin-­de-siècle, Art Nouveau also entertained a certain preoccupation with sexual innocence. This can be explained in part by its frequent attachment to a pure and asexual ideal of the human form (as we have seen in Moser’s Venus in the Grotto, for example), which was often a stylistic device in Art Nouveau ornamentation and which was deeply built into the ethos of the decorative style in general. It is also a reflection of Art Nouveau’s interest in the vitality of youth, and it is clear that for some artists at least that vitality could be considered tainted in some way by the sexual awakening of adulthood. One important story from classical literature in whose treatment we see such concerns played out is that of Daphnis and Chloe. Recorded by the Greek novelist Longus in the Roman period, their story was not newly discovered by Art Nouveau. It had had a long reception history in the bucolic ideals of romantic and neoclassical art. However, the story of the two young lovers, one a shepherdess and one a goatherd, and their romantic adventures found a new resonance in Art Nouveau with artists transforming the story in new ways. Longus’ story is frequently and disproportionately referenced in the style in comparison to other classical myths and legends that were generally better-­known. A number of different elements in the story may help explain its appeal: its presentation of pristine youth, coupled with innocence, ideals of both male and female beauty, proximity to untamed nature, and the undeniable power of both Eros and Pan that emerges in Longus’ tale, both of whom were favourite gods of Art Nouveau artists. The novel’s proem gives a clear sense of the idyllic pastoral world in which the romantic adventures of the young couple take place: When I was hunting in Lesbos, I saw, in a wood sacred to the Nymphs, the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen – a painting that told a love story. The wood itself was beautiful enough, full of trees and flowers, and watered by a single spring which nourished both the flowers and the trees; but the picture was even more delightful, combining excellent technique with a romantic subject [. . .] In it there were women having babies and other women wrapping them in swaddling clothes, babies being exposed, sheep and goats suckling them, shepherds picking them up, young people plighting their troth, pirates making a raid, enemies starting an invasion.14

Set against the backdrop of various dramatic events (of the sort that might be encountered by a shepherdess and a goatherd), and conspiracies against Daphnis and Chloe’s romantic and sexual union from those who envy their love, the novel is really concerned with sexual innocence and awakening as the protagonists

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gradually learn to navigate their own sexuality. Unsurprisingly its erotic content, coupled with its pastoral setting, had been the primary elements of interest in the ancient novel’s earlier artistic receptions. Art Nouveau receptions show an adaptation of this interest and reorientation towards other aspects of the tale. To take one example, the Russian artist Viktor Borisov-Musatov’s (1870–1905) painting, Daphnis and Chloe15 (1901) has a different starting point. Focusing on the pastoral setting of the tale, rather than the romantic relationship of the two protagonists, he creates an idyll that has much in common with some of the Baltic painting that we have discussed in earlier chapters. A naked Daphnis and Chloe stride through a pastoral landscape side by side, their flock of happy white sheep (and one galloping black goat) in train. The dark-­haired Daphnis pipes loudly on a golden pipe as he leads the way, while the golden-­haired Chloe, one arm placed on his shoulder, gestures with the other towards the landscape ahead of them. Picking up on one episode in Longus’ novel where the couple lead their flocks down to the sea, we see they are approaching the shore. Yet far from the balmy Mediterranean countryside evoked by Longus, Borisov-Musatov has transformed this landscape into something much closer to home. The slender birch trees that surround the couple and mirror them compositionally seem more painted from a Russian landscape, as do the deep greens of the other trees and the cold sky. Although the artist acknowledges the eroticism of the story by having his couple naked, nonetheless his main interest is the bucolic potential of the tale. In this he departs from earlier receptions, re-­creating Longus’ world in his own terms. This kind of representation has much in common with the bold northern Arcadias of Rozentāls, where the landscape can be a signifier for an ideal of youthful vitality, which is itself often related to a national romanticism. In this respect BorisovMusatov’s Daphnis and Chloe is a good example of a multifaceted transformation of Longus’ original text. Borisov-Musatov nonetheless remains true to that text and to Longus’ pastoral idyll, even if he re-­casts it slightly for his own reasons. By contrast Ferenczy, in his Daphnis and Chloe16 (1896), completely reinvents Longus. Gone is the pastoral idyll of ancient Greece, and instead we simply have a contemporary scene, such as might be on display in any café, restaurant or opera house in Budapest. We simply see a young couple – if that is indeed what they are – sitting facing one another on a seat somewhere (we cannot tell where from the close up point of view). The man, smartly attired in a suit and overcoat, a scarf slung about his shoulders, and sporting a rakish hat, looks intently at the woman, his arm advanced towards her along the back of the seat behind them. The woman,

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also well-­dressed and with a white scarf around her neck, seems to lean back very slightly from the man, but her head is tilted to one side as she looks at him askance, her eyebrows raised, apparently with some curiosity. A close study of two young city dwellers and their interaction, we cannot be sure of what the exact story is here, although we are invited by the artist to conjecture. Who are they? Are they lovers? Are they a married couple? Or is their relationship illicit? Might she be a prostitute? The title suggests the innocence of the love of Daphnis and Chloe – is this what the artist intends us to understand of this couple too? Or is it intended ironically? Ferenczy does not provide any explanation, but leaves us to decide for ourselves. Moreover, he has inserted himself into the scene in the form of a self-­ portrait as the man, which could make any or all of these questions personal ones too. Whatever his exact intent in choosing the title he did, his transformation of Longus is certainly an entirely new and original one. Interestingly there is an oil sketch of the same year by Ferenczy, also entitled Daphnis and Chloe17 (1896). This time true to Longus, we see the ancient Daphnis and Chloe in nought but the costumes given them by nature as Daphnis plays on his pipe while Chloe looks on at him in admiration. Similar to the charcoal drawing, this oil sketch is also focused solely on the two figures themselves and their interaction, Daphnis to the right and Chloe to the left. Given the compositional similarities, it is likely that Ferenczy was thinking of the ancient model when he created his modern version, or vice versa. Evidently the artist had considered both together and was drawing a parallel – possibly not without some hint of (perhaps personal) irony – between that ancient idyll and the present day. Ferenczy’s drawing suggests that despite Art Nouveau’s interest in the Daphnis and Chloe story, we should not overstate its preoccupation with an ideal of sexual innocence. As the art of the ‘Decadence’, Art Nouveau’s primary interest was always in the outward display of sexuality itself and the classics are used principally to express that interest. In considering this dynamic there are two main things we need to be mindful of at the outset. The first is the context of the growth of psychoanalysis, as a result of the writings of Freud, and especially the contemporary interest in the sexual unconscious. Freud’s argument for the existence of an instinctual drive native to every human being, which he called the ‘Id’, had a profound impact on the arts and on Art Nouveau and Symbolist imaginings of sexuality. The investigations of the French neurologist JeanMartin Charcot (1825–93) into hysteria had also drawn the attention of the public to the power of hypnotic unconscious states (Charcot himself believed in the power of art in his treatments). The second, related, development is the

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evolution of the ideal/anti-­ideal of the femme fatale. Rogoyska and Bade’s (2011: 58) summary of Klimt’s women can be applied more generally: ‘Klimt’s women are long-­haired, slender, lithe, and possess a sexual awareness that is both alluring and almost threatening in its directness.’ The reasons for the artistic popularity of this motif during the period are complex, ranging from the purely aesthetic to the misogynistic (on which see Dijkstra (1986)). But its recurrence at the fin-­desiècle was in part a challenge to a traditional less threatening neoclassical articulation of a gender stereotype of woman. The shattering of that stereotype in the art of this period belies a certain anxiety. This manifested itself primarily as an anxiety about the dangers of unbridled female sexuality (or sexuality in general), and we will encounter very many classically-­based examples of such femmes fatales in this chapter. A case can be made that such sexual anxiety, evident in the art of the time, is related to broader anxieties about contemporary social change, thereby affecting understandings of the past too. Discussing sexuality at the fin-­de-siècle Bauer (2008: 95) comments of this dynamic: The difficult distinction between nature and culture was a focal point for nineteenth-­century discourses of the social, which often struggled to provide coherent explanations of the links between individual behavior and the social order. For many sexologists, the notion of civilization as a society-­in-process was crucial to the ways in which they positioned their work historically.

Again in this aspect of Art Nouveau’s engagement with the classics we are often faced with its double-­nature of both embracing the new and clinging to the old. It is telling that the artists of that other more reactionary movement that also returned repeatedly to the motif of the femme fatale, Pre-Raphaelitism, were greatly concerned with exactly these same social issues. Classical myth, literature and art provided multiple models for expressing the power of sexual love and Freud’s sexual unconscious. Freud of course made extensive use of all of them himself.18 The same dynamic appears in Art Nouveau, and two particularly popular motifs from classical myth were the gorgon and the siren. Both gradually became emblems of the dangers of sexual temptation, where they had more often signified mortal peril in the past. The first is probably one of the most widespread motifs (perhaps the most widespread motif) of sexuality in Art Nouveau, and we will consider it first. Before we look at examples though, an obvious point – but nonetheless one that must be registered at the outset – should be made, which is that almost all Art Nouveau artists were men. It is important to recognize this as a primary reason for the significant and obsessively repeated focus on the sexuality of women, rather than men, that we

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see in the gorgon and the siren. After all, classical myth provided many paradigms of male sexuality too (a favourite being the god Pan), and we will see some of these transformed to acquire new meanings too, but these are on the whole far less frequent. It is also probably no accident that the gorgon and siren appear most often in the somewhat more conservative artistic centres of Vienna, Munich and London, than elsewhere, where they frequently became vehicles for the freer sexual expressions of a new generation of artists. Medusa was the gorgon par excellence and all of the more generic representations of the gorgon in Art Nouveau really stem from her reception. Her myth was fascinating to artists because she symbolized at once what was beautiful and what was horrific. Moreover, in her ability to turn all those who looked upon her to stone, they found a ready-­made allegory for the destructive power of the gaze. We should also remember the contemporary interest in hypnotism, or mesmerism, as a result of a broader growth in mysticism at the fin-­de-siècle. Medusa symbolized the reductive effect of sexuality on man, and its power to trump all reason. But she was also interesting to the artists of this period for stylistic reasons. Her long snake hair had an immediate appeal to them because of their love of line and of curvature. The female form itself already gave them ample opportunities to indulge this, but in Medusa’s hair it could be extended further. This partly helps explain her endless repetition in both works of fine art, but also frequently in Art Nouveau architectural ornament and jewellery. In certain contexts, the symbolism of the gorgon acquired additional significance for her association with Athena, a favourite goddess of Art Nouveau (see discussion above). Art Nouveau depictions of her often follow the precedent of ancient art by showing her donning the aegis, a sort of large scaly bib featuring the head of the monster Gorgo. Mehoffer’s Medusa19 (1904) is a good starting point for understanding the contemporary transformation of the gorgon. She is actually a contemporary woman, rather than the gorgon of classical myth. It is a simple portrait of a pretty young upper-­class woman wearing a great black fur jacket over a white lace blouse, on which we see a blue sapphire necklace. She wears a bejewelled headband, also set with sapphires, with a great jewel on her forehead. Despite her youth there is something hard and knowing about her expression. However, the most curious addition to the painting are live snakes, which coil around her headband and seem to somehow emanate from it. In sharp contrast to the image of a handsome young woman, we see their small vicious heads, poised to attack. In another variation of this painting of the same title and same year, which shows a different woman but is otherwise compositionally similar, we again see snakes

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emanating from her headband. The simple message of Mehoffer’s paintings on this subject seems to be that beauty can be dangerous. All is not as it seems. We find a more emphatically sexual and dangerous portrayal of Medusa in the work of the Belgian jeweller Philippe Wolfers (1858–1929). Born into a family of jewellers – his father’s upmarket atelier produced work for several European royal courts – Wolfers had studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and been led to Art Nouveau through an interest in Japanese art. His very versatile oeuvre is not limited to jewellery but also extends to vases, fans, lamps and sculpture, and we will look at an example of the latter here. His Medusa20 (1898–9) is a small pendant worked in gold and ivory. The hard, ivory face of Medusa seems to lour out at us with her large clear oversized opal eyes, set beneath an evil frown. Her expression is frenzied and dangerous, and we can just imagine that her gaze might have a magic stultifying power. On her crown, Wolfers has sculpted a small snake in gold, whose head rises up above its coils. By its side we see two more snakes, their mouths spread wide as they threaten to attack. On the side of Medusa’s head are two golden wings, and the whole work is set on a golden chain. Such small but masterful work using Congolese ivory won Wolfers great international acclaim.21 His Maleficia22 (1905) treats the same subject from another angle. This sculpture in red marble, ivory and amethyst is perhaps one of the strongest Art Nouveau expressions of the sexuality of the femme fatale. As its Latinate name suggests, this sculpture is meant to be a representation of evil intent. Consisting of the armless upper torso and head of a young woman in marble, crowned with ivory snakes, it is a beautiful but undeniably malevolent work. Moreover, Wolfers has deliberately chosen a form that resembles a fragmentary classical sculpture. We might consider it an Art Nouveau transformation of the armless torso of the Venus of Milo (late second century BC, discovered in 1820). Unlike that white marble sculpture though, the sexual allure of the woman’s naked flesh is heightened by the rich bronze tones of the red marble, which add an additional layer of realism. However, all of this is offset by the very modern look of distraction of the head as it faces away to the right. While the vacant expression of the empty eyes and its slightly parted mouth lend the sculpture a disturbed and fitful quality. The addition of the finely-­carved ivory snake hair, realistically made to fall as if real hair, augments this effect still further. Crowing this ivory hair, erected on Malificia’s forehead is a winged gorgon mask in amethyst similar to that in the Medusa and which Wolfers had already used elsewhere. As Caland (2003: 326) explains, this work derives a dramatic sexual tension from its juxtaposition of different elements:

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This work, unanimously recognised as superb, has two particularities: there is not only a head but a female bust and the mask of Gorgô fixed in the voluptuous hair. Consequently the tension is extreme: the body adopts a lascivious pose, taught with desire or joy while the terror is concentrated in the amethyst jewel; in addition the body and the woman’s gaze invite us at the same time to where the jewel’s gaze is fixed. The man who does not know how to resist is lost.23

As explained above, this is exactly the attraction that Medusa held for Art Nouveau artists; she was simultaneously sexually attractive, and extremely dangerous. Two further representations exploit this same duplicity. The Czech artist Pirner’s pastel drawing Medusa24 (1891) shows a similarly malevolent young and alluring Medusa bent over a large votive bowl, into which her heavy snake hair falls. Beneath that heavy hair we see her devious expression, a malign smile on her face. The whole scene is greyish black, as if all were already turned to black, and in the background we see the sea, omnipresent in Pirner’s work. Wittlich (1992: 52) comments on how Pirner picks up on the traditional Eros (Love)–Thanatos (Death) paradox of artistic representations of the gorgon, describing his Medusa as ‘à la fois beau et effroyable’.25 Meanwhile Stuck, who also returned to the gorgon motif repeatedly in his work, illustrates the mythological narrative more directly in his Medusa26 (1908). In this we see a muscular Theseus, as he battles with an adversary, pull the head of the Medusa out to stun his opponent. The latter tries to turn away but we see it is too late, as his sword falls from his hand. We see the still young, but dreadful and pale, face of the Medusa in the centre of the canvas as her eyes bore into Theseus’ enemy. We know he is doomed. Symbolist transformations of Medusa are also many and various, and we will not consider all of these here. However, given that we discuss the artist elsewhere in this book, it would be wrong to overlook the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff ’s (1858–1921) important work Blood of the Medusa27 (1898). Khnopff had been a founding member of the Art Nouveau group of artists Les Vingt in Brussels, participating in their annual exhibitions, and was close to both the PreRaphaelites and contemporary occultists.28 Naturally his Medusa is a more symbolically dense image of the ancient gorgon than we have looked at so far, whose meaning is very elusive. We see the enlarged severed head of the Medusa against a pale yellow background, as if it had appeared to us in a nightmare. Her deathly pale grey eyes, their pupils raised upwards and the thin grim line of her mouth all project an undeniable sense of evil. All around her head we see the dark coils of snakes, and out of her severed neck thick black blood is still pouring, which itself appears to coil back up in a stream to join the snakes. In Khnopff ’s

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image we return, albeit in a new Symbolist way, to the original less sexualized image of Medusa where the emphasis is more on direct mortal peril. One final artist we will consider here in relation to Medusa is Malczewski, in whose work she makes frequent appearances. His Medusa29 (1895) bears a relationship to the other Polish transformations of her that we looked at earlier, those of Mehoffer, in the sense that it also portrays a beautiful (although somewhat androgynous) red-­headed young woman with the addition of snake hair. A symmetrical arrangement of blue snakes, rearing up as if eyeing the observer, crown her mass of red hair – in a departure with artistic tradition Malczewski does not actually show the snakes as her hair itself. Beneath this she stares at us from under her lowered brow, an evil smile on her face. Other than her bared shoulders we cannot see the rest of her body, but she appears to be naked. We are similarly returned to this conception of Medusa as the red-­headed femme fatale of the fin-­de-siècle in his The Artist and Medusa: Portrait of Tadeusz Błotnicki30 (c. 1902), where she again appears to be a metaphor for temptation. The subject of the portrait is shown in armour, his eyes cast down in a virtuous expression and clutching a cross to his chest, as he is assailed by Medusa. Her face appears right beside him as she approaches him from behind. She is furious, her lips pursed and her eyebrows drawn together, as she grabs him by both shoulders with her hands (we see her long fingernails clawing at him), her red hair flying out behind and snakes all about. Here the artist has made Medusa function directly as a moral adversary and dangerous assailant. As ever, Malczewski transforms classical myth by incorporating it into his portraiture to create individual meaning. The siren also had a long reception history in art as a metaphor for danger, the primary classical text here being Homer’s Odyssey. The beautiful female monsters that lured sailors to their doom on the rocks with their inescapable song was a hackneyed theme, as was the hero Odysseus’ run in with them. Strictly speaking, although the original concept of the half-­bird siren was classical, the roots of her use as a metaphor for the perils of sexual desire (where the siren is more often conceived of as half-­fish) are to be found in medieval Christian thought.31 Nonetheless, the siren as both a metaphor of danger and of sexual temptation had grown into a conventional artistic motif, becoming a favourite icon of Art Nouveau. Given its origins this retained an element of moralistic warning, but at the same time acquired a touch of fascination too. Moreover, the siren had the advantage of being associated with the sea, whose symbolic significance as a proxy for the soul had already been well established in Romanticism (for example in the work of Caspar David Friedrich), and was now revived as a symbol of the

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human unconscious. The siren then had two main things going for her and it is natural that we find her repeated presence in Art Nouveau. An interesting example is the Dutch-Javanese artist Jan Toorop’s (1858–1928) The Shipwreck32 (1895). The artist’s early years spent in Java had led to the strong influence of Javanese art on his work which, as Beardsley’s, is unique in its entire conception. In The Shipwreck the artist returns to the terror of the idea of shipwreck in a strange and psychological drawing featuring a repetitive design of swimming sirens carrying lyres and violins. All the sirens are drawn in strong black ink outline, the upper four shown in profile, their long hair streaming out in the water behind them and curling up in a repetitive design of a swirl around their heads. We see their naked bodies as they glide through the water from right to left, their arms outstretched as they play on their instruments, and their chins jutting forward in an unsettling way, while they seem to look back at us threateningly as they go. Other sirens turn towards us more directly. We cannot help but feel as if they are coming for us. Then in the lower left corner, out of sync with all this orderly formation, we see a heap of terrified human figures. These are the shipwrecked sailors. We see a father, mother and baby, all wearing expressions of abject terror on their faces, their jaws dropped and eyes wide, as they fear their impending doom. The male figure has both his hands clasped around his face as Munch’s Scream (1893) of two years earlier. Behind them we see another face of a man who looks up in terror and incomprehension at one of the sirens who appears to bear down on him. As gorgons, Toorop’s sirens are at once alluringly beautiful and mortally threatening. Toorop’s transformation of the siren myth acquires dramatic tension in a similar way to Wolfers’ Maleficia, through the contrast between the beauty of the sirens and their long hair (interspersed with doves and given extra force by its print-­style repetition),33 and the contortion of the bodies of the shipwrecked and their evident abject terror in the lower left of his drawing. The Pre-Raphaelites had also exploited this association between woman, the sea, and the sexual allure of long hair. We might think of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s A Sea Spell (1877) where the dove – in this context originally a reference to Noah’s Ark – is also present. Toorop aims for the same here. Yet by contrast with such earlier representations there is something undeniably funereal about this whole image, and we know from its title that the terrified figures are doomed to a grisly death by drowning at sea. Toorop would return to the same design in a poster in 1909. Just as a point of contrast, to show that this was not the only kind of transformation of the siren in Art Nouveau, we might consider another example. In Sonrel’s Sirens34 (date unknown), we have a somewhat more anodyne image of

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the mythological creatures, as Sonrel transforms them after her own imagination. In this happy watercolour scene, Sonrel imagines her sirens more as mermaids. We see a male and female mermaid in a cerulean underwater grotto redolent of the Little Mermaid story. The female looks back at the male as he gazes out onto the expanse of the ocean. Their slender figures are green and they have adorned their hair with seashells. Another female behind them points out from the grotto to something she has spotted out at sea, where we can see more mermaids sporting in their underwater kingdom, above the rocky sea shore. There is an important point to register here about the nature of Art Nouveau transformations of the classical. There was never in the short period that the style attained its height a set or canonical reception of individual classical themes. While there are generic themes and interests that recur – around which this book is structured – there is rather always a significant degree of variation in reception as individual artists give themselves the latitude to re-­invent classical myth, literature and art as they see fit, and for their own purposes. Gorgons and sirens were not the only figures from classical myth that appealed to Art Nouveau artists. Returning to the theme of the Freudian unconscious, many artists found in the faun, satyr, nymph and bacchant/ bacchante, ready-­made allegories of the sexual instincts of woman and man. Moreover, as we shall see, the Dionysian and Priapic cults – and the classical art that reflected their influence – also found a home in Art Nouveau. For some artists, the icons of ancient cult became a vehicle for the expression of an idealized classical past, or a classically-­modelled but timeless present, in which the sexual instinct of the ‘Id’ was freely expressed, or simply more manifest than it was in the often sexually-­repressed societies in which they lived. Fauns, satyrs, nymphs, bacchants and Dionysian and Priapic symbolism had had an outing already in post-­Medieval art, but Art Nouveau’s use of them was new and more direct than anything that had gone before. And at the level of design their presence became widespread (see for example Fig. 1635). Fauns and satyrs, or some blend of the two involving allusion by degrees to the goat-­god Pan, became a major motif for the male sexual drive. Neoclassical painting had touched on this theme obliquely – we might give as examples Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel’s (1839–1929) Pan and Venus (1865), Pal SzinyeiMerse’s (1845–1920) Faun and Nymph (1868) and Albert von Keller’s (1844– 1920) Faun and Nymph (1869). The Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones’s Pan and Psyche (1872–4) had also hinted strongly at the sexuality of this theme (see the end of this chapter for a discussion of the figure of Psyche). Moreover, the distinction between faun and satyr had become a fine one. In ancient Greek vase painting

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Fig. 16  Stained glass window depicting faun, Lucerna Arcade, Prague.

the former had generally had traits that resembled a goat and the latter a horse. But the iconography and symbolism of the two had become blended in the history of their artistic receptions, such that by the period we are looking at here the terms and concepts are effectively used interchangeably by artists. If there is any difference in practice in the art that we are looking at, it is to be found in a

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slight variation in the choice of title (whatever exact blend of the two is actually depicted). Fauns were more often associated with male sexual beauty – often as a way of commenting on women’s sexual attraction to men – whereas satyrs were more often proxies for male lust. The distinction is a fine one though, and not always applied. It is also rare that either fauns or satyrs are pictured individually in Art Nouveau, in the way we have seen goddesses were. More often they are accessories to sexual allegories and therefore figure in larger compositions. Janis Rozentāls’ Women and the Spirits of Nature36 (1907) is a rather coarse exploration of some of the sexual fantasies that came to develop around the faun/satyr. A young nude, her long blond hair let loose and hanging by her side, stands disrobed by the sea shore. A motley crew of ugly sea creatures gather at the water’s edge, looking up at the apparently unwonted sight of the woman. Behind her a red rose bush is in flower, in a symbolic extension of her presence, and in the top right corner of the painting a satyr-­like creature crawls over the cliff ’s edge peeping his head over, complete with two horns, long ears and a double-­forked black beard, to see what is going on. As ever with Rozentāls we have a curious blend of Latvian folk mythology and the classics (Howard (1996: 194) speaks of ‘an attempt by Rozentāls to classicise Latvian mythology’), but in its basic conception this work shows the essential elements of the faun/ satyr metaphor in Art Nouveau: the sexually attractive woman, and the pursuing male satyr. We might compare Louis Joseph Raphael Collin’s (1850–1916) Nymph and Faun37 (date unknown) which shows, quite simply, a naked red-­ headed woman in flight across a sunny woodland, as the figure of a frustrated faun emerges from the bush in pursuit, his arms stretched out in the direction of the nymph. To consider the proliferation of this sort of imagery in a different medium, we can find many examples in illustrations produced for the French magazine La Vie Parisienne (published continuously between 1863 and 1917). Particularly in the illustrations produced by Chéri Herouard (1881–1961) and Henry Gerbault (1863–1930) we witness a number of instances of the use of classical symbolism in satirical erotic allegories. An illustration by Gerbault for the magazine, entitled The Butterflies38 (1916), imagines a young faun couple politely turning up at a Breton farmhouse hopeful of securing accommodation for the night. The young Breton woman answering the door, evidently dazed by their nudity and general appearance, looks up at the male satyr in amazement as the female satyr looks on at her, apparently nonetheless hopeful that they will be allowed in! In a late example of Herouard’s for a cover image from 192439 we see an attractive young

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woman in a red dress perched on top of a large bust of a satyr, as she reaches up to pick grapes from a vine that hangs above her. The statue of the satyr itself is in this case very close to the original depiction of the satyr from Greek vase painting, which Herouard has made exaggeratedly ugly with large horse ears, flaring out to the sides, a large beard, and a wide and somewhat depraved looking grimace. Again, Herouard is leaning heavily on the classical iconography of the satyr to produce sexually suggestive imagery. We have already seen how Malczewski makes use of classical iconography in his sexual allegories. Of all the motifs he most favours in his paintings, other than overtly national romantic content, fauns are probably the most frequent (Fig.  1740). To take just three indicative examples we might consider his The Vicious Circle (1895–7), Self-Portrait with Fauns (1906) and his Woman with Faun (1918). His use of the faun leads to some curious results. If ever a faun looked out of place and a little awkward, it is in Malczewski’s Polish landscapes. No doubt this was a deliberate choice, to achieve the different effects the artist wanted in each painting concerned. But it is also clear that the faun had a special place in the artist’s heart. He appears to have seen in the faun the perfect symbol of man’s not necessarily baser, but more genuine, nature. Olszewski (1989: 17)

Fig. 17  Jacek Malczewski, The Unknown Note (portrait of Stanisław Bryniarski, a Cracow painter).

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has spoken of how in painting ‘harpies, fauns, angels and Death’ in the midst of the Polish landscape, ‘his purpose was to display things timeless, such as Art, and things ultimate, such as Death, in the atmosphere of the Polish countryside’. The timelessness of the faun must have been a signifier of the timelessness of the aspects of man’s nature that it embodied. The Vicious Circle (1895–7), an allegory of the personal inspirations of the artist, is a real helter-­skelter of a painting. In it we see the multiple inspirations of the artist surrounding him, represented by an aerial circus of human figures revolving around a ladder atop of which a young boy sits. Unsurprisingly, given what we have said about the importance of the faun to Malczewski, Dionysian imagery plays a significant role here. At the beginning of this swirl of humanity we see a naked woman, facing away from us, who appears to clasp a leopard skin in her right hand. Next on from her is a faun, whose cloven hooves we can see flailing about in the air. Above him a naked red-­headed beauty, apparently a Bacchante from Dionysus’ train, looks down at us, making a sign of blessing. Rather incongruously this is then followed by a group of happy Polish peasants in folk costume and after them a great disarray of other allegorical figures. Evidently the followers of Dionysus, and all the simple abandon they represent, play a certain role in the artist’s inspiration, even if they are to be understood as offset by some of the other more macabre figures in the composition. The real world, the ideal world, and the world of myth are blended together in Malczewski’s conception.41 His Self Portrait with Fauns: Triptych42 (1906) is another curious work. The painting consists of three portraits arranged as a triptych, the central one a self-­ portrait and the other panels each depicting a faun. Each portrait is set in the Polish landscape, as the majority of the artist’s portraits are. The self-­portrait is fairly unremarkable except for a metallic device that the artist wears around his head that looks like part of a helmet. In the background, we can make out a scene of a summer evening and red sunset, with a woman in a white dress dancing in a field of flowers, and an angel. The faun portrait to the left shows a young man holding a flute, sporting the same beard and moustache as Malczewski himself, just with the addition of the faun’s horns growing out of his forehead. Also in the background, we see a line of trees against an evening sky. The faun portrait to the right shows an older faun with a longer unkempt beard and pointed ears against a rural Polish scene with women working in the fields. We have seen the inclusion of a faun in the side panel of a triptych by the Czech artist Preisler in his Autumn, but the juxtaposition of self-­portrait with faun is an original innovation of Malczewski’s. In doing so he appears to be drawing a parallel between his own

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nature and the instinctual life of the faun. In his later Woman with Faun: Temptation43 (1918) he extends this still further by actually painting himself as a faun, appearing from behind a bush playing the double aulos to attract the attention of a woman, again pictured as the perennial Maria Balowa. His face is red and puffed up as he plays the pipe, two great horns growing out of his forehead. In a sense this is the logical consequence of the Malczewski-­faun, the artist reduced to his bare instincts in pursuit of the object of his desire. In a similar and at first seemingly random way, fauns pop up in Beardsley’s work too, most notably in his How King Arthur saw the Questing Beast44 (1893), his frontispiece design for Plays by John Davidson45 (1894) and his Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook46 (1895) (Fig. 18). In all but the last of these three, the presence of the faun, or Pan, is a little incongruous. In the first he makes an appearance in Arthur’s vision in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, as he potters off behind the mystical beast seen by the king with a pair of reed pipes in his hand. The exact purpose of his presence in this scene, which shows the king and the fantastical beast he dreams of as it comes to the riverside to drink, is not entirely

Fig. 18  Aubrey Beardsley, Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook.

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clear but is evidently meant to increase its magical and surreal feel. His appearance in the frontispiece design for the plays of John Davidson (1857–1909) is perhaps still more inexplicable, other than as an idiosyncratic quirk of Beardsley’s. Admittedly the image itself is enigmatic, with various arguments having been made about what exactly it shows and who it may or may not be caricaturing. It may relate to the last play in the volume, Scaramouche in Naxos, although suggestions have been made that Beardsley intentionally makes a likeness to Wilde here in the Dionysus figure. Whoever he is, Dionysus is accompanied by a naked woman – perhaps one of his Bacchantes – and in the foreground a rather haughty and lascivious-­looking little faun, for which attempted identifications have also been made. Wilson (1976: 24) summarizes: ‘The faun in the left foreground has been identified as Henry Harland, co-­editor of The Yellow Book, but Brian Reade thinks it could be a self-­portrait of Beardsley.’ Whether or not there is a specific caricature in the figure of the faun,47 Beardsley clearly felt he had the licence to include whatsoever fantasy creatures he wanted – even if not everyone appreciated this. The Daily Chronicle of 1 March 1894 published an unfavourable mention of this work critical of its use of portraiture, to which Beardsley retorted in an angry letter printed by the newspaper the next day! Beardsley’s Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook is probably the most interesting use of the faun in all of his work. Although it was intended for The Yellow Book it was never so used, and was ultimately published in Leonard Smithers’ Catalogue of Rare Books (1895) instead. The drawing shows the god kneeling among flowers under a tree on the riverbank, an open book in his hand, as he reads to a young woman. In contrast to his rustic appearance, his naked upper body and hair adorned with vine leaves, she wears a large white dress. Beardsley has created a deliberate contrast between an imagined romantic and bucolic ideal in the figure of Pan and the restrained world of modern Victorian life, where young people learn of such things through books. The striving to recover a natural paradise, expressed through various pastoral idylls (and often mediated through classical iconography), is a recurrent theme in Art Nouveau. But Beardsley’s Pan is also a personal ideal of the beautiful male youth, expressed in the handsome and healthy figure of the rustic god. It could be argued that there is an erotic overtone to this image, and that it relates to the idea of sexual awakening led by Pan, perhaps with a subtext of how this often happens vicariously through fiction. If so, this is a literary motif originally drawn from Dante’s Inferno (5), in which the story of Paolo and Francesca highlights the perils of erotic passion inspired by literature. Beardsley may well be intentionally

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referencing this here. It is a contrasting vicarious notion of erotic discovery also evident in Art Nouveau, where Daphnis and Chloe (and Pan) represent untutored love. By inserting the person of Pan in this image, Beardsley combines the two motifs in one composition, which as ever may be a form of satirical and literary play on the artist’s part. Nonetheless, at least at the level of style and in its overall feel, it sits most naturally with the few non-­satirical and non-­sexual drawings that Beardsley made. The complexity of this imagery shows how imaginatively the faun could be re-­cast in the hands of an artist as versatile as Beardsley. So far we have looked mainly at symbols of male sexuality here, but for Art Nouveau the faun could also be female. Nor did artists forget the female followers of the god Dionysus, the Bacchantes, the danger of whose frenzy had been so memorably captured by the Greek playwright Euripides. This imagery was also used interchangeably with that of the nymph, who had long become a catch-­all figure for the classical female nude in western art. Grasset’s engraving The Little Faunesses48 (1896), which was published by Henri Floury in the monthly dedicated to woodcutting L’Image: Revue Artistique et Litteraire, imagines two sporting female fauns out in the countryside, their long blond hair flying behind them as they leap through the air, one grabbing at the hair of the other. While the Bacchante and the nymph were generally preferred as symbols of the erotic female (fauns were, after all, a bit too rough around the edges), this image nonetheless shows how artists were seeking to create images that showed the same sexual liberation of the female as they had of the male in their faun/satyr images. Art Nouveau artists were not the first to explore the sexual potential of the classical nymph. The Pre-Raphaelites had done so too (the sexual allegory of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) comes to mind), as had many other artists since the Renaissance. And, as we have already seen, nymphs were often coupled with fauns to symbolize male erotic (sometimes foiled) conquest of women. Some artists took this still further though, seeking to explore the psychological potential of the nymph too. But in general, the nymph remains separate from the femme fatale of the gorgon-­type transformation, tending in her person at least to retain her original connotation of rustic innocence and natural if sexually alluring beauty – though this is not to say that this naïve sexuality cannot be seen to be visibly threatened by the presence of the erotic male, often present in the form of the satyr or faun. There is probably no clearer expression of this dynamic than in Stuck’s Tempting a Nymph49 (1890). In Stuck’s fantasy, a nude red-­headed nymph lies on a river bank, a faun crouching by her side with his arm around her waist, as she stretches out her arm towards a black

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ram that has approached and is trying to lick her fingers. Her pale white skin and apparent naivety contrast with the tanned skin of the horned faun and the black hide of the horned ram. She is the object of sexual desire obtained. More generally nymphs abound in the architectural ornament of Art Nouveau, in jewellery, furniture and in graphic art. The nymph retained an obvious affinity with nature, with plants and with floral ornament, which made her stylistically useful to artists, as well as interesting for her erotic – or semi-­erotic, when occasion demanded – presence. The Catalan artist Alexandre de Riquer (1856– 1920), for example, returns to such themes repeatedly in his graphic work and painting. Meanwhile, the Hungarian artist Géza Faragó (1877–1928) transformed the classical nymph in an entirely new way in his Modern Nymphs50 (1906), as its title suggests. In Faragó’s image, while they retain their traditional woodland setting, the nymphs themselves are transformed into modern dancers. Four identical dancers, elaborately dressed as if they had just walked off the fin-­desiècle stage, gyrate in formation across the drawing, not unlike Toorop’s sirens. Here we are again in the semi-­decorative frame of Art Nouveau drawing, where an ancient theme can be completely reinvented to suit the dictates of the medium. Yet thematically it is interesting how Faragó equates modern dancers with ancient nymphs. That may not be without a touch of irony, with the modern dancer acting as emblem of fin-­de-siècle decadence, where the nymph stands for beautiful innocence, or it may be an allusion being drawn between the allure of the modern dancer and that of the eroticism of the classical nymph. In turning from the nymph to the Bacchante we turn from passive object of male sexual desire to symbol of active – and thereby often, threatening – female sexuality. In many ways, the Bacchante was an obvious choice for Art Nouveau artists, representing the unbridled power of the erotic woman, and often she becomes a femme fatale. We see a suggestion of this in Klimt’s drawing Female Nude lying down51 (1886–7), which was a preparatory drawing for his The Altar of Dionysus. His prostrate female nude Bacchante, who appears to be intoxicated, is a representation of sexual desire as well as a sex symbol herself. Her lounging body seems to belie a certain longing for the god, who in this case has come to symbolize desire. There is an echo of Klimt’s Danae here, the difference being that she is conscious of the presence of the god and is drawn to him, a willing participant in his cult rather than an inactive recipient of the god. The Russian painter and costume designer Leon Bakst (1866–1924) also made a watercolour pencil drawing, entitled A Bacchante52 (1911). This was a costume design for the Ballets Russes in Paris. In it we see the frenzied leaping figure of a Bacchante in a short yellow dress, her legs kicking about and her

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elbows drawn together, as she dances drawing red scarves through the air behind her in a flash of colour. The designer also has the long black braided hair of his model and a red headscarf trail through the air as she moves. Bakst designed the costumes for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 L’après-­midi d’un faune (which used Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faune as its score), which features a faun chasing nymphs in an erotic arcadia with the choreography designed to resemble that of an ancient Greek vase painting. In his costume design, Bakst brought to life an erotic ideal of ancient religion and myth, but we can also contextualize this individual vision of ancient Greece in light of an interesting painting of a few years earlier, entitled Terror Antiquus53 (1908). Bakst completed the painting after a visit to Greece in 1907. It shows a female painted archaic Greek koure statue in the foreground, set before a rugged Greek landscape of rock and ocean shot through by a bolt of lightning, which among other things features the destruction of a city and includes recognizable ruins of the Athenian Acropolis and the Lion Gate of Mycenae. In terms of a transformation of ancient sculpture by an Art Nouveau artist, it is undeniably a fascinating example. It is almost as if Bakst is challenging the comfortable neoclassical ideal of ancient Greece, proclaiming that he knows of an older archaic Greece, one less comfortable, more violent, more colourful (as his kore) and simply more human. As Kirstein (1970: 198) summarizes of his costumes for Nijinsky’s ballet, where the uncompromising eroticism of the faun and nymph is seen through the same lens: Poses recalled sixth-­century Greek vases and stone reliefs; the girls wore clinging pleated shifts reminiscent of korai, the standing sculptures of draped maidens deriving from Egypt or Phoenicia. The subject – a recognition through auto-­ eroticism of adolescent sex – and its treatment both seemed extreme. While Nijinsky ostensibly borrowed a ‘Greek’ manner, it was his personal stylization, shaped by an archaic epoch Bakst chose and by the choreographic discipline he set himself. He was bound by no previous vision, neither Fokine’s nor Isadora Duncan’s more amply heroic plasticity. He analyzed motion and its arrest. Returning instinctively to the sacral birth of theatre, he anticipated further uncharted development – dance in itself, no longer diverting, but ritualized [. . .] Bakst had sketched in Crete and Attica as an informed amateur archaeologist. He had painted a huge easel composition, Terror Antiquus, suggesting the mystery of Attica’s remote and unfamiliar past. Nijinsky applied a vision of archaic innocence to real life.

Bakst’s painting illustrates a certain dynamic within the classical tradition where more ancient forms of the classical are increasingly in favour among writers and artists as time goes on. As Haynes (2007: 101) puts it:

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This orientation toward an ever-­more-remote antiquity – from Hellenistic sculpture to the marbles of classical Athens to preclassical Greek figures – parallels a broad feature of the classical tradition in western Europe since the Renaissance, where in successive periods the dominant focus of attention moved from the Rome of seventeenth-­century classicism to the Athens of nineteenth-­ century Hellenism to the preclassical Greece of the modernists.

We might think of Bakst as on the cusp of this transition from nineteenth-­ century to modernist classical traditions. Remaining on the theme of erotic transformations of classical art in Art Nouveau, it would be mistaken to consider this as limited to the figural forms found in Greek vase painting. As mentioned above, a wider body of classical art relating to Priapic and Dionysian cult also found favour with Art Nouveau artists. The herm was a frequent and favoured motif, which acquired new symbolic meaning. We have already seen some examples of this in the works of Beardsley discussed earlier in this book. There is a definite sense in these representations that artists were trying to unearth an original – unabridged, so to speak – meaning in classical art and religion. In itself, this became a proxy for the uncovering of unconscious human instincts. Perhaps the best example of this is Vaszary’s The Return of the Spring: The Living Key54 (1899). In this painting, we see a naked and red-­haired young woman standing in the middle of a sunlit garden full of yellow flowers, her arms flung wide exposing her breasts, as she tilts her head to one side and smiles flirtatiously at a herm in the corner of the painting. This has the bearded head of a god upon it, which (although it is made of stone) appears to have turned towards her. The exact meaning of this painting is unclear but it seems to hint at some ancient fertility rite. Moreover, on the side of the herm there appears to be the suggestion of a stone phallus. Greek herms had phalli, but this may also be a reference to St. Augustine’s (City of God 6.9) claim of an ancient Roman ritual practice whereby newly-­wedded brides symbolically (and literally) mated with the god Priapus – in the form of his statue – in a fertility ritual. Freud would later refer to St. Augustine’s reporting of this practice in his The Taboo of Virginity (1924, originally published 1918), although this would have been too late for Vaszary to have read of. Nonetheless, St. Augustine’s claim of this Roman practice may explain the ‘living key’ that the title of the painting refers to. Whatever the correct interpretation of this painting’s meaning, we have a close relationship between sexuality, the spring and life before Christianity. Another artist who exploited a similar association in a commercial context was the Spanish painter, illustrator and poster artist Gaspar Camps (1874–1942).

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In a poster for Vermouth55 (date unknown), Camps created an image that, as Herouard’s discussed earlier, leans heavily on the association between cult art and the erotic to give a sexual subtext to a commercial advert. An attractive red-­ headed beauty in a heavy teal dress and purple hat leans on a priapic herm, whose carved stone face looks out at us lasciviously. The herm is adorned with vines and luscious red grapes. The woman has draped her right arm about the back of the herm seductively, as if it were her lover (she moves her face close to that of the herm, while her little finger points outwards suggestively), and with her left she cups one of her breasts. The imagery here is confused, but it is consistently erotic and again relies heavily on a preconditioned idea of the eroticism of the classical world and of ancient cult (revived in somewhat tenuous association with Vermouth). As ever in Art Nouveau, mixed in with all of this we have an abundance of plant imagery, where all seems to grow in plenty. Camps’ imagery tells us that during this period there was already a popularized association between sex and the iconography of ancient Dionysian and Priapic cult. Or at least that was the calculation Vermouth was making. The major inspiration for Art Nouveau was the art of the Far East. However, this was itself part of a more generalized interest at the fin-­de-siècle in all things ‘oriental’. As Edward Said and others have analysed,56 this was linked to the growth and establishment of the British Empire, which had led to the development of a series of established cultural norms about the ‘Orient’. As time went on such – often romantic – ideas about the ‘Orient’ became increasingly differentiated. As part of this Art Nouveau took an interest in the design and fashions of the Near East, something in large part driven by commercial innovation, and in the latest wave of Egyptian revivalism. There are very many examples of how Art Nouveau transformed icons of Middle Eastern and Egyptian history and legend, including in the context of how it articulated its interest in sexual desire – the biblical figure of Salome rapidly becoming the single most important oriental sexual icon in Art Nouveau. But this profound interest in the eroticism of the ancient Orient also coloured some of the ways that artists transformed the erotic icons of the classical world, whether real or fictional. Following the publication of Flaubert’s novel Salammbô in 1862, Salome acquired a classical counterpart in the novel’s heroine. Flaubert claimed that this ‘historical’ novel about ancient Carthage, replete with an ostensibly academic level of attention to detail, was based on extensive studies. Much of the detail in fact appears to have been created by the author. Nonetheless, the figure of the eponymous heroine captured the imaginations of many Art Nouveau artists. She can really be considered a refracted reception of the figures of both Salome and

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Cleopatra, with both of whom she shared much in common: a beautiful oriental seductress whose tragic story unfolds in an opulent court in the ancient Near East. To summarize the plot briefly. Salammbô is the beautiful priestess daughter of Hamilcar Barca, the great but exiled Carthaginian general. Carthage is threatened because a group of unpaid veterans have rebelled under the leadership of the soldier Matho. Hamilcar is summoned to return to wage war on the rebels and save Carthage, but with the help of the cunning slave Spendius, Matho secretly enters Carthage and steals the sacred veil and palladium of Carthage, the Zaïmph, prompting Salammbô to clandestinely enter the rebel camp to steal it back. Matho has fallen in love with Salammbô but despite a heroic struggle against Hamilcar he is ultimately defeated. During his ritual sacrifice it is implied that Salammbô has fallen in love with him too, and in the final tragic denouement of the book she commits suicide by drinking poison. Typical of the sort of high melodrama that was popular at the fin-­de-siècle, Flaubert’s novel found some belated success. However, despite his attempt to clothe his historical novel in apparently well-­researched detail, it was ultimately only really the beautiful and tragic figure of Salammbô herself that garnered any real interest. ‘Clothe’ being the operative word here, because it was really the opulent detail of costume and jewellery that fired the imagination of Art Nouveau artists, and in this sense the novel was almost ready-­made for them. To quote the description of the heroine at Matho’s sacrifice: From ankles to hips she was sheathed in a net of narrow mesh imitating a fish’s scales, and gleaming like mother of pearl; a solid blue band round her waist showed her breasts through two crescent-­shaped scallops; carbuncle pendants hid their tips. Her headdress was composed of peacock feathers starred with jewels; a wide cloak, white as snow, fell back behind her, and with her elbows in, her knees tightly together, with diamond bracelets at the top of her arms, she sat straight, in a hieratic attitude.57

There are number of elements here dear to Art Nouveau: the scantily-­clad female, the peacock feather, unusual and opulent combinations of colours, and ornate jewellery. Cleopatra had long fascinated artists for the same reasons, and in this sense Salammbô’s reception can be considered a subset of her own. After all she shared many attributes with the historical Egyptian queen and lover of Mark Anthony: an erotic beauty akin to that of a classical or Egyptian statue, royal (or near-­royal in Salammbô’s case) status, a proliferation of oriental trappings, the prominent presence of a snake in her story, a touch of stubbornness, violence and even cruelty (partly reflected in her family), and at times almost supernatural

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– occasionally given literal emphasis – power over men enabling her to render the virtue of a ‘Roman’-type military hero worthless, her existence and involvement at a cataclysmic moment for a great civilization, and her eventual suicide. Salammbô is different to Cleopatra in some respects, however. Despite her obstinacy, she seems less the master of her own fate, and less manipulative as a result. Yet she is a femme fatale – even though she does not choose for Matho to fall in love with her, her beauty nonetheless has a symbolic destructive power in the novel, ultimately realized in Matho’s gruesome death and her own suicide. This destructive power seems inherent to her nature. As a result, artistic receptions of Salammbô, Cleopatra and Salome all draw upon a conventional repertoire of the sexualized and dangerous oriental body. Moreover, the descriptive opulence of Flaubert’s novel appealed to them on its own merits. To give another example of the description of the Carthaginians’ victory feast itself: The feast was to last all night, and lampstands with several branches had been set, like trees, on the carpets of painted wool surrounding the low tables. Great amber jugs, blue glass amphorae, tortoiseshell spoons and round bread rolls clustered together among the double set of pearl-­bordered plates; bunches of grapes with their leaves were twined like thyrsus round ivory vines; blocks of snow were melting on ebony trays, and lemons, pomegranates, pumpkins, and water-­melons made mounds under the tall silver vessels; boars, with mouths agape, sprawled amid powdered spices; hares, still with their fur on, seemed to be leaping among the flowers; seashells were filled with elaborate dishes; pastries had symbolic shapes; when the coverings were lifted from the dishes doves flew out.58

The reference to the thyrsus, the staff carried by Bacchantes and followers of the god Dionysus, makes his cult again a reference point for all that is decadent. In their transformations of Flaubert’s Salammbô, Art Nouveau artists aspired to retain as much as possible of the author’s richness of detail. At the same time, this is combined with their individual stylistic peculiarities. One example is the French artist of the Nancy School Victor Prouvé’s (1858–1943) bookbinding cover design showing Flaubert’s heroine (1893).59 Prouvé produced his bookbinding in collaboration with the Nancy bookbinders René Wiener and Camille Martin for an edition of Flaubert’s novel that they were publishing on the commission of the French painter and sculptor Henri Borde (1888–1958). Its whole conception is very Japanese, with great swathes of space covered by what appears to be a depiction of the Zaïmph veil, on which various astrological symbols have been marked in gold. We are swept up in a great ferment of movement that seems to involve all the individual elements of the composition,

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even though many of these exist independently of each other. On the front cover is the nude figure of Salammbô, her arms raised and her head tilted back as her long black hair falls behind her. Her sacred snake coils around her body as she brings its head to her mouth to kiss it. Beside her we see smoke rising from a sacred censer. On the back cover Prouvé makes direct reference to Flaubert’s text again, showing the horned god to which the noble Carthaginians, in desperation at their siege by Matho’s forces, will sacrifice their own children by fire. We see the chain hanging from his shoulders by which the vessel in which the children are sacrificed is held. Red flames rise from behind the veil towards the barbaric god’s face. The bookbinding is studded with symbols of Carthage drawn from the novel: lions and an Egyptian astrological scarab symbol on the back cover, and a griffin, monkey and fish on the front. Many of these animals and creatures feature in the novel in one way or another. Here we have the erotic interest in Salammbô herself, juxtaposed with the snake (with all its potential for the free use of line so beloved of Art Nouveau) and the cruel image of the god that accepts human sacrifice. Another Art Nouveau conception of the theme, less focused on the tragic elements of the story and more on the figure of the priestess herself, can be seen in Mucha’s lithograph Salammbô60 (1896) (Fig. 19). The image was printed in 1897 in the L’Estampe Moderne series that we discussed in a previous chapter. Mucha engages with classical themes elsewhere (he completed a painting on the theme of Henrik Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? in 1903). And he also produced a Salomé for the same series in 1897. His portrayal of Salammbô here is consistent with his usual style. Mucha imagines Flaubert’s heroine in an adaptation of the author’s description of how she was attired for the victory celebration (see quotation above). She stands upright in a long white dress that leaves her breasts exposed, heavily adorned with green and red necklaces, earrings and pendants, and wearing a great peacock feather headdress. Her legs are close together and her elbows held in to her sides, with her forearms outstretched and palms upturned. In an expression of divine inspiration, not without a note of sadness, she looks up towards the sky. Kneeling before her a ceremonial harpist strums on her instrument, herself naked to the waist and bedecked with jewels, while smoke rises from censers by her side. All is covered with red and yellow flowers. Behind Salammbô we see the stylized image of a lion, and beyond the hazy red and yellow outlines of the coast and the skyline of Carthage. All the sky is patterned with dense wavy lines, and serried ranks of six-­point stars. The density of this image almost makes us feel as if we have inhaled too much incense. It departs to a degree from the other highly-­bejewelled portrayals of

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Fig. 19  Alphonse Mucha, Salammbô.

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Flaubert’s heroine – we might for example compare that of Mucha’s collaborator the French artist Georges Antoine Rochegrosse (1859–1938) from 1886 which likewise seeks to capture much of Flaubert’s detail but is somewhat more sparing. But consistent with Mucha’s usual graphic design his composition is intense, full of movement and melodrama. With his baroque joy in such detail, in a sense his portrayal of Flaubert is perhaps truest to the author. Three other variant portrayals of his heroine that we might compare are Carl Strathmann’s (1866– 1939) Salammbô61 (1894–5), František Kobliha’s (1877–1962) Salambo62 (1913) and Gaston Bussière’s (1862–1920) Salammbo63 (1920). Strathmann’s version is much more focused on the great black snake, whose presence is at least as important as Salammbô’s own in this image. Combined with its dark tones, it is a far more malevolent image of Flaubert’s heroine than that of Mucha, and relies heavily on the biblical imagery of Eve and of sin. By contrast, Kobliha’s conception of her is much simpler and, being closer in spirit to Beardsley, shows only her pale nude figure and long black hair as the black serpent coils around her feet. And in complete contrast again Bussière imagines her as a sort of young Byzantine princess. His Salammbô is rather a pretty red-­headed girl with blue eyes, rather elegantly dressed, who looks out at us curiously and in apparent innocence. Bussière’s depiction of Flaubert’s heroine is a departure from the highly sexually charged images of many of his predecessors. Nonetheless, what all these images have in common is an almost voyeuristic interest in the beautiful priestess as she haunts the inner sanctum of the Carthaginian citadel, whether or not this is an erotic interest. In this they share the spirit of the author and show how the ideal of the tragic oriental beauty continued to preoccupy the minds of artists throughout the period we are looking at. Moving on from the specific figure of Salammbô, no discussion of Art Nouveau’s erotic transformations of the classical would be complete without a more detailed consideration of Beardsley. Indeed, the depth of his, particularly satirical, engagement with classical literature in his art is profound. The erotic and psychological qualities of his drawings, which in their own unique way reveal the fin-­de-siècle fascination with Freud’s ‘Id’, have been explored by others,64 but they bear close attention here because of how they frequently involve direct reception of classical literature. Beardsley’s deep immersion in that literature is so obvious from his work that it is hardly worth mentioning, but his erotic artistic expressions of it are worth examining for what they reveal about the broader nature of classical reception in the 1890s. Even if his interpretations of ancient literature are consistently personal in their take, his literary references are also often highly specific in nature and presuppose a

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certain familiarity with the works in question. This is one aspect of Beardsley’s classical reception, and we will look at some examples here. It was not limited to this though, for Beardsley also had a direct relationship with classical art and draws on it, occasionally directly (in the case of the Attic vase painter, Douris) but more often indirectly, in his own art. And this classical reception can be blended with reception of other past artistic styles, and thereby transformed into something new. As Schmutzler (1962: 27) puts it: We know that Beardsley combined Japanese elements with stylistic and ornamental features which he found in pictures painted on vases by the Attic vase painter, Douris. Beardsley could not avoid responding to the Greek technique of linear silhouettes, to the sharp, precise, and streamlined contour of the shadowless and spaceless pictures that decorated Greek vases.

Moreover, it is worth bearing in mind that Beardsley was very well read indeed. He had a strong penchant for French literature, and as a result this often becomes an intermediate point of reference for his receptions of all things classical. For example, in a letter of 1896 Beardsley writes to his correspondent: I have just been lent a study of moeurs antique entitled Aphrodite. It is by Pierre Louÿs. You have I expect read it.65

Pierre Louÿs’ (1870–1925) Aphrodite: moeurs antique (1892) is a novel set in ancient Alexandria that tells the story of the tragic love between the courtesan Chrysis and the sculptor Démétrios. As well as being an historical novel of the ilk of Flaubert, it also toys with the concept of the female body as reified sexual object (in a rather overdone episode, following Chrysis’ eventual suicide the sculptor gruesomely uses her body to pose for a statue of Immortal Life). This is just one very limited example of the sort of literature we know that Beardsley was reading, and the levels at which he would probably have been able to engage with both classical literature and classical art. It also belies a certain interest on his part in creative transformations of the classics in his own day. To begin with a drawing he made for the magazine The Studio, his The Birthday of Madame Cigale66 (1892) (Fig.  20) is a curious illustration of Schmutzler’s comments above about his blended receptions. It is also a good example of how he was able to transform the classics in multiple ways at the same time. Beardsley’s drawing shows a strange scene featuring a train of motley figures bringing gifts to a woman, named Madame Cigale (the title is inscribed at the top of the drawing). She sits to the left of the composition on a sort of throne wearing a great robe that leaves her chest bare. The nearest figure to her,

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Fig. 20  Aubrey Beardsley, The Birthday of Madame Cigale.

at the front of this procession, bows before her as he offers his gift to her. He is a little man and appears to be a sort of clerk. Immediately behind him is another odd figure in a top hat and dress coat, a man with pointy ears. By his side a further figure lumbers along as he struggles with the weight of a giant bouquet of flowers. At the end are two more figures, one a sprite-­like child and another man with a hooked nose that again looks like a clerk (as Beardsley himself had been), each bringing their own gifts. At the sight of all this Madame Cigale waves to them graciously as if she were a queen. The rest of the scene is very Japanese in style, as Madame Cigale’s own attire, with a cherry blossom in the foreground, and a stylized border featuring a stork, a snake and a peacock. On the far wall of her chamber we see a design featuring a flock of birds. Many attempts have been made to decipher this enigmatic image. Given Beardsley’s interest in the author (whom he illustrated elsewhere), the explanation that it is an illustration of Lucian’s True History, and the episode where the narrator visits the ‘Island of Dreams’, seems most convincing. To quote the relevant excerpt from the Greek author: The dreams themselves differed widely in character and appearance. Some were well-­grown, smooth-­skinned, shapely, handsome fellows, others rough, short, and ugly; some apparently made of gold, others of common cheap stuff. Among them some were found with wings, and other strange variations; others again were like the mummers in a pageant, tricked out as kings or Gods or what not.67

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Despite the clear reference to a Japanese inspiration, it is probable that ancient Greek vase painting has also played a role in inspiring this work. In his analysis of this drawing, Clark (1978: 68) argues that this plays a significant role here: ‘In Madame Cigale the severe and economical line with which these far from admirable characters are drawn informs us that Beardsley had found a new source of inspiration – one which was to mean incomparably more to him than Japaneseries – the fifth-­century Greek vases in the British Museum.’ Clark, who does not accept Beardsley as really an adherent of Art Nouveau at all in the way Mucha was, mentions the Attic vase painter Douris as a model. Although he does not mention a specific vase of the artist’s on which Beardsley may have modelled his Madame Cigale, one likely candidate is an Attic red-­figure pyxis in the British Museum entitled Women at Home68 (c. 470 BC) (Fig. 21), by a follower of Douris. One side of the pyxis shows a compositionally very similar scene to that in Beardsley’s drawing, with one woman seated to the left of the scene, her left arm raised in acknowledgement of a vessel brought to her by another woman who approaches from the right offering it to her. We know that Beardsley had spent time studying such ancient Greek vase painting in the British Museum, and it seems very likely that he drew on this directly in his Madame Cigale, as he did other classical art in his other drawings. Another example of where we know that Beardsley illustrated Lucian is in his drawing A Snare of Vintage69 (1894), two years later. This depicts another episode from the True History, this time in which the narrator and his companions encounter magic vines with the upper body of women who desire to mate with them (two of his unlucky companions take up the offer and can never break themselves free again!): We then crossed the stream where we found it passable, and came among a world of vines of incredible number, which towards the earth had firm stocks and of a good growth; but the tops of them were women, from the hip upwards, having all their proportions perfect and complete.70

Fig. 21  Follower of Douris, Women at Home, Attic red-­figure pyxis.

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Beardsley had been commissioned to illustrate the whole of the True History in December 1892, but ultimately didn’t complete more than five drawings as a result of the pressure he was under at the time to finish his Morte d’Arthur illustrations. In the end, only two made it into the final publication in 1894. Beardsley also illustrated Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans. In his illustration to this episode, Beardsley brings alive Lucian’s sexual satire by showing us the vine women, their hair a mass of grapes and wearing the expression of the drunken molester, as they powerfully bear down on the narrator’s companions. For their part, they are all abject terror, but we can see it is already too late for them! In Lucian’s True History, Beardsley found ample ammunition for his sexual satire. Another author whom he turned to with the same wit was the Roman satirist Juvenal. The artist made a number of illustrations to his sixth satire, a misogynistic rant against women in general and a few characters from Roman history in particular. The work was commissioned by the publisher Leonard Smithers, who encouraged Beardsley’s interest in classical and French texts. As Beardsley wrote to his correspondent in July 1896: ‘Juvenal number six is my next book, & I am making the translation as well as the pictures.’71 This is a reminder that Beardsley was himself something of a Latin scholar (we will encounter another example of this in a later chapter). His Frontispiece to Juvenal (1895), which appeared in the fourth volume of The Yellow Book, was completed immediately after he had finished his illustrations to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Fig. 22) (see discussion below) and is executed in a similar style. His drawing shows an old Roman woman being carried along in an ornate box carriage by two uniformed monkeys. It has all of Beardsley’s wonted quirkiness (a skit was made by punch on its publication). In the background we see a row of Regency buildings – not really ancient Rome – which Clark (1978: 126) identifies as a combination of actual buildings in London and Brighton. Beardsley had a keen sense for Juvenal’s satirical absurdities and brings these alive in his illustrations, using anachronistic licence to do this after his own fashion. Yet Beardsley clearly did entertain a sort of anti-­ideal – by which he was nonetheless fascinated – of a debauched and at times rather more comfortable Mediterranean south. This was occasionally linked to Roman history, but occasionally also just to the city of Rome itself. As he wrote in late 1896: I have been whiling away my semi-­convalescent moments with Zola’s Rome, in its thoroughly bad English dress. I always melt over descriptions of the South & sunshine.72

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Fig. 22  Aubrey Beardsley, Lysistrata.

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Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether, in the ideal of the hot and sexually liberal Rome, Beardsley found the opposite of the cosseted life that he led as a result of his severe illness. This was increasingly debilitating for him as time went on and ultimately led to his early death. It is fair to say that the Juvenal illustrations are ambiguous on this point, while the Lysistrata seems to revel more in its own blatant eroticism, as we shall see. His two illustrations of Messalina, the notoriously depraved wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, show the caustic nature of his sexual wit when fully deployed. His Messalina Returning Home73 (1895) is one of the five drawings made by Beardsley for Juvenal, more precisely of the satirist’s description of the empress’ habit of leaving the palace to assume the mock persona of the prostitute ‘Lycisca’: There she stood naked with her gilt breasts, feigning the name of Lycisca, and shews the belly which bore thee, noble Britannicus. With kindness she received those who came in, and asked for money. By and by, the pimp now dismissing his girls, she went away sad. But (which was all she could) she yet last of them all shut up her cell, still burning with desire; and tired, but not satiated with men, she went off.74

Beardsley’s drawing follows Juvenal’s original description closely, showing Messalina as she walks the streets of the city in disguise, accompanied by a female attendant. The empress wears a long skirt and heavy cape, drawn up over head, but with her breasts bare. The portrayal of Messalina is very strong and captures all the frustration of her depravity in her embittered expression (Clark (1978: 134) even went so far as to call this ‘one of Beardsley’s most explicit studies of evil’). And once again, Beardsley makes his scene timeless by transposing it to a contemporary urban setting. In a second version of the same theme from two years later, Messalina Returning from the Bath75 (1897), Beardsley again captures her sexual frustration in comic fashion. This time we see the empress as she ascends the stairs, her blouse slipping down her overweight body to reveal her breasts, as she stares ahead clenching her fists in evident frustration. It is again a masterful portrayal of the childishly comic anger of Messalina. As Clark (1978: 30) trenchantly put it, referring to the ‘real ferocity’ of this image: ‘This is satire, and worthy of the Juvenal that it illustrates’. In his illustrations to the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, completed between June and August 1896, Beardsley gave full rein to his sense of satire as it intersected with the erotic. The illustrations consist of eight large ink drawings and depict episodes from Aristophanes’ play. This had first been performed in 411 BC at the height of the Peloponnesian War between Athens

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and Sparta. It imagines a comic scenario in which the Athenian and Spartan women, led by Lysistrata, try to stop the war by withholding sexual favours from their husbands until they agree to stop fighting. Immediately after the completion of Beardsley’s The Rape of the Lock (1897), during his stay at the Spread Eagle hotel in Epsom, Smithers commissioned the artist to illustrate a translation of the play that he planned to publish. Several of the illustrations appeared much later in a privately printed edition but before he died, in a fit of remorse for their sexual obscenity, Beardsley requested of Smithers that he destroy them (to no avail). However, Beardsley had clearly valued them at the time he finished them, writing of them in summer 1896 as ‘in a way the best things I have ever done’.76 Some of the drawings are very explicit. One illustrating the Lacedaemonian ambassadors shows them all with oversized erect phalluses. Several images show Lysistrata and the Athenian women in poses that resemble masturbation, and one showing the toilet of Lampito is really anyone’s guess. In them Beardsley seems at once to have let loose both his own sexual fantasies and his satirical gifts. It is unclear whether Beardsley got his inspiration directly from the playwright or whether through an intermediate reception or some combination of the two. However, in a letter of late 1896 he writes: ‘The conversational pieces of Maurice Donnay are most entertaining; I knew nothing of him before, except Lysistrata, which you have of course read & seen acted.’77 Maurice Donnay (1859–1945) was a French dramatist who wrote a play entitled Lysistrata (1892). Beardsley’s interpretation of Aristophanes is very close to Donnay’s. The prologue to Donnay’s play gives a sense of the author’s similarly at once satirical and reverential perspective on the Greeks, both of which we can find in the broader body of Beardsley’s work too: Only they had the Gods, That’s rather what you miss; It was their radiant side, Their temple wasn’t the bank, But from the old Parthenon Upstanding on its white columns, To the humble nameless rock Lost under moss and branches, Every place was inhabited By pure divinity.78

It is likely, then, that Aristophanes’ original play had been refracted through an intermediate reception for Beardsley in the form of this French play. To

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complicate this further by adding another angle to Beardsley’s reception, Howard (1996: 27) has also argued that in his illustrations ‘Beardsley enriched erotic themes borrowed from Utamaro; he thus “perverted” a Greek subject by treating it in the Japanese style.’ Beardsley’s transformations of the classical in his erotic satire simultaneously show his close awareness of the original text, but equally his flexibility to adapt to the receptions of others, and even to introduce non-­ classical elements where he saw fit. If anything, they show just how versatile Art Nouveau receptions of the classics could be. Before we conclude this chapter we must also briefly consider Art Nouveau’s reception of one other figure from classical myth, Psyche. This is because the story of Cupid and Psyche, as told by the second-­century Roman author Apuleius in his Metamorphoses (books 4–6), became a favourite motif for many Art Nouveau and Symbolist artists, coming to function as an allegory for both desire and the soul. Apuleius’ narrative tells of the youngest daughter of a king and queen whom many admired instead of Venus who, taking umbrage at this, dispatched Cupid to get revenge. Cupid clumsily scratched himself with his own dart, falling in love with Psyche and disobeying his mother. Meanwhile, after receiving an oracle, her father exposed her to die but she is instead swept up by the West Wind to a magic palace where Cupid secretly impregnates her. In jealousy at this, her sisters put her up to killing to invisible Cupid, but when she actually sees him she is startled and wounds herself on one of his arrows, falling in love with Cupid in turn. He takes flight in fear while Psyche wanders the wilderness facing various trials at Venus’ behest, which she completes with the aid of the other gods. In the end, after falling into a deep sleep in the underworld she is awoken by Cupid, who takes her to Olympus where they are sacredly wed and where Zeus grants her immortality. This allegorical representation of the marriage of love and the soul had an obvious appeal for artists at the time, with their deep interest in portraying different psychological states. We have mentioned Freud in this connection already. While the erotic was a major part of Art Nouveau artists’ interest in the unconscious – and the myth of Cupid and Psyche could play a significant role here – it was not their only interest in the unconscious. In their continual probing for metaphors to express this interest in the deeper recesses of the human soul, classical myth and symbolism in general became an important source of inspiration, but the figure of Psyche held a particular fascination in this context. Indeed, the Freudian concept of the psyche entered into the theorizing of art critics. We see, for example, the critic Šalda (1903: 189) writing in Volné Směry of how: ‘Culture does not believe that the beautiful soul exists in poor, neglected

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bodies; culture is the marriage of spirit and mass, Fysis and Psyche – it is the kingdom of fulfilment.’79 As is clear from this sort of theorizing reflections on the soul and its relationship to art could lead to some rather abstract reasoning. Three works that all consider the figure of Psyche from a slightly different, and more psychological, standpoint are Klinger’s Psyche on the Cliff 80 (1880), Toorop’s Psyche81 (1898) and James Herbert McNair’s Psyche at the Well of Forgiveness82 (1911). Klinger’s version, one of a series of illustrations which he made to accompany Reinhold Jachmann’s translation of Apuleius (1881), shows Psyche as she stands by the sea looking cold, lost and vulnerable. In the black and white engraving we see her erect frontal figure and distressed expression as she looks out at us. She is standing on a cliff edge, the unforgiving sea stretching away to one side of her. Her robes are wrapped tightly around her and her hand is raised to her face in a gesture of anxiety. This probably illustrates Psyche’s exposure on the rock by her father before she is taken up to heaven on the West Wind to meet the invisible Cupid for the first time. It is a deeply psychological imagining of Apuleius’ heroine, in which Klinger brings home his conception of the loneliness of the human soul and its ultimate isolation. Morton (2014: 242) speaks of how Klinger’s illustrations for the Jachmann translation schematically emphasize these factors in their design: ‘Emotional identification is facilitated because settings have minimal narrative detail; spaces are flattened, simplified, and cropped; and gestures are universal signifiers of unhappiness.’ By contrast, Toorop’s cover design for the Dutch writer Louis Couperus’ (1863–1923) Symbolist fairy tale Psyche emphasizes the flight of the soul and its exaltation. In a letter to his publisher, the writer had specifically requested that Toorop illustrate his novel. In the cover design, we see the naked figure of Psyche as she clings to the back of a winged horse in mid-­flight. Psyche is depicted in profile in simple outline drawing, shutting her eyes as she flies through the air. True to his usual style, the rest of Toorop’s design is highly stylized, with the great wings of the horse filling much of the cover and a curvilinear floral design filling the rest of the composition. Despite this, Toorop’s conception still shows an emotional interest in the figure of Psyche, whose body he has elongated and made prostrate in a gesture of submission – perhaps of submission to her fate. In a personal innovation, he has also given her two small wings. McNair’s later drawing goes even further in exploring the human elements of Psyche’s story in a complex Symbolist allegory. In his small watercolour drawing, the prostrate figure of the naked Psyche, conceived of in the style of the Glasgow School, lies in the centre of a deserted plain by the side of a well. A dainty little Cupid, very much smaller than her and complete with butterfly wings, sits beside her and

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embraces her head. In the well a little mermaid with green hair pulls at Psyche’s arm as if she is trying to pull her into the well. Meanwhile, butterflies flutter above the body of Psyche, a conventional symbol for the soul in art. It is unclear which episode from Apuleius’ narrative McNair intends to illustrate here, if any specific episode at all, as is the exact meaning of this obviously allegorical composition. But in his Symbolist conception the figures of both Cupid and Psyche have become signifiers of desire, the soul, their mutual interaction and their interaction in turn with the other forces that govern human life. As a final note on the subject of Psyche, it is also interesting to see how the Czech architect Jan Kotěra (1871–1923) imagined a more concrete homage to the marriage of love and the soul in his Temple of Amor and Psyche – Roman fantasy83 (1898). Completed during the architect’s study visit to Italy in 1898, it depicts an imagined design for a temple dedicated to the couple set within the Italian landscape. Even in its time this work was recognized as belonging to the realm of fantasy about the ancient world, rather than reflecting any historical reality, as its title suggests. The Czech critic Mádl (1899: 117) highlighted this, refusing to accept in it the reconstruction of actual antique architecture. What we are seeing here is the projection of a contemporary artist’s ideal of the classical world back onto its imagined historical reality world. That is to say, Kotěra was fascinated by the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and its allegorical potential. So the idea that a religious cult might once have existed dedicated to this myth was something he would like to have believed, even if he didn’t have any real evidence for this. In this we see the classical world deliberately transformed into something it may never have actually been. Desire was perhaps the single greatest preoccupation for Art Nouveau artists, whether that was desire of life, beauty, the soul, or sex. In this chapter, we have seen how classical myth, literature and art were all of service to artists in creating their individual expressions of desire. We have seen how this could span everything from abstract personifications, or meditations on the nature of the human soul, to the frankly semi-­pornographic, but to limit an examination of how Art Nouveau used the classics to articulation of individual desires would be a mistake, because its artists also recruited the ancient in another, characteristically nineteenth-­century, cause.

6

Nation Nation, race, civilization, empire. These were all words that were very much on the lips of thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and beyond. Much attention has been given in existing studies to how this peculiarly nineteenth-­century phenomenon evolved during the course of that century, with a view to its consequences for the century that followed. Some have turned their attention to how this growth in national identity manifested itself in art, and others still have considered the role that the classics played in this process.1 However, very little attention has been paid to the intersection between nationalism and Art Nouveau. Admittedly nationalist Art Nouveau is a phenomenon more prevalent in central, eastern and north-­eastern Europe than it is in western Europe. The unfortunate but somewhat inevitable greater focus of anglophone, francophone and German scholarship on western forms of Art Nouveau has perhaps been a contributing factor in the relative neglect of its nationalist forms elsewhere. Still less attention has been played to the ways in which Art Nouveau transformed the classics in its nationalist expressions. This chapter is at least an attempt to partially redress that balance. Partially because the relationship between Art Nouveau and nationalism is a large one, and could alone fill a whole volume. Instead, we will consider here just a few salient examples of nationalist receptions of the classics by Art Nouveau artists. This by way of illustrating how creatively classical myth, literature and art could be re-­ invented, and given new meaning, in the service of the national cause. The reasons why Art Nouveau developed a nationalist bent in the first place are complex and also a testimony to the very schizophrenic nature of the style. After all, Art Nouveau was on the one hand the art of the new technological age, embracing change, and – one might expect – the sharing of ideas in a new more global way than had ever been seen before. Hence, part of the reason for its name. But, as Lahor (2007: 6) rightly points out, Art Nouveau had its roots in England, ‘where at the outset it truly was a national movement’. Indeed, both nationalism and cosmopolitanism ‘are evident and in conflict’. Why? Because

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much of the impetus for Art Nouveau in the first place, as had also been the case for Pre-Raphaelitism in England before it, was about returning to folk roots and national traditions in the attempt to seek out new and innovative forms of design. Yes, this was about trying to create something new and folk art could only be a starting point, but there was still the sense that inspiration had to come from somewhere else in breaking free of historicism and the Academy. The philhellenism of the nineteenth century had already been variously (though not always successfully) co-­opted in the cause of nationalism, particularly in Germany, as Most (2008) has shown – which is itself a complex history. Art Nouveau’s nationalism both grew out of that philhellenism – even if not always intentionally – and sought out national motifs for its own reasons of style and patronage. So, to a degree an interest in the national was built into the style’s development from its inception. But the dynamic was not a straightforward one, and was affected by the ways in which new nationalisms related to new technologies. As Howard (1996: 8) points out, this could subtly affect the ways that Art Nouveau artists engaged with historical or artistic tradition: ‘Those countries, regions or artists vying to show themselves at the forefront of the modern machine age, could strive to show their embrace of modernity in an original way, deliberately avoiding recourse to tradition.’ There is no better place to begin such an examination than Poland. With one or two exceptions in anglophone scholarship, most notably Howard (1996), nationalist Art Nouveau receptions of classical antiquity in central and eastern Europe have been largely overlooked. Of those receptions, the Polish case is perhaps the best and most easily intelligible example of this dynamic. Poland had long been caught in the crossfire between German, Russian, Austrian and other influences and incursions. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the frustrations of Polish nationalists had begun to vent themselves culturally in a big way. To a degree, this could be argued to be a symptom of the political repression of Polish nationalism that had characterized the earlier century, whereby poetic and artistic expression had become one of few legitimate outlets. At the turn of the century, the Młoda Polska (‘Young Poland’) movement had become a focus of these efforts and became the nexus for a major channel of artistic output by a generation of nationalist Polish artists. In parallel with this, the foundation of the Polish Applied Art Society in 1901, on the direct inspiration of the British Arts and Crafts movement, also did a lot to inspire the development of new styles through the encouragement it gave to the collecting of objects of folk art. By 1902, the society had its own publication with materials and illustrations relating to both folk and contemporary art, with the magazines Life

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(which ran from 1897 to 1900) and Chimera (which ran from 1901 to 1907) – the classical reference of whose title is telling – providing a space for the artistic development of the ideas which they inspired.2 But it was a complex dynamic, something reflected in the Art Nouveau Poland produced. As Howard (1996: 123) summarizes: Many Polish nationalists turned [. . .] either to a vernacular romanticism or to modern universalism [. . .] On the other hand, the occupants were also happy to encourage the development of the international trend of the Secession Style since this appeared to contradict and suppress the nationalist inclinations of the population. The result was that Art Nouveau in Poland, as in Catalonia, Scotland and elsewhere, was to be promoted and characterised by a dual set of stimuli – nationalist interest and its suppression. It was the meeting ground for conflicting ideologies, a laboratory where the elements were being mixed, if not united, and convoluted solutions obtained.

Wyspiański, one of the founding members of the Polish Applied Art Society, is probably the single most important nationalist Art Nouveau artist in his region. As we have mentioned in passing in a previous chapter, his engagement with the classical world was profound, and in his dramatic productions Wyspiański breathed new life and local meaning into classical myth, Homeric epic and Roman history. The transformations of the classical in his art were also extremely versatile, and the boundary between the national, the religious and the classical can be very fluid indeed. A good example of this is his decoration for the Franciscan Church in Krakow (completed between 1895 and 1902). His stained glass Ascension3 (1904) window at the end of the nave, above the altar, depicts Christ as Dionysus (Figs. 23 and 24). Christ’s association with Dionysus was not the artist’s invention, where representations of Dionysus influenced depictions of Christ in early Christian art, and Hölderlin and Nietzsche among others had exploited the parallels between the two in their writings. The upper body of Christ appears in a swirl of red feathered wings, with all the momentum of the epiphany of Dionysus in Titian’s (c. 1490–1576) Dionysus and Ariadne, floating above the saint down on earth below him. On receiving the commission for the work the artist had consulted Eugène Viollet-­le-Duc’s (1814–79) Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVe siècles (1858), in the end opting for a dense and colourful Młoda Polska style with frescoes on every wall of the church and brightly-­coloured stained glass windows. Wyspiański’s ability to blend the iconographies of different artistic styles, including in a sacred context, was new.

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Fig. 23  Stanisław Wyspiański, Ascension (detail), Franciscan Church, Krakow.

However, it is another project that shows just how deep Wyspiański’s nationalist engagement with the classics was. Between 1904 and 1905, he worked with the architect Władysław Ekielski (1855–1927) on a plan to redevelop Wawel Hill, Krakow’s ancient fortress and spiritual home of Polish nationalism, as a sort of Polish Acropolis modelled after that of ancient Athens. The idea was to create

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Fig. 24  Stanisław Wyspiański, Ascension, Franciscan Church, Krakow.

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a national sanctuary and space where cultural activities promoting the ideal of a free Poland could be held. Wyspiański and Ekielski’s architectural plan even included a great amphitheatre, as well as several other buildings. In a lyrical poem, the artist spoke of this as a ‘great theatre’, although in practice he appears to have vacillated between an open-­air theatre after the style of an ancient Greek model, or something nearer to but grander than Wagner’s theatre at Bayreuth. Wawel Hill, with the Vistula river flowing beside it, and their mythological story feature repeatedly in Wyspiański’s plays. As Terlecki (1983: 19) explains, for the artist they were ‘the legend, the very legend, the archmyth’. He also wrote a play entitled Acropolis (1904), a full-­length drama in four acts. In a curious innovation, typical of Wyspiański the playwright, none of the individual acts bore any narrative relationship with any of the others, each being set in a different historical epoch. Classical symbolism is nonetheless scattered throughout the entire play, while the whole of the second act consists of a re-­creation of the besieged Trojan citadel of Homer’s Iliad, complete with Priam, Hecuba and their children – the virtuous Hector and luxuriant Paris symbolizing moral poles – which the playwright directly equates with Wawel. All this classical dress really amounted to a way of saying that Wawel was worth more than the Austrian military garrison that it had become. Ultimately, the plans came to nothing, and a fairly advanced version of the project was published by Ekielski only after Wyspiański’s death. Despite this, his extensive work on these plans is testimony to the degree to which this Art Nouveau artist, in formulating perhaps his greatest and grandest nationalist scheme of all, leaned on the direct inspiration of classical architecture and the poetic inspiration of classical epic. In another work which he did realize, his stained glass window for the Medical Society building in Krakow entitled Apollo: The System of Copernicus4 (1904) (Fig. 25), we gain an insight into the grandeur of conception that was so bound up with all things classical for Wyspiański. On receipt of the commission to decorate the interior décor of this building, he set about completing the work after the fashion of what he conceived of as the model décor for a public recreation room (other Polish artists were undertaking similar commissions during this period, for example Mehoffer’s work for the Krakow Chamber of Commerce and Industry). As well as the stained-­glass windows, Wyspiański also designed the staircase, balustrade and decoration for the conference room at the top of the staircase, in a holistic conception. In his stained glass window, which has pride of place over the staircase, we see the figure of the bound Apollo in a complex symbolic allegory intended to portray the movement of the heavenly spheres in the solar system after the theories of

Fig. 25  Stanisław Wyspiański, Apollo: The System of Copernicus, Medical Society building, Krakow.

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Copernicus. The composition is dominated by the great figure of Apollo representing the sun, his torso glowing gold and red, but who is bound fast to his lyre in an expression of the immobility of the sun. He is encircled by blue, white and turquoise concentric circles, in which we see other planets moving, here symbolized by their divine classical namesakes. Immediately to the left of Apollo we see two old men, representing Jupiter and Saturn, below which is the head of the god of war Mars in his plumed helmet. Below him, the messenger god Mercury runs towards us, while opposite him we see two figures representing Pluto and Venus. Swimming across the very bottom of the window we can see Neptune. This is a grand conception of the astronomical pantheon expressed through an allegory of the classical gods. While it is not explicitly nationalist in its outlook, what it does demonstrate is the sort of proud and bold ideal image of classical myth that Wyspiański entertained in his work. All the same, the figure of the bound Apollo, with all his indignant pride and desire to break free, such that he might be truly resplendent, seems to be not without something of a nationalist ring to it (a study for the head of the figure of Apollo also exists from 1904,5 showing the attention that the artist paid to its conception). Compositionally similar depictions of the bound Polonia were frequent at this time, for example in the work of Malczewski. Malczewski, born to the Polish patriot and social activist Julian Malczewski in Radom in Russian-­controlled Congress Poland, employs a forceful and highly ambiguous symbolism in his art – examples of which we have encountered in previous chapters. Other than the erotic, the national is probably the most prominent inspiration in his work and he shared the same fervent Polish patriotism that Wyspiański had. As we have seen already, Malczewski’s use of classical motifs can be very versatile indeed, and his use of them in nationalist allegories is no exception. As Howard (1996: 135) puts it: Malczewski was responsible for an early form of national romanticism that was overtly patriotic and introspective [. . .] Often, his morbid national and personal allegorism is stressed through the use of fantastic hybrid creatures, angels, androgynes, satyrs and fauns.

One such example is his use of the faun and other such symbolism in his Law, Fatherland, Art6 (1903), a triptych of three different paintings one on each of the themes of the title. True to his usual style, two of the three paintings feature self-­ portraits of the artist shown in different guises. The one which does not, the central canvas of the triptych, Fatherland, instead features an allegorical representation of a noblewoman in a red cloak standing in a field of flowers set

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against a Polish landscape (in which we can make out the distant spires of churches), accompanied by a young boy and a young girl, who holds a manacle in her hands. A typical representation of Poland by Malczewski, he does not fail to remind us of her national enslavement. The Art section of the triptych does feature the artist, who wears a military uniform as he is led along in a procession with other of his countrymen, his head bowed. Behind them is a great horse, and a red-­haired young woman who seems to be an allegory of art, holding a laurel branch in her hand. The exact meaning is unclear, but the classical symbolism here implies national liberation through art. However, of most interest to us is the Law section of the triptych. This painting, really another self-­portrait of the artist, shows just his upper body in profile. Sunlight streams in from the upper right of the composition, shining on the top of his bald pate and glinting on his blue shirt. He is flanked by two allegorical figures. To his right, standing in the shade and facing in the opposite direction to the artist, is a woman. Her face is livid and she leans on a scythe, an allegory of death. By contrast, to Malczewski’s right, we see the rather different figure of a young male faun, his head bent and his face red as he blows on his reed pipe. His hair, out of which his horns sprout, is decked with leaves. As the artist, he is bathed in light, and Malczewski’s gaze is fixed on him. This triptych is probably one of the artist’s most symbolically dense. It is testimony to the degree to which he could combine classical and national motifs to create a very personal expression of his nationalist feeling. The Law and Art canvases are evidently intended to comment on the central panel of the triptych showing the Polish fatherland. It is law and art that come together to nourish the fatherland, which is diminished by their absence. However, considering the Law canvas separately, it is interesting that within this individual allegory we find an opposition constructed between the faun and death, between whom the artist himself seems to be caught. A logical reading of this would be that the faun represents life. In his person, he embodies all that the pale image of death, standing in the shadows behind the artist, does not: life, lust, sun and song. Law is then the balance that must be struck between life and death. But what complicates this reading is that the woman who represents death is the same woman that we see in the central fatherland canvas. Yet it is the faun that Malczewski turns towards. Is there a secondary level of symbolism here suggesting that the joie-­de-vivre that the faun represents could be a distraction for the artist (and maybe others) from the serious national cause in which, in the Art section, he shows himself as soldier and for which he feels he ought to be able to face the ultimate sacrifice if required? Malczewski seems to be telling us that

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his conception of his art, and his national mission as an artist, is a fundamentally serious one. As ever, Malczewski’s exact meaning in this work defies easy interpretation, perhaps for the very reason that it is so deeply personal. But it is clear that the artist saw no incompatibility between the classical and the personal. In the case of his painting Polonia7 (1914), he transforms a specific classical myth in a national and personal allegory expressing his disappointment at world events and the continued submission of Poland in 1914. The painting shows the allegorical figure of Polonia, a young woman (Maria Balowa again) dressed in a chiton and wearing a band of gold about her temples, her arms crossed on her chest and smiling in the sunshine as she is led along by Hermes. The god stands to her left, a muscular young man wearing Hermes’ cap and bearing his caduceus wand, with which he guides souls to the underworld. Immediately behind them we see a Polish soldier in his long overcoat, a laurel wreath on his brow. His face is covered but he pulls down his scarf to look briefly at the young woman (who seems to be turning in response to this attention). Far off in the background we can make out the figure of an old bearded man ferrying a small boat, who looks intently in their direction. As we observe the dark scene around we can also see the figure of another soldier walking in his direction and we realize we are in a trench. Malczewski here re-­tells the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the bard’s beloved whom he failed to lead back from the underworld after breaking his promise not to look upon her until they returned to the world of the living. However, instead of Orpheus we have the Polish soldier in the trench, daring to look upon his beloved Polonia. The ferryman who beckons behind is then Charon, who in classical myth (and Dante) ferried the souls of the dead to the underworld. We see that Hermes’ hand already reaches out towards Polonia, ready to lead her back to the ferryman, and to leave the Polish soldier forlorn. We can already see another Polish soldier behind heading in his direction. Her apparent joy is a sad contrast with the otherwise funereal nature of this painting. In this transformation of the myth, Malczewski expresses all his disappointment in war and the dashed national hopes of his country. It is another example from the end of our period that shows how an artist could creatively reinvent the classics in the service of a nationalist (and in this case frustrated) ideal. Similar themes emerge again in another painting entitled, Nike of the Legions8 (1916) (Fig. 26). In this a Nike dressed in white (Maria Balowa) sits on a fence in the countryside, with a dead or dying legionary soldier strewn at her feet. The sky has turned an ominous shade of reddish purple, as she herself seems to cast a

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Fig. 26  Jacek Malczewski, Nike of the Legions.

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deathly red glow. In the background, we see a bare landscape marked only by the presence of manmade structures. In this case, the artist uses the classical Nike, her wings resembling those of the Polish eagle, to again make a comment on the nature of war and its consequences for Poland. As in Polonia, the bright figure of the young woman in the countryside strikes a strange note beside the corpse of the soldier and the desolation of the rest of the scene. In another painting, Nike in the Artist’s Studio (1922), we also see him experimenting with similar iconography. As we have seen, Malczewski could incorporate his favourite classical motifs into his portraiture as a way of commenting on those portrayed. He also did this in many of his portraits of contemporary Polish patriots and historical figures. In his The Story of a Song (Portrait of Adam Asnyk)9 (1899), he depicts the Positivist Polish poet and dramatist Adam Asnyk (1838–97) two years after his death, who had taken part in the 1863 January Uprising against occupying Russian troops. A favourite figure, he also portrayed Asnyk in another work, Portrait of Adam Asnyk with Muse (1895–7). In The Story of a Song, the elderly poet and dramatist is shown as a heroic figure, his serious eyes downcast beneath a careworn and furrowed brow, as he leans on his staff. Yet the figure of Asnyk only fills the lower part of the composition, its upper half entirely being dominated by the faces of five rather ugly fauns, who seem to impose themselves onto the scene and almost appear to be pursuing Asnyk. All these play on reed pipes, the faces of the foremost two hovering directly above the poet. One of these, an older bearded faun with pointed ears whose hair is decorated with autumn leaves, looks up in our direction as he pipes, while his younger companion looks down in concentration pointing his horns at us. To the right behind them the face of another faun pops up, frowning at us as he plays his double aulos. In the middle background, we simply see the pursed lips of another bearded faun as he pipes too, and at the back left a young faun with a black beard is peering through this crowd at us. It is a strange juxtaposition of a Polish patriotic icon and Bacchanalian imagery. This was a frequent device used by Malczewski, and probably has multiple meanings which vary depending on the exact context. We have seen in Law, Fatherland, Art how the faun could be made to symbolize life itself, and how the artist even portrayed himself as a faun elsewhere. In this painting, Asnyk is almost overwhelmed by fauns. Their playing music may be a symbolic representation of his poetry, or the poetic genius with which he was inspired. Or alternatively they may simply represent the passion by which he was driven. But Asnyk himself is nonetheless weighed down with care. Three years earlier

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another Polish artist, the sculptor Waclaw Szymanowski (1859–1930), had created a sculpture that seems to allegorize the collective depression of the Polish people experienced as a result of their national submission. Exhibited in Lviv in 1902, his Caryatids10 (1896) transforms its ancient sculptural model (the female figures from the Erechtheion building on the Acropolis in Athens) into the image of a people oppressed. Several figures, male and female, struggle together to support the weight of a great rock which they collectively bear upon their backs. In their tense muscles, the contorted arrangement of their limbs, and the patent fatigue and suffering visible on their faces, Szymanowski brings out all the pain of their predicament. It is a powerful work, and shows how classical sculpture, too, could be transformed in a poignant expression of the Polish national condition. During the same period the lands of what is now the Czech Republic, but at that time were the provinces of Bohemia, Silesia and Moravia in the AustroHungarian Empire, also saw a significant growth in nationalist thought which manifested itself in a cultural movement known as the Czech National Revival. Although to a degree this was a dynamic that had been developing since the earlier decades of the nineteenth century and had gradually been picking up momentum, spurred on by a growing sense of the political and civic alienation of the Czech-­speaking majority by a large German-­speaking minority, a particular stimulus was given by the advent of the Jubilee Country Exhibition of the Czech Kingdom in Prague in 1891. Much of the art produced during and after this exhibition took on a nationalist quality, or at least showed a pronounced interest in Czech tradition, where the classics were also recruited in the articulation of new national ideas and forms in art and architecture. Classical iconography could also play a role in the ways in which Art Nouveau defined itself in the new artistic context of the time. For example, in the new Palace of Industry, exhibited as part of the Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering held in Prague in 1898, frequent reference was made in the design of the pillars for this building to Hermes. Hermes is a god that often appears in Art Nouveau (we have seen an example above in Malczewski’s Polonia), with different meanings in different contexts. In this case, the commerce, industry and technology of the modern age, with which Art Nouveau often strongly identified itself, is linked to the commercial connotations of the patron god of trade, where neoclassicism would likely rather have favoured Apollo. Whichever side of the divide between the old and the new a critic might choose to take, classics remained the standard. In this way, the French critic and advocate of neoclassicism Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929) could comment that what he saw

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of Czech Art Nouveau seemed to him more ‘oriental’ in inspiration, and lacking the dynamism and plastic modelling of Greek sculpture.11 This point about Art Nouveau’s possibly being a ‘foreign’ import is also an important one. It is worth registering that some Czech nationalists saw the Secession movement as a foreign import from Vienna that they believed should therefore have little to do with their art. This is largely because the previous generation of Czech artists and architects had worked in a rather different local variant of a neo-Renaissance style. This style had become associated with a series of national architectural projects, including the emblem of Czech nationalism, the Czech National Theatre, which has given its name to this generation of Czech art in Czech art historical criticism as the ‘National Theatre generation’. This should be seen in the context of the increasingly open expressions of cultural rivalry between the Czech majority and German minority in the city of Prague at the time. On the other hand, others welcomed the new impetus of the Viennese Secession in the wake of the at length overbearing nationalist and moralising overtones of the National Revival movement. As the critic Miloš Jiránek (1875– 1911) commented in 1912: Young artists champed at such moral pressure [. . .] We first wanted to take ownership of all that was being done abroad, to get up to speed with the rest of Europe.12

Ultimately, as the city of Prague still attests to today, Secession style trumped its rivals at least for a short and intense period at the turn of the century. The best academic artists of the 1880s, Hynais, Václav Brožík (1851–1901), and Antonín Chittussi (1847–91), had already begun looking abroad for inspiration and travelling to the other artistic capitals of Europe. The first group of Czech artists looking to change things for the better formed a group in the early 1880s named Škréta (after the seventeenth-­century Czech artist Karel Škréta (1610–74) whom they admired). They penned the first manifesto of the Czech Secession in the form of an open letter to the artist Mikoláš Aleš (1852–1913), whose illustrations in the 1880s depicting the (forged) medieval Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts had been condemned by a classicizing critic in the Národní Listy newspaper. The Mánes Society of artists also became a focal point for those looking to take Czech art in a new direction. In 1897, they travelled to Dresden for the International Art Exhibition there, where they saw western European Art Nouveau on display and were greatly influenced by it. A number of art periodicals came to play a role in mediating what quickly became a transformation of contemporary Czech art, including the Moderní

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Revue (‘The Modern Review’), founded in 1894 by the Czech Decadent critic Arnošt Procházka (1869–1925) and the poet Karásek z Lvovic, which became an important medium for new Decadent Czech art. As Wittlich (1992: 59) described it: ‘Procházka nonetheless considers decadent art not as a decline, but as an awareness of the decay which invites the artist to reject society’s hypocritical conventions’.13 A group of artists also took inspiration from Munich’s Jugend to form their own journal in 1896 entitled Volné Směry (‘Free Directions’). Through the vehicle of these publications, and the exhibitions of the Mánes Society, a circle of modernizing Czech artists and critics were gradually able to shape the direction of art, criticism, taste and private patronage in the Czech lands. The publications were also important media for bringing in new ideas from abroad and educating local artists about artistic developments elsewhere in Europe. For example, in 1899–1900 Volné Směry published a series of reproductions of Puvis de Chavannes’ works and in 1903 reproduced in translation an essay on the artist together with another on contemporary French art by the French critic Gabriel Mouray (1865–1943). Indeed, as more generally in the public debate about national and republican values that was taking place in the Czech lands at the time (and which would ultimately lead to the independence of Czechoslovakia), the influence of France and of French thinkers was prominent. This is an important dynamic to recognize, because for many Czech artists this was not just about getting up to speed with the development of international art, but also about posing existential questions about the state of their national art and what it meant. Preisler was one artist who was very conscious of such issues. Holding up France as a model, in which he saw evident that mature and solid artistic tradition that he believed ‘absolutely necessary’ for the development of any new art, he commented that: In our case we find that there is relatively just as much talent as there is among the mature nations, just as much taste for life and growth [. . .] There is a certain inexorable logic that a small nation can afford only a small number of strong people. But above all it is the lack of a systematic tradition and systematic work that is to blame for that.14

During his inaugural remarks on taking up his teaching position at the Special School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1913, he again commented that: We have begun to genuinely realise that we have the right to exist like any other nation, and when the political conditions finally permit, that we will at least be able to breathe a little more freely, and in the fine arts we have begun to apply ourselves a little more intensively.15

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Elsewhere he repeatedly returns to the importance of tradition in developing national art. As we have already seen in his frequent transformations of the classical in his own work, this was clearly very closely linked to the classical tradition of painting, sculpture and architecture. One work of Preisler’s that is at once national and classicizing in its conception is the mosaic façade that he created for the Novák Commercial Building on Vodičkova Street in Prague‘s Old Town in 1902–0416 (Figs. 27 and 28). Covering the three upper storeys of the building, the mosaic depicts an allegory of Flora surrounded by a number of emblems of Czech folk tradition. This was a commercial commission for the artist from the newly opened department store. While its architect Kotěra gave the building itself a very traditional structure, its entire external and interior décor was made out in the latest Art Nouveau style. Preisler produced a number of drawings and oil studies which show his preparations for this work, including many of the central figure of the goddess Flora. In the final mosaic version, we see her in the uppermost plane of the composition, centrally placed, in the form of a nude red-­haired woman modelled in contrapposto. Reminiscent of the Aphrodites of ancient sculpture, but also of her Renaissance adaptations, Preisler’s Flora is a modern update on a traditional

Fig. 27  Jan Preisler, Novák Commercial Building façade (detail), Prague

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Fig. 28  Jan Preisler, Novák Commercial Building façade, Prague.

model, with her red hair and pale white skin, accompanying peacock and great purple robe fluttering about her. She stands on top of a hill in a great Bohemian summer landscape where the trees and flowers are in bloom, and in which a variety of different figures are gathered below her. These depict a range of idealized Bohemian peasants engaged in different activities. Immediately below her a group of handsome young men and women dance together as they carry a long chain of flowers. To the right a group of men and a boy are engaged in different activities, while one leans pensively against a tree (a motif we have already met in Preisler’s work in the form of his shepherd in one of the side panels to his triptych Autumn). To the left we see a young woman with a baby and her spinning wheel, wearing traditional Bohemian costume, and another group where a merchant is selling a piece of cloth to a wealthy lady. Preisler’s mosaic is really an allegory of prosperity. This makes sense, given its commercial context. But it is two more things as well. It is an allegory of the ideal nation. And it is a classical ideal of beauty and plenty. During this period, many artists made attempts to capture the entirety of the national communities to which they belonged (their‘imagined community’, to use Anderson’s terminology) in their art. We have already seen an example of this in the Malczewski triptych

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discussed earlier. This is perhaps one of the most applicable of all possible usages of the phrase coined by Anderson, given that the community in this case really is ‘imagined’ in the truest sense. It is, after all, impossible to represent in any real way the entirety of all those people who belong to so large a community as a nation in one single work of art. Some of the artists we look at in this chapter begged to differ though, and Preisler is one such example. What we see then is an idealized version of the Czech national community that many of Preisler’s contemporaries were actively anticipating at the turn of the century. We have happy children and young adults, mothers and babies, craftsmen and merchants. And while not everyone is as well-­to-do as the woman buying the cloth, no one in this ideal nation is poor. Preisler cannot resist introducing his melancholic youth, the most ubiquitous element of his art, somewhere in the design, but we are left in no doubt that the overall allegory is one of the happy and prosperous nation. In addition, the introduction of the figure of Flora to the scene, as a sort of queen presiding over all this good and plenty, lends the whole a very classicising feel. Of course, if that also lent it a sense of class, then that would not be unwelcome in a commercial commission of this sort. Novák must have been pleased with the result. But it is at least interesting for our purposes to see that at the very point that the commercial and the national reach a crescendo in the Art Nouveau of this period, the classical is still very much present. She is perhaps a very distant descendant of the Venuses and Floras of the classical world, but she is such a descendant nonetheless. Preisler’s mural is a specific case, but it is also true that many of the buildings that went up in the spate of national building work that overtook Prague in the first decade of the last century owe at least something to classical architecture or art. To take one such example, the main railway station in Prague, built by the architect Josef Fanta (1856–1954) between 1900 and 1909, was constructed in an Art Nouveau style that borrows modified features that are originally classical (Figs.  29 and 30). The construction was actually a reconstruction. A neoRenaissance style building had been put up in 1872 but, when the need was felt only a few decades later for the station to be enlarged, Art Nouveau after Fanta’s taste was chosen as the winning entry in the architectural competition for the work. Here we will consider one feature of the design, the two towers that surmount the building’s main façade. On the upper register of each of these, facing in four different directions, the architect has had four Atlases sculpted, each with raised arms as if they were supporting the top of the tower. To continue this analogy further, Fanta included glass cupolas on top of each tower, made of several small panes of glass. It thus appears, from whichever angle we behold the

Fig. 29  Prague Main Station interior (detail), Prague.

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Fig. 30  Prague Main Station exterior (detail), Prague.

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towers, that on each of them an Atlas is holding up a great glass globe. In its more basic design, rather in the way the Secession building in Vienna had done, the building incorporates adaptations of the ancient Doric temple (in the register of the towers below those in which we find the Atlases we can for example see a design modelling the alternation of metopes and triglyphs in the frieze of such a temple). The building is otherwise replete with national and sub-­national or semi-­national symbolism relating to the idea of the Czech nation. Beneath each Atlas on the towers we see a falcon with spread wings in a reference to the Czech nationalist gymnastic youth society, the Sokol (‘Falcon’). Classical myth is used alongside contemporary nationalist symbols in this national building project as an expression of confidence and strength. No discussion of nationalism and Art Nouveau in the Czech context would be complete without at least a brief consideration of Mucha’s work. Mucha is undoubtedly the most famous Czech Art Nouveau artist. This has a lot to do with the fact that he spent arguably the most significant years of his career in Paris in the 1890s, during which time he fell in with the artistic milieu of the PostImpressionists around Gauguin, even if his own style remained very different from theirs. It is no exaggeration to say that Mucha did a lot to define the graphic art and poster format of Art Nouveau in the first place, which was then taken up with enthusiasm by many other artists in Paris and beyond. Mucha’s nationalist art though has traditionally been very much less well-­known. While this was evidently something that had been gestating for some time during the Paris years, it was not something that flowered in any major way until his return to Bohemia in his later years, when he undertook (an ultimately unfinished) project on a monumental scale entitled The Slav Epic (1911–26). This aimed to depict the entire history of the Slav people through twenty key episodes. But perhaps the grandest national building project Mucha was involved in – arguably the grandest of all such Czech initiatives – was the Municipal House building. The Municipal House building, designed by the Czech architects Osvald Polívka (1859–1931) and Antonín Balšánek (1865–1921), and constructed between 1903 and 1912, is similar to the main station in that it relies in part on classical architectural elements, even if its principal construction is on an Art Nouveau basis. The double-­storeyed building is designed around two large wings converging on a central hall. It was intended as a space to hold concerts, meetings and other public gatherings, with a view to encouraging national activities and unity. Several Czech architects and artists worked on the project, but Mucha had a leading role in designing much of the interior decoration of the building. The Mayor’s Salon chamber is a case in point. This is a circular room designed on all

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sides around a series of columns, whose intermediate spaces are spanned by arches and in the spandrels of which allegorical national-­historical themes are painted. Mucha also included a great ceiling painting on the same themes. The iconography of these paintings is very similar to that of his Slav Epic, depicting the great narratives of Czech history through its individual protagonists. But many classical elements are incorporated into the room’s interior décor too. This includes the stylized laurel, here a signifier of the coming victory of national self-­ determination, in the Art Nouveau capitals of the columns. Beneath these capitals we find inscriptions in each case referring to one of the eight virtues shown in the spandrel paintings. Laurel leaves also appear elsewhere, for example in the border of the ceiling painting. The allegorical scenes of the murals are not themselves classical in style, being far more after the very individual style that Mucha had developed in the preceding years, but the classical nude is still present in a much-­modified form. Nonetheless it is clear that for his part Mucha, in line with his nationalist sentiments, saw the origins of his style rather as an organic continuation of native Czech (particularly Moravian) artistic traditions. Mucha’s nationalism was evidently deeply-­felt, and directly affected his conception of European history, including classical history. As his son Jiří Mucha (1982: 429) later commented of this conception: He believed that the time had come when the Slav would determine history. But he knew that history wasn’t written in advance, and that through their faults a people could miss its chance. If we recognise his right, rooted in the nineteenth century, to desire that the Slavs – following on from the Romans and Germans – might have their time, a time when he believed they would be harbingers for mankind, then we might rather speak of their coming as imminent rather than belated.17

An early example of where we see Mucha’s individual nationalist historiography applied to classical history in his art is in the illustrations for the French historian Charles Seignobos’ (1854–1942) Scènes et épisodes de l’histoire d’Allemagne (1896–8). Published in forty-­one parts by the Paris publisher Armand Colin, Seignobos’ work spanned the entire history of Germany and was accompanied by forty illustrations by Mucha and Rochegrosse, engraved by Georges Lemoine. In one of his illustrations for this volume, Varrus brûlé après la bataille de Teutbourg (1898), Mucha imagines the ancient leader of the Germanic Cherusci tribe, Arminius. As related by Tacitus in his Annals (1.55ff), Arminius was responsible for the death of the Roman General Quinctilius Varus and the destruction of his three legions in the Teutoburg forest in Germany during a

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rebellion against Roman rule. Arminius had had a long and multifaceted reception since the Renaissance (Winkler’s recent study (2016) gives a good overview of his modern reception).18 German nineteenth-­century painting and sculpture had traditionally valorized the ancient leader as a national forebear. In his illustration, however, Mucha takes a very different approach, rather depicting Arminius as he presides priest-­like over the barbaric cremation of Varus and the execution of his soldiers. Mucha transforms an episode in Roman history into a vehicle for making a critical comment about German history, challenging the conventional artistic representation of Arminius. As his son and biographer points out, illustrating a work celebrating the expansion of German history was no easy task, and as such he found his consolation in incorporating at least some artistic challenge to that narrative in certain of his illustrations.19 Mucha exhibited his original illustrations as part of the first two major exhibitions of his work in Paris in 1897, with these receiving as much positive praise as his decorative and poster work, which was also on display. As neoclassicism had done before, Mucha’s Arminius illustration demonstrates how Art Nouveau could continue to transform Roman history in new ways.20 Moving away now from the central European sphere, and turning to the Mediterranean, it should be noted that we have not yet discussed Gaudí in this book. That is because Gaudí’s particular brand of Art Nouveau is so individual that for the most part it is hard to describe it as the product of any earlier artistic tradition at all. Gaudí’s art certainly is unique, and no discussion of Art Nouveau would be complete without at least the briefest consideration of his work. Yet in more recent scholarship there has been an increasing awareness of how the modified forms of Catalan and Moorish architectural and artistic traditions played a role in inspiring the artist’s novelties.21 We will briefly consider here the few cases where he transformed the classical in his work, and explore the national elements we find there. On the whole, classical allusions in Gaudí are rare and often oblique, but there are a few instances where the artist directly employed classical mythological and artistic allegories in his work. We discuss them in this chapter as it is often forgotten what a nationalist Gaudí was. His close association over many years with his wealthy patron Eusebio Güell (1846–1918) demonstrates his close link to a circle of influential Catalan nationalists during this period. It should be noted at the outset that the classics played a prominent role in the development of that nationalism in which, as Gracia-Alongo (2016: 75) has shown, the archaeological site of the Greek settlement of Emporion in Catalonia figured as emblem of a Greek-­inspired but distinct Catalan spirit:

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Two objectives needed to be achieved to build an identity-­based reality that could be considered a decisive ideological and social force: the dissemination of ideas and their easy comprehension and adoption by the population. In the late 19th century, writings in periodicals such as La Renaixença argued that the link between the origin of the Catalan identity and Classical Greece as a belated expression of the ideals of the Romantic movement that had marked European support for Greek independence. The Mediterranean, as the axis for the transmission of culture, together with the colony of Emporion (Empúries in Catalan) as the port of entry for Classical culture, gave structure to this line of thought. During the early years of the 20th century, artists and intellectuals worked to add symbolic elements to the aforementioned demands.

Gaudí was not the only artist at the time working within this nationalist cultural milieu (Gracia-Alongo also mentions the important example of the Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1850–1923)). One result of this positioning of the classics within Catalan nationalist discourse is that the material we look at here often involves classical allegories of a heroic quality. These might as well have been discussed in the earlier chapter where we looked at this dynamic in Art Nouveau, but they are discussed here because at a symbolic level such heroic qualities are in Gaudí’s work very closely linked to what are often considered specifically Catalan virtues. And as for so much else of Gaudí’s work that we will not look at here, in a similar sense to Mucha the artist saw his work as rooted in the folk traditions of where he came from. An early example of where the artist uses classical iconography can be found in one of his first commissions, his lampposts for the Plaça Reial in Barcelona22 (1879). One year after his graduation Gaudí was commissioned by the City Council to design ornamental street lamps for the square. The artist elaborated two different designs for lamps, the more complex of which employs classical symbolism. We will be unsurprised by this stage to learn that reference to the god Hermes plays an important role in the artist’s design here. In the lampposts, still in situ today, the iron column of the street lamp and its marble base are topped by the arms of the city of Barcelona and by the caduceus wand and winged cap of the god. As Roe (2012: 34) explains: ‘As well as being a messenger of the gods he is also the god of commerce, a very appropriate reference for Barcelona in this period.’ The reason for the suitability of this association was because Barcelona was at this time entering on a period of new industrial and commercial growth. Given the later direction of the artist’s patronage it is apt that in one of his earliest works he should have used this classical metaphor.

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More generally it is hard to pin down whether – and if so what – inspiration Gaudí drew from classical art. Masini (1984: 127) for example suggests a parallel between certain late black-­figure Attic vase painting and the designs he used for his gate in the Casa Vicens in Barcelona (1878–80). But on the whole, it is obvious that in his architecture at least his main point of departure – even if he didn’t ultimately remain true to it – was the Moorish style of Catalonia, not high classical art. But that doesn’t mean that classical myth didn’t play a role in Gaudí’s creations, even if he did not choose to clothe in it in classical dress. Rather there is evidence that it played a strong and central role in some of his best-­known creations. To begin with one example, his pavilion gate for Güell’s Can Cuyàs de la Riera estate23 (1884). This great gate, cast in a single piece of iron, depicts Ladon, in classical myth the dragon guardian of the Garden of the Hesperides, whose golden apples Hercules succeeded in stealing as part of his labours (Fig.  31). These too are shown in Gaudí’s scheme, realistically depicted and complete with branches atop a stylized brick tower attached to the pavilion. The dragon itself is a real monster. A far cry from his marble predecessors, Gaudí’s Art Nouveau update is a mass of tangled and coiling iron. Much of the central section of the gate is taken up with the span of Ladon’s wing, out of which his long thin neck emanates in a great bending iron coil, leading to his head. This is largely one great open mouth and forked tongue, as Ladon faces us the impostor at the gate. On its right side another iron coil doubles back on itself in a swirl to form his tail. To complete the effect, his iron claws rise as the gate opens. This work has been considered by some as ‘the first great example of Art Nouveau that we meet in his work’.24 The masterful iron workmanship of the gate was also praised in its time, with one journalist exclaiming: ‘In a word, the gate to which we refer is a further demonstration of how much Catalan Industry can achieve, and the value of its artists and builders.’25 It was commissioned in 1884 by Güell specifically with Gaudí in mind. Gaudí’s transformation of the myth is complex and multi-­layered, involving its refracted reception through the work of the Catalan poet Jacint Verdageur (1845–1902). His epic Catalan poem L’Atlàntida (1877) tells of the journeys of Hercules, which in his version involve his crossing the Atlantic to retrieve the golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides. At one level, the heroic analogy of Hercules’ labours, represented by the ferocity of the dragon (despite the physical absence of the hero) and the prize of the golden apples as the divine fruit of human labour, is clear. But the influence of Verdageur on Gaudí’s conception of the myth, and the fact that Güell had made his money in trade on the far side of the Atlantic in Cuba, has led some to detect a personal allegory relating to Gaudí’s patron here.26 At another level still,

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Fig. 31  Antoni Gaudí, Can Cuyàs de la Riera estate gate, Barcelona.

the symbolism of the dragon in a Catalan context should not be overlooked either, with St. George – who had also virtuously overcome a dragon – being patron saint of Catalonia. As artist and patron, Gaudí and Güell enjoyed a close relationship and a shared patriotic ideal of Catalonia. This emerges in another project for which Güell commissioned the artist, the Güell Park in north-­west Barcelona. The park was really intended by Güell to be a great social project, and ultimately to become a sort of garden city – he wanted it to be the second largest public municipal space. During his travels, he had been inspired by English parkland and its combination of wild vegetation with an overall sense of order. Accordingly, in the Güell Park there was a clear attempt to work within and around the natural contours of the landscape. Work began under Gaudí’s direction in 1900 and was finished, in the end as a public park, in 1914. The artist arranged the park in such a way that it would allow for open spaces where public performances, including those based around Catalan folklore, could take place. In this we witness some of the same train of thought that we have already encountered in Wyspiański and Ekielski’s conception of a Polish Acropolis. Gaudí’s approach betrays the same

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importance attached to the creation of a space to foster the cultural identity seen to underpin (in this case a Catalan) nationalism. For our purposes, what is interesting is that there are a number of features of the Güell Park that appear to draw upon classical myth and art in subtle – if not necessarily explicit – ways. As Carandell and Vivas (2005: 15) highlight, the very entrance pavilions themselves form two facing snakes, when seen from above and – as in the lampposts for the Plaça Reial which also feature the twin snakes – this may again be a reference to Hermes, as found elsewhere in the park too: ‘This is probably a reference to the pair of snakes borne by Mercury on his staff, indicating that aggressive forces mutually neutralise one another, and for that reason a symbol of protection of peace and health.’ The main classical feature of the park, however, is the grand temple-­like structure that forms its centrepiece (erected between 1906 and 1908), approached by a flight of steps. This structure does not properly take the format of a Doric temple, but uses its optically-­ adjusted fluted columns and architrave in a variation of its traditional arrangement.27 Instead, rows of these columns support a platform above and provide a place of shade in the park, with the vaulted ceiling upheld by the columns decorated in colourful mosaic complete with sun medallions. Approached by a flight of steps, this sort of half-­temple nonetheless gives the impression that we are entering the sanctuary of a god or goddess. Moreover – to continue the temple analogy further – Gaudí included a sculpture of a dragon, which he decorated with coloured stones and placed in the centre of this flight of steps. To quote Roe’s (2012: 175/178) interpretation: The water that pours from the dragon’s mouth emerges from an underground cistern Gaudí built to control the park’s drainage [. . .] the practical seems to be layered with the symbolic. The dragon may be read as the classical dragon Piton, which attempted to flood the temple of Delphi. The god Apollo defeated him to preserve his shrine and temple, which served as a prison for the dragon. The dragon having been imprisoned beneath the temple became the guardian of the world’s subterranean waters. In this way the temple above becomes the temple of Apollo, and allusions to the classical deity may even extend to the park’s owner himself, Güell.

We have already spoken of the connection of dragons, and of dragon-­slaying, with Catalonia, and it is likely that the same double classical/national allusion is being made here again. Indeed, this generally ‘classical’ design is central to the entire conception of the park as a whole, even if it has been completely taken apart and re-­assembled by Gaudí in a way never actually attested in classical

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archaeology. Yet in his conception there is nonetheless a clear continuity with the Catalan national historiography of ancient Greek influence, and of the paragon of the archaeological site of Emporion referred to above. As such, it is no surprise to learn that the platform above that the pillars support has become known as the ‘Greek Theatre’, with Josep Maria Jujol’s (1879–1949) curving and exquisitely mosaic-­decorated bench running around its edge. Above all else, this park demonstrates that the extent of Gaudí’s simultaneously classical and nationalist symbolism is deeper than might at first sight appear. Leaving aside further discussion of Gaudí, and turning back again to central Europe, we can find further examples of the intersection of Art Nouveau and nationalism. Hungary is another country in which we see the coincidence of an effloresence of the style and a rise in nationalist thought during our period. Art Nouveau arrived somewhat later in Hungary than it did in much of the rest of Europe and developed mainly during the first decade of the twentieth century. This has sometimes led to its being considered as a sort of late and rather uninteresting offshoot of the style, which was already outmoded at its birth. Such aesthetic judgements aside, the local variation of Hungarian Art Nouveau nonetheless has something interesting to tell us about the intersection of Art Nouveau and nationalism in Europe, and in some cases how the classics played a role here. It is fair to say, however, that the classics played a much smaller role in national art in Hungary than they did in the countries we have looked at above. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Hungary’s national cultural identity was even more greatly formed around an individual idea of cultural origins than it was in the nationalisms and sub-­nationalisms that we have looked at so far. In practice, this meant that its origins could even be placed outside Europe (or outside classical and Germanic civilizations), which directly affected the shape its national artistic brand took in this period. Vienna wasn’t after all that faraway, but despite this proximity, that city’s brand of Secessionist art did not leave any strong marks in Hungary.28 The influence of contemporary English and French styles was stronger, but for the most part Hungarian artists tried to find their inspiration in what they considered to be authentic national folk styles. Connected with this there was inevitably also a sense of breaking with artistic tradition. Károly Lyka (1869–1965), the Hungarian critic, commented of Art Nouveau: By gaining freedom from the shackles of antiquated styles, artists are able to follow, in complete liberty, the impulses of their individualities, are able to realize their individual temperaments, their racial or national characters.29

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Lyka’s comment makes plain – perhaps a little too plain for modern tastes – how closely the discourse around national artistic styles had become linked to contemporary racial and organicist discourses. Lahor (2007: 60), discussing Hungary’s showing at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, speaks of how the country ‘mined the depths of its past for decorative motifs that would enable it to establish an originality in art that was as pure and distinct as the uniqueness of its music and literature’. We have seen already how Mucha used an episode from Roman history as a reference point for an indirect nationalist statement. The designer Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch (1863–1920) and stained glass artist (including to the royal court) Miksa Róth (1865–1944) did likewise in their Siege of Aquileia30 (1908). This glass mosaic was part of the main façade of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1908–9. By this stage, such exhibitions had become increasingly important opportunities to show off national innovation, technology or tradition, and the Hungarian Pavilion showed off what it considered to be the best of an (adapted) traditional Hungarian style. The glass mosaic was an interesting choice, given that it made reference to Attila the Hun’s attack on the Roman city of Aquileia in Italy in 452, which led to the destruction of the city (the poor city had already had the misfortune of being sacked by Alaric in 401 and 408, an easy target given its prominence and location). Contemporary Hungarian nationalists claimed Attila as forebear, so it’s easy to understand why they might have seen this as a key turning point in Hungarian history, this representing his first incursion into the territory of the Roman Empire. However, in an interesting twist, given that this was after all the Venice Biennale, it was the flight of Aquileia’s inhabitants at this time to the lagoons that was believed to have ultimately led to the foundation of Venice (a theme which also featured in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s (1863–1938) play La Nave of the same year, adapted as an opera by Italo Montemezzi (1875–1952)).31 Again, a singular, and perhaps slightly aggressive, Art Nouveau interpretation of Roman history for nationalist purposes. As an interesting point of contrast for Róth, we also have two companion piece stained glass windows that he undertook on the themes of Orpheus32 and Artemis33 (c. 1910). These windows were studies for the figural elements of a window to cover several stories of a building, a block of flats and shops built by the Kasselik Foundation at Vorosmarty ter 3 in Budapest. The building, completed by the architects Kalman Giergl (1863–1954) and Floris Korb (1860–1930), also features an Aphrodite design. Both the Orpheus and Artemis windows feature elegant idealizations of the figures from classical myth which they represent set within a golden-­coloured hexagonal glass border (their themes likely drawn

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from Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Typical of the artist’s geometric-­classicizing Art Nouveau style, they are a reminder of how – as we have seen in Preisler’s mural for the Novák Commercial Building – classical myth could be used in public commissions for the decoration of national capitals. By virtue of this context, and the idealizing and heroizing qualities of such depictions, it is probably fair to consider them as having nationalist overtones – even if we cannot go as far as describing them as explicitly nationalist in nature. The nationalist use of the classics in Art Nouveau elsewhere cannot be described as having been systematic, but individual usages do appear sporadically, demonstrating if anything how greatly the classics remained the unconscious artistic vocabulary of many Art Nouveau artists. To conclude this chapter, we will consider three more examples, Bellery-Desfontaines’ poster for France for the 1910 Brussels Universal Exhibition,34 Moser’s Dedikationsblatt35 (1898) for the fiftieth anniversary of Kaiser Josef I’s rule, and the Swiss artist Charles l’Eplattenier’s (1874–1946) decoration for the La Chaux-­de-Fonds crematorium36 (1909–10). Without explicitly alluding to a classical myth or work of art, all show slightly different ways in which Art Nouveau could lean upon conventional classical iconography in national or local contexts. Bellery-Desfontaines’ poster, fitting its context for such an exhibition, personifies France as a muscular blacksmith in an allegory of France’s industrial achievements. He is watched over by a sort of Nike decked out in gold, who floats above him, her temples bound with laurel and bearing a laurel branch in her hand. Indeed, laurel features prominently throughout the poster design, including in its borders. In his design, Moser uses similar imagery to honour Kaiser Josef I, returning more directly to the figure of Athena who here holds a palm branch in her hand and is set against a background of laurel and sunflowers. Although transformed into an Art Nouveau beauty, she is nonetheless consistent with the imagery conventionally used by artists to portray the goddess during this period, as discussed earlier in this book. We see the face of the gorgon on her breastplate and her plumed helmet by her side. In this case, she symbolizes both the wisdom and victories of the long-­reigning sovereign. If anything, Moser’s image here, with its enthusiastic support for the imperial monarchy, is a reminder that Art Nouveau could be very much establishment, as well as anti-­establishment, in nature. In his decorations for the crematorium building in the Cimitière de la Charrière in La Chaux-­de-Fonds in Neuchâtel in Switzerland, l’Eplattenier employed a simultaneously semi-­occultist and classicizing style. The artist had founded his own art school in the town, where he endeavoured to develop a local Pine Style variant of Art Nouveau. The wealthy factory owner Ali Jeanrenaud

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(1860–1942) had donated funds for the building of a crematorium with the specification that its iconography should be non-Christian. The result of a rather fraught collaboration between architects Robert Belli (died 1923) and Henri Robert, and l’Eplattenier, the crematorium is a curious building that cannot quite seem to decide what it really is, church or classical temple. In contrast to the simplicity of the plain marble construction with its minimalist exterior and stairway flanked by sentinel figure sculptures, the interior is densely animated by four panel paintings by l’Eplattenier on each of the walls (with the rest of the interior décor undertaken by his students). The paintings show various allegorical scenes of the type favoured by Art Nouveau and Symbolist artists at the time, La mort, la douleur et la paix, La purification par le feu, Le silence, La flamme de souvenir. As Birksted (2009: 116) comments in his discussion of this building: The crematorium of La Chaux-­de-Fonds shows the antagonism between the stripped neoclassicism of Belli, with its emphasis on volume, massing, and whiteness, versus the elaborate art nouveau style of l’Eplattenier, with its focus on carved and colored surface decoration.

Yet l’Eplattenier’s paintings for the interior of the building also display something of a simplifying classicism. For example, the panel La mort, la douleur et la paix shows the two pale corpses of a man and woman stretched out on a plain slab of marble, in the middle of which an occult figure of a woman sits with outstretched hands in a gesture of peace, while male and female figures kneel at each end of the marble as they mourn their dead with wreaths of flowers by their side. The simplicity of this design, much as the Secession building in Vienna had, harks back to the simple masses and gravitas of Doric architecture (consistent with the main architectural outlines of Belli’s building). While such public art is not explicitly national, l’Eplattenier’s attempts to develop a distinctive local variant of Art Nouveau in Switzerland show how this could both complement and conflict with classical forms. In this chapter, we have seen how thoroughly Art Nouveau became linked in some instances with nationalist ideas. The dynamic was particular to each country, of which we have only been able to consider a sample here. In many cases though, the classics continued to provide a reference point for such nationalist artistic expressions, leading to new, and sometimes contorted, transformations of ancient literature and art. In our last example, we also briefly encountered that ever-­present fascination and fear for Art Nouveau: death. In the next chapter, we return to this in more detail, and look at what role the classics played here.

7

Death What is death? Is it the end or is it the beginning of another life? Such questions arise repeatedly in Art Nouveau. Death was both fear and fascination for its artists. This was because it meant the end of the rich life in which their art so revelled, but at the same time provided them with that consciousness of mortality which made this matter so much to them in the first place. In some ways, their interest in the theme was an extension of the concerns of the religious art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, revived by Romanticism. It also reflects again the contemporary growth in psychology and mysticism, and questions these had raised afresh about the immortality of the soul. And finally, it could be yet another expression of that typically fin-­de-siècle anxiety about the coming of a new age. But the artists of the time knew they were not the first to pose such questions or to feel such anxieties. Despite their association of the classical past with vitality, they also found there allegories of death, and of the afterlife too. In this chapter, we will look at some examples, where death is considered both literally and in its broadest possible metaphorical sense. This last point about the afterlife is important to note at the outset. Even if Christian ideas about the immortality of the soul are rightly something we associate more with Art Nouveau’s predecessors than with the style itself, this does not mean that its artists did not entertain their own personal and spiritual artistic metaphors relating to the existence of the soul and its possible survival after death. Mysticism and occultism were highly prevalent in the social circles in which Art Nouveau artists tended to move. This was the case across Europe and North America, but perhaps nowhere more so than Paris. Several of the artists we have already encountered in previous chapters came under the influence of these movements, including Mucha and l’Eplattenier. Blending with nationalist and ethnic ideas, this could often produce some rather odd results. But if the prevalence of such movements tells us nothing else, it does indicate an interest in life after death. More broadly, Art Nouveau shows a distinct interest in liminal states. Whether this is the transition of childhood to youth, of day to

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night, of winter to spring, of waking to sleep, or of life to death, the pattern is a clear one. Were there certain times or places when the boundaries between different states might be blurred? Many of the works we have looked at earlier in this book can, in one sense, be seen as attempts by artists to stand on such boundaries. For they entertained a strong desire in so doing to look both ways at once. Death was no exception. More a Symbolist than an Art Nouveau work, but worth considering here for its relevance to this topic, is Khnopff ’s I Lock My Door upon Myself1 (1891) (Fig. 32). This well-­known work is a highly enigmatic canvas centred on a red-­ haired young woman who leans on her folded hands and gazes out at us mournfully with her deathly pale eyes. She sits in a room at a table on which a great blue velvet cloth has been spread. To the right a window gives onto a street scene through which a small Friedrich-­esque black silhouette moves. In a direct reference to a work of classical sculpture Khnopff places a Roman winged head of the god of sleep Hypnos behind her to her left, who seems almost a patron god for this whole scene (Fig. 33). We also see a strange door that leads nowhere, a mirror, and in the foreground what appear to be dried lilies. The whole painting has an indefinable funereal feel to it. Given the very Pre-Raphaelite character of the woman and the iconography of the whole painting, it is unsurprising that Khnopff chose an English title for his painting (this is not the only example of where he did so). It is a reference to a poem by Christina Rossetti (1830–94), the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, entitled Who Shall Deliver Me? (1876). That title itself recalls Romans in the New Testament, which relates to man’s yearning for

Fig. 32  Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door upon Myself.

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Fig. 33  Head of Hypnos, British Museum.

spiritual release from the inevitability of his physical death. Rossetti’s poem appears to be more about escape from one’s self generally, but it is also a meditation on death and the soul: God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care. All others are outside myself; I lock my door and bar them out The turmoil, tedium, gad-­about. I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

But what is the meaning of Hypnos’ presence in this Symbolist allegory of death and the soul? Hypnos was the brother of Thanatos, the god of death in classical mythology, where sleep and death were seen as closely linked states. Indeed,

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dreams were believed to be sent to sleeping mortals from the underworld. Khnopff seems to be deliberately combining symbols of sleep and of death in his painting, returning us to that interest in liminal states of existence. Given its surreal feel, the impossible perspectives it presents and the woman who seems to dream with her eyes open, this painting leaves us wondering whether we are dreaming or in the afterlife already. But whether this Symbolist dream is real or not, the god continues his benign watch over the scene. Of all figures drawn from classical mythology the sphinx had perhaps the greatest appeal to Art Nouveau and Symbolist artists as they constructed their allegories of death. Strictly speaking, we should consider the sphinx as simultaneously a transformation of two ancient sphinxes: that of Egyptian art and that of classical mythology (the Theban sphinx of the Oedipus myth). The Egyptian sphinx already had a long history in post-Renaissance art, entering European art primarily in the waves of orientalism of the eighteenth century, and had its own reception history in neoclassicism (we might think of Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres’ (1780–1867) Oedipus explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx (1827) as an illustrative example). The mystery of the ancient Egyptian monument now found its place in a new way as a symbol of mystery in Symbolist art, where Egyptian iconography played a role in the mystic cults and occultism of the time. As for the sphinx of classical myth, Oedipus’ encounter with the mysterious beast, and its fatal riddle, were well-­known. As we shall see, her exact form was variously interpreted by artists. And as one might expect, given their preoccupation with the femme fatale, the sphinx is often imagined as (at least in part) a beautiful young woman. However, whether pictured as such or not, the sphinx is consistently an ominous figure, tending to connote mystery, but also danger or death. The sphinx appeared particularly prominently in the art of the Low Countries and of central Europe. We will compare three representations of the sphinx here: Toorop’s The Sphinx2 (1892–7), Stuck’s The Kiss of the Sphinx3 (1895) and Khnopff ’s The Caresses of the Sphinx4 (1896). To begin with Toorop’s drawing, this brings out all the mystery and indeed latent horror of the figure of the sphinx. The sphinx herself (for she is clearly female in the drawing, as she is in classical myth) sits upon a rock by a lake in a dark woodland. At least she appears to be sitting on a rock – but on closer inspection the rock appears more a mass of caryatid-­like figures holding her up. The rest of the scene is a great cluster of human figures below the sphinx. To her right, we see a group of slender female nudes, who mass in lines as they look up at her and seem to raise their hands in worship. But the main figure of the composition, around which others gather, is that of a prostrate male who appears to have been stretched out on a sort of

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globe. Many more half-­crazed looking people, men and women, cluster frenziedly around this man stretching out their hands as if they want to touch him. Throughout this strange scene, the artist has placed the pallid and haggard faces of old men and others, all of whom intently watch the man stretched on the globe. A strange bird-­like monster lours in the upper-­right next to the lake, on which two white swans swim. In greatest contrast to all this frenzy is the apparent anguish of the man, and the contented expression of the sphinx. What all of this really means is anyone’s guess. But the details discussed seem to suggest Toorop is imagining some kind of bizarre pagan ceremony of worship for the sphinx (who here seems more alive than made of stone), which involves a human sacrifice. It brings us face to face with some of the more grisly occult symbolism that was linked to the sphinx in the art of the time. Stuck’s imagining of the sphinx is similarly macabre in nature, even if it exploits a different iconography. Stuck’s sphinx is more a vampire. We see her crouching on her leonine hind legs as she leans forwards with her upper female body to kiss a naked man, who kneels helplessly before her, one of his arms wrapped around her body and the other stretched out as if in agony or joy – we cannot tell which. Her long hair falls about him, casting her face in shadow. Stuck completes the painting in his usual favourite reds, blacks and browns, as if a wall painting in Pompeii (which inspired some of his other designs). Stuck’s sphinx is more femme fatale than grisly pagan god, but is nonetheless a very ominous and, one feels somehow, violent figure too. Khnopff ’s painting is compositionally similar, this time showing a sphinx embracing rather than kissing a man (indeed it dates to only one year later than Stuck’s work, which suggests he may have taken inspiration from it). The sphinx is however quite different in appearance, with the full body of a leopard (the artist seems to delight in painting its spots) and merely the face of a woman who, as Toorop’s sphinx, closes her eyes contentedly as she embraces the man. But Khnopff ’s conception is far more ‘Greek’. The man himself, young and naked from the waist up, is different. He too has the beautiful and mysterious face typical of Khnopp’s work, and seems to be in some sort of symbiosis with the mythological beast. He also holds a staff in his hand topped with a globe and wings. Behind him is a large poplar tree, and in the further background we see a rather barren red Mediterranean landscape, which features two lonely Corinthian columns and another group of poplars on the right. Are we in a Greek temple precinct of sorts? Two marble slabs behind the sphinx inscribed with an ancient Middle Eastern language that is not Greek or Latin suggest otherwise. As with the two other depictions of the sphinx we have looked at here, the exact meaning

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of the painting is not immediately obvious. All three works show some of the different ways that the ancient sphinx was revived in the art of the time, and consistently in a way that emphasized aspects of mystery or of horror. All three leave us with something of an uneasy feeling in our stomachs, even if we cannot explain exactly why. Some artists hinted obliquely at the idea of death through ancient figures such as the sphinx. Others did so through reference to classical art of the sort we saw in the first of Khnopff ’s works we examined. Still others represented death directly as a personification or looked to classical allegories of the underworld. In his Thanatos5 (c.1898–9) Malczewski did exactly this. We have already seen in previous chapters how he used the figure of the grim reaper in his work. In this painting she appears again, this time naked save for a great red robe draped around her, leaving her back exposed as she stands outside a wooden country cottage. Leaning on her staff, she faces the open window of this cottage where we see an old man slumped on the windowsill of an open window. Outside we see a well-­tended garden in spring, in which white and yellow flowers grow, and where trees are blossoming in pink and blue. A dog, sitting by the entrance to the cottage, stares at death apparently able to see her (in a reference to folk tradition). The grim reaper, updated as a young woman after Malczewski’s wont, is not a figure specifically drawn from classical mythology or literature, but through his title making use of the ancient Greek word for death, thanatos, Malczewski’s painting acquires a new level of allegorical symbolism. In his Hekate6 (1901), the Czech artist Pirner picks an uncommonly-­favoured symbol of death from classical mythology. Pirner’s goddess of the underworld and of witches is a beautiful but pallid nude. She is borne on her back through the night sky, crossing the face of the moon, held aloft by a long-­haired and malevolent-­looking witch who bears a torch in her hand. Another female figure lies back-­to-back with Hekate, their hands clasped. Hekate holds a giant key in her hands. Pirner has inscribed the letters of her name across the top of the canvas above the moon, in flame lettering the same colour as the torch she bears. As is typical of Pirner’s mythological canvases, its symbolism is dense, but it is also a sign of the prevalence of the occult at the time and a new wave of interest in witches, magic and the supernatural that was growing in the 1890s. Prague itself had a long history of and reputation for interest in the occult that stretched back to the Middle Ages, but this work is an unusual example of where the classical was used to express such an interest. The mystery that we see in such works is often an expression of that preoccupation with liminal states already mentioned, which was frequently

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linked with death in the minds of artists. As such we find many images in Art Nouveau of nature or of the human body in a state of transformation, or at physical boundaries. The iconographical repertoire used in such depictions was very broad, but the classics played a role here too. The love of mystical states also affected artistic preferences. In this way Šalda (1903: 178) could comment that: One can say that the more that the cult of the Romanesque and of extravagance disappears from art, the more mysticism flows into it.7

There is a certain sense here that minimalism and avoidance of excessive detail was more conducive to capturing the essence of mystery. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the sea was a favoured motif in Art Nouveau. We have already seen how Toorop attached a certain mystical significance to the sea itself. Nor were the artists of the 1890s the first to find in the sea a convenient allegory for the human soul, and of the afterlife, but the motif returns to prominence during this period. Night-­time also came to have a similar meaning. As natural states, the sea and night-­time were considered to be somehow more liminal, somehow closer to eternity or even the afterlife of the soul. Pirner gave classical expression to some of these ideas in his Empedokles8 (1898). His painting pictures the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (490–430 BC), who elaborated the classical theory of the four elements, proposing the forces of Love and Strife to mix and separate them. Pirner was greatly interested in Empedocles’ theories, something we see reflected in this painting and in others. The ancient philosopher, dressed in a long brown robe that makes him look like a monk, stands on a slab of rock by the sea while a number of spirits, in the form of female nudes like wisps of smoke, hover around him as they look up in his direction. Empedocles draws one of his hands up to his mouth as he ponders the mysteries of the elements. The painting is typical of the convoluted allegories of this artist, which soon became unpopular with his contemporaries because of their being outmoded (we will see another example in this chapter). However, Pirner’s painting does reflect a revived contemporary interest in ancient philosophy and its conception of the natural world. A number of other Czech artists at this time showed a marked interest in Pythagoreanism, which they also sought to reflect in their art (the artist František Bílek (1872–1941) for example adopting a neo-Platonic symbolism of light in his work). Moreover, it is no accident that Pirner’s Empedocles should be imagined by the sea. Art Nouveau artists also saw the same potential of a liminal state in the night-­ time. To take one example from a different medium, we might consider the pendant-­brooch Night9 (1899) designed by Wolfers. This piece of jewellery in

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gold, opal, pearl and glass shows the classicizing form of a semi-­nude woman as an allegory of the night. In a typical Art Nouveau design, her figure sways in an S-curve as she holds a cauldron aloft in her hands. The pearl sheen of her figure is evocative of the still peacefulness of a clear moonlit night. Again, we are brought back to the soft imagery of Endymion and the moon goddess Selene, and how this myth embodies the gracefulness of such a night for Art Nouveau artists. While there is no clear classical myth being referenced here, it is a masterful work that leans heavily on classical figural tradition, re-­casting this in a subtle Art Nouveau allegory. In looking at this brooch, the artist would have us feel what we do when looking at the full moon on a warm summer night, and all the sense of wonder with which we are filled at its beauty, and at our own existence. Linked to such mythical symbolism we sometimes also encounter an interest in the power of prophecy. The existence of the oracles in the ancient world, most famously at Delphi, was well-­known and continued to be a source of fascination to artists and writers in this period. In the case of Art Nouveau artists, this too is a reflection of their interest in what is liminal. For if the priestess is somehow inspired by the god to see into the future, although she may speak in riddles, she nonetheless has one foot in this world and one in eternity. In many ways she is the quintessential metaphor for where artists wanted to be themselves; standing on that border between this world and the next and able to look in both directions. Moreover, prophetic inspiration could easily be made to stand as metaphor for artistic inspiration. Malczewski engaged with such themes in his The Pythia10 (1917) (Fig. 34), his title referring to the Pythian priestess of Apollo at ancient Delphi in Greece, who received the inspiration of the god to answer questions from visitors to the sanctuary (she was so named after the Python that Apollo once slew on the site of the shrine, as mentioned above). Malczewski’s painting re-­creates a scene in the inner-­shrine of the temple of Apollo as it might once have been in the ancient world. Centrepiece is the figure of the priestess herself (Maria Balowa), who sits on her seat in the upper portion of the composition wearing a translucent black dress, as she receives a male visitor to the shrine. Below her, hunched over in obeisance before the god, we see his naked back. In a direct reference to the intoxicating fumes that rose from beneath the seat of the priestess in the temple, whence her inspiration, Malczewski fills almost the whole of the rest of his canvas with smoke, apart from behind her, where we can make out some of the detail of the interior architectural décor of the temple. The Pythia, while it appears to be an historical representation of the shrine as it might once have been, is also at another level a very personal painting. For the Pythian priestess, despite all her mysticism, is still very much Malczewski’s

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Fig. 34  Jacek Malczewski, The Pythia.

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usual genial and smiling Maria Balowa (we again see the wedding ring on her left hand, the same motif we have already seen in another of his paintings). Why this association between his beloved and the ancient priestess of Apollo? We have seen how she often appears in the context of reflections by the artist on his own mortality (including by actually appearing as the grim reaper). Malczewski’s The Pythia is a personal engagement with the idea of the vagaries of man’s existence. It is a comment on how he prostrates himself before an ideal of knowing his own future. Yet the fumes filling the painting remind us that he is really blind to that future. The only clarity in all of that obfuscation and fear is the figure of the beloved. This is perhaps the artist’s way of communicating, through a complex use of classical symbolism, that in facing his fear of death man’s only real illumination and hope is in love. In the rest of this chapter we will consider two main types of death that mattered to Art Nouveau artists: the epic and the tragic. To begin with the first, the heroic qualities of death in classical literature (and to a lesser degree in classical art) were not lost on the artists of the time. While this had been a major inspiration for generations of artists before them too, they returned to the ideal of the noble death with renewed fervour. There is perhaps no greater expression of the sentiment that surrounded this ideal in Art Nouveau than Beardsley’s Ave atque Vale11 (1896) (Fig. 35). Beardsley wrote of this work in early October 1896: S. has just sent me a Savoy. I rather like this number. No.  7 will contain a translation of mine from the ‘Hail and farewell’ poem of Catullus. I have also made a picture for it.12

The artist’s simple ink drawing, published in The Savoy (a magazine for collectors and bibliophiles begun in 1896), illustrates the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus’ (c. 84–54 BC) Carmen CI. Beardsley, himself a Latin scholar, had produced the following translation of the poem: By ways remote and distant waters sped, Brother, to thy sad grave-­side am I come, That I may give the last gifts to the dead, And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb: Since she who now bestows and now denies Hath ta’en thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes. But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years, Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell, Take them, all drenched with a brother’s tears, And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell!

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Fig. 35  Aubrey Beardsley, Ave atque Vale.

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Beardsley’s illustration of this poem captures all the poignancy of Catullus’ poem, in the same way as his translation had done. In the drawing, we see the profile of a handsome youth, heroically nude except for the tunic which falls off his chest, his brows knit in sadness as he raises his right arm in a gesture of farewell to the departed. In his hair he wears a laurel wreath. Behind him, in the distance, we see some trees, perhaps a woodland. Above him Beardsley has inscribed the drawing’s title, its letters capitalized as if in a real Roman inscription. The rest of the drawing is otherwise left blank. Both Beardsley’s translation and his drawing gather much of their poignancy from Beardsley’s personal reflections on mortality, occasioned by his awareness of his being gravely ill. Despite the simplicity of this drawing, in it the artist manages to capture all the gravitas of classical funerary art. Clark (1978: 152) commented of this work: ‘It is extraordinary that Beardsley has been able to give an illusion of modelling to the torso although its white surface is relieved only by a nipple (too far to the right) and a navel’. It is certainly a masterful drawing, but its inspiration is likely also drawn directly from classical art. We have already spoken of Greek white-­ground lekythos vases in connection with Beardsley’s art. These were usually used in funerary contexts or for burials, so the relevance to Beardsley’s drawing here is obvious. Moreover, many of these depict heroic youths shown in profile, in simple outline against their white-­ground background, as the artist has in this case. It is highly probable that he had seen such a vase in the British Museum at the time he made this drawing (we might compare his drawing to Fig. 10 for an illustrative example). This is yet another example of how adeptly Beardsley could transform both Roman poetry and Greek art into a hybrid Art Nouveau creation of his own. Less seriously, and somewhat satirically, Beardsley makes a reference to death in his Et in Arcadia Ego (1896). The title is originally a reference to the fifth book of the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues, where the implication is that even death is present in paradise. But Beardsley’s image is rather different in tone to Virgil’s poem. As Clark (1978: 36) succinctly put it: When in the mood he could be frivolous about anything, even about art and sin. He adored Poussin, but could not resist giving his own interpretation of Et in Arcadia Ego, in which an aging roué in frock coat and spats tiptoes toward the storied urn.

The man in the drawing that seems so terrified is certainly a little comic. There have been various interpretations of what this painting and its title might mean, some suggesting that it could refer to a painting by Claude Lorraine (c.1600–82),

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whom the artist admired, or that it may simply have been a wordplay on the address of his publisher Leonard Smithers in the Royal Arcade.13 As so often the case with such published drawings by Beardsley, taken out of its context today the exact nature of its satire is not wholly clear, but the drawing does show that the artist was also able to bring a sense of levity to such reflections on mortality. In contrast to such simplicity of conception, returning to Pirner we find the complete opposite in his grand and epic conception of life and death. His Finis14 (1887) and Love, Life, Hate and Death15 (c. 1893) are a case in point. Finis, exhibited in the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition in Prague, shows us the allegorical confrontation of the forces of Life and Death, personified by the presence of Poetry as a winged harpist bathed in light and by a demon with a gorgon’s head. The nude female figure representing life sits atop a tomb as she looks down at the demon, who is sitting at its foot and looks back up at her. Before the tomb, an array of dead, dying and mourning figures are ranged, showing the havoc caused by death, who appears to be winning the battle. Yet, as Klimt in the Beethoven Frieze, Pirner returns to the classical ideal of poetry as man’s only salvation faced with death. Wittlich (1992: 52) comments of this painting: ‘[The painting] illustrates well the neo-­platonic inspiration of Pirner’s neo-­romanticism, his conviction that the creative soul is immortal’.16 Similar themes emerge in his Love, Life, Hate and Death, a complex allegorical drawing. A poet mounting Pegasus leaps to the heights where Genius awaits with a crown of laurel. However, just before reaching his goal he is brought down to earth again by the demon Frustra. Again, Pirner creates oppositions between the forces of light and darkness, valorizing their struggle in the figure of the poet, who once more attempts to transcend his mortality through art. In both these paintings though there is inevitably something of a sense that the battle may be being lost to death and ignominy, perhaps in a reflection of Pirner’s own disappointment at his ultimate lack of artistic success. We have already seen how Wyspiański used Homeric epic in his art. Many of his illustrations for the Iliad also engage with a classical ideal of heroic death. But Art Nouveau artists were also interested in the classical conception of the tragic death. This happened at several levels. In some cases, we see a fascination with individual personalities drawn from Greek tragedy for their allure as tragic heroes or heroines per se. On another, we see the detachment of the conventional metaphors and motifs of Greek tragedy from their original contexts and their transposition to new ones. We will look at one example of each of these here. Mucha’s Medea17 (1898) (Fig.  36), a poster the artist was commissioned to undertake for a staging of Euripides’ play at the Renaissance Theatre in Paris, is

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a very Art Nouveau interpretation of an individual personality drawn from Greek tragedy. The star of both the play itself, and Mucha’s poster to advertise it, was the actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Bernhardt was Mucha’s most important patron, and had been responsible for spotting his talent not long after his arrival in Paris. The Medea poster is typical of the sort of commissions that the artist received from the actress, who saw quickly how Mucha’s unique graphic style could enhance the glamour of her own public image. His representation of the actress is also typical of his individual brand of Art Nouveau. It is focused almost entirely on the elongated figure of the classical heroine herself. Jason and her children, whom she has just slain in an act of revenge against him, lie at her feet. They are almost a stylistic afterthought. The real interest is the bloodstained dagger Medea holds in her hand, which is really an extension of her own figure. While she is largely swathed in a deep black and red robe, the red blood on the tip of the dagger nonetheless stands out sharply. Behind her she is crowned by the halo of a brutal red sun, as if it were somehow aware of and party to the heinous crime she has just committed – in classical mythology Medea was the granddaughter of the sun god Helios, who at the end of Euripides’ play takes her up into heaven. Medea’s madly piercing, almost frightened, eyes glare out at us. Mucha exercises his graphic art to the full to bring out the tragic suspense of this moment. He had obviously done what he was meant to, and the actress was pleased with the result. If from nothing else we know this because in 1899 Bernhardt commissioned from the French jeweller Georges Fouquet (1862– 1957) a snake bracelet in gold, opal, ruby and diamond after the design that Mucha uses in this poster.18 Mucha’s conception of Medea was certainly a revolutionary one. This was a completely new way of portraying Greek tragedy in art, both in terms of medium and in terms of style. But he was not the only Art Nouveau artist that was interested in the figure of Medea. Several others also portrayed her, in each case seeing her in a new light, and more broadly there was interest in her potential as a tragic heroine. Beardsley, who did not portray her directly, refers to the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer’s (1791–1872) Medea (part of his trilogy Das goldene Vleis (1822)) in a letter of 1897.19 It is perhaps not difficult to understand her appeal for fin-­de-siècle artists. She had many of the features of the femme fatale which we discussed earlier in this book. But Mucha’s Medea is also an emblem of death, and of tragic death. The sheer theatricality of his image is a clue that Greek tragedy had an allure for Art Nouveau simply because of its melodramatic qualities. In his Erynnyes (date unknown), the Hungarian artist Körösfői-Kriesch transposed the Furies of ancient mythology to a modern context. In ancient

Death

Fig. 36  Alphonse Mucha, Medea.

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literature, the three hellish sisters represented in terrible physical form the doom that inevitably caught up with those guilty of blood crimes. Körösfői-Kriesch has them stand on a street corner of a modern-­day city, malevolently lying in wait for a murderer (we can see his victim lying in the street). The artist uses the presence of the Furies to make a point about the eternal nature of crime as he sees it. By transplanting them from ancient tragedy to the modern city, he is saying that the values of ancient Greek drama are as true today as they were in the ancient world. Violence ever begets violence. We know that the modern-­day murderer will ultimately meet a similar fate to that of his victim. In this painting, we are seeing the attempt to explain the uncomfortable realities of modern life through the transformation of the motifs of ancient drama. Ultimately this is perhaps not entirely effective. After all, it stands to reason that fantastical mythological figures invented for the ancient Greek stage can only have so much relevance in a contemporary social commentary like this. Classical allegories of this ilk did not last much longer in art for this very reason. Yet this painting does show that at least in this period such classical mythological transpositions could still be seen as valid. Death, and awareness of it, was an important part of the mentality of Art Nouveau artists, and in this chapter we have seen some of the ways that this could be expressed. The underlying anxieties – personal, artistic and social – that this related to were perhaps never fully resolved and continued to find expression, including through classical media, right up to the First World War. The shock of that conflict, while it did not provide answers to those anxieties, in a sense overtook them with its greater and more immediate horrors. In so doing it made the classical feel suddenly very much more remote, and as a consequence less relevant. At long last the golden age was well and truly gone.

Conclusion The different chapters of this book have brought out just how dynamic Art Nouveau’s transformations of the classics could be. We have also explored some of the reasons why. As was stressed in the introduction, each of these transformations was individual to the artist, and as a result their variety is more a rich and diverse patchwork than a schematically repetitive pattern. But the chapters of this book nonetheless indicate that it is possible to detect a broad set of recurring interests on the part of artists when they turned back to the classics. So what are the main insights that have emerged from a closer consideration of these different interests? This brief conclusion will hazard a top ten. First, while Art Nouveau artists transformed the classics in new ways, their original meaning was still considered to be immutable. The case studies of this book demonstrate in various ways that a majority of artists continued to entertain an ideal of the classical world based upon its literature and art. Though they often saw previous receptions of the classics as bastardized, the source itself remained pure. As a result – as we explored in the first and second chapters – many artists visualized their art as a sort of new artistic renascence of the classics. Or where they did not, they often used classicizing iconography to express the renascence of their art. This dynamic seeps into almost all of Art Nouveau’s receptions of the classics, and is a governing characteristic. It is built upon a certainty that the classics were a sort of never-­ending font of art and inspiration. Second, Art Nouveau’s reception of the classics was primarily about an ideal, even if this was not always a moral or noble one. There was certainly no sense that that ideal had to be understood in quite the same way as it had been by neoclassicism. But many artists, above all those of the Viennese and Munich Secessions, believed they were unleashing a power of beauty and inspiration that was inherent to the classics and inherently ennobling of their own art. Indeed, as we have seen in their use of the figure of the goddess Athena, that classical ideal could even be used to challenge a canonical reception of the classics which they

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rejected. The exact transformation of that ideal varied enormously, depending on the context in question, but it continued to reflect traditional classical ideals of the heroic and the beautiful. And the erotic, to which they added a whole new dimension. Third, that ideal was based on two main classical sources, the first being Greek literature. More specially, epic and tragedy found a major and very diverse outlet in Art Nouveau. Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were particularly popular with artists, who both returned to the eternal human themes that they found in these authors’ works and transposed them to very new contexts. Certain artists, perhaps none more so than the Pole Wyspiański, engaged directly with the original texts to reinvent them in a new way in their art (and, in his case, in his plays too). While the heroic and tragic ideals that they found in epic and tragedy respectively were fixed in their original significance for artists, the individuality that they brought to their recreation and representation was great. This encompassed everything from Wyspiański’s Blake-­like interpretation of Homer’s Iliad to Mucha’s poster-­girl horror Medea. Fourth, the second source of Art Nouveau’s classical ideal was Greek art, and chiefly classical and Hellenistic sculpture, and architecture. This was a direct inheritance of neoclassicism, whose essential faith in the purity and greatness of Greek forms they did not reject. Many had been schooled in this tradition, and so it is natural that it should have been their point of departure. Doric architecture, and the greats of Greek sculpture, Phidias, Praxiteles and Lysippus, all found a home in Art Nouveau. That is not to say that Art Nouveau’s transformations of them were the same as that of earlier art. They were very definitely not. But a traditional ideal of art as ‘Greek’ was upheld by Art Nouveau, and as we have seen it played a big role in the way it reinvented its muse. At the same time, an artist as experimental as Gaudí felt that he could still refer to the greatness of Greek architecture without compromising his individuality. Fifth, this is not the whole story though because Art Nouveau also engaged with other Greek art in a way previous artistic receptions of the classics had not. This included archaic Greek sculpture and both archaic and classical Greek vase painting. Some of the artists we have looked at in this book, including Klimt and Beardsley (and possibly Wyspiański), evidently had a solid understanding of ancient vase painting. While they did not copy these directly, they were unafraid to take what they thought was best from them as they transformed them in their own work. At the same time artists such as Bakst betray a certain fascination with archaic art and its association with an older, more primitive and more instinctual, ideal of ancient Greece.

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Sixth, the art of ancient cult has an outing in Art Nouveau, where it is also given new meanings. Most prominent in Beardsley’s work and in that of central, eastern and southern European artists, certain archaeological motifs of ancient art relating to cult practices were revived. There is perhaps no greater example of this than the ways in which Art Nouveau reinvents a tradition of Dionysian and Priapic symbolism in its quest for the erotic. Often these are used as an artistic vehicle for sexual suggestion. This was not entirely new to Art Nouveau, where examples can be found in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art, but Art Nouveau took this to new levels, and applied it in entirely new and revolutionary contexts, such as the commercial. Seventh, classical myth more broadly remained influential but was attributed new allegorical values it had not enjoyed before. The erotic allegories of classical myth were given new emphasis. At the same time, a certain selectivity becomes evident in the motifs of classical myth preferred by Art Nouveau, which departed from that of earlier art. The gorgon as femme fatale, the Bacchante and faun as sexual instinct, and the goddess as artistic patron, are perhaps the best examples, but one classical myth that found new prominence in a big way was the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Where Psyche had been depicted in neoclassical art before, she was now detached from her original context and attributed new psychological and Symbolist significance, in a reflection of the contemporary development of psychoanalysis. The same was of course done for Oedipus. Eighth, some Art Nouveau artists employed the classics in a new nationalist way. Classics had already been used in a major way in imperial contexts in the earlier nineteenth century by Napoleon, and more recently in the overseas colonies of the British Empire. A generation of (particularly central and eastern European) artists now turned back to the classics with a fresh perspective to see what they could find there in articulating their hopes and fears for the new nations they believed in. This again involved an ideal of the classical world, whose essence they wanted to infuse into their art and bring to bear in the new national consciousness they strove to foment. The exact meanings that were given to the classics in such nationalist transformations varied, as we might expect, by country. But it is clear that the classics were seen as an eternal reference point for the ideal nation. Ninth, all Art Nouveau transformations of the classics reflect one of two main fin-­de-siècle preoccupations, the first of these being desire. Desire for the heroic, the romantic, the erotic, the liberated, the magic or mystical, or the national. The turn of the century was, on the one hand, an age of great optimism. It was a

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period during which many of the cosmopolitan capitals with which we have been concerned in this book attained to new heights of economic wealth, industrial development, and culture. The desire for the new, the great, and the untried was palpable, and Art Nouveau took to this desire with gusto. Above all else, the style is concerned with vitality, and classical myth, literature and art provided a rich source for artistic expression of that vitality. Many of these expressions are, or verge on being, erotic. But the fin-­de-siècle also brought with it a host of more romanticizing, mystical and national desires which were new and idiosyncratic of the age. And finally tenth, that the second of these preoccupations was its anxiety. Anxiety about industrialization, social change, women’s sexuality, the unconscious ‘Id’, loss of the golden age or simply about death. This was the flipside to the desire of the age. A period of rapid technological change brought great promise but also great fear. This thread runs through all the chapters of this book, where a note of escapism is also detectable in artists’ turning to the classics. For the classics could be both the means of expressing this fear, and of trying to cope with it. In this complex process, the transformation of the classics in art broke new ground it had never broken before. That reception dynamic would continue further – and become richer still – in the Symbolist and early Modernist art which grew out of Art Nouveau.

Notes Introduction 1 This dynamic has long underlain studies of Art Nouveau, with the classics often given pride of place in the rejected canon of the old. Discussing Otto Wagner’s architecture, Tschudi-Madsen (1967: 130) constructs an opposition between a ‘classical tendency’ shown towards the end of the century with his more occasional use of Art Nouveau motifs. Masini (1984: 38) refers to the attempt to ‘create a contemporary manner of expression avoiding the moribund plundering of historical styles’. Lahor (2007: 18), finding the style’s origins in England, refers to a ‘return to profiles, colours, and forms that were no longer Greek, Latin, or Italian: an art that was English rather than classical’. See also note below. 2 Lahor (2007: 77): ‘Art Nouveau was the work of English, Belgian and American architects, subject neither to classical principles or the imitation of Greek and Italian models but deeply and completely committed to modern life, who created a solemn, refined style’. 3 As Masini (1984: 38) puts it: ‘The Art Nouveau designers were trying to create a contemporary manner of expression avoiding the moribund plundering of historical styles.’ 4 The nomenclature has changed over time. Certain of these terms – for example, the French Modern Style – while widespread in their day, can no longer be said to be current. 5 Volné Směry, Volume VII (1903: 137–8): ‘Není dávna doba [. . .] kdy se za vlastní a pravé umění za ‘velké’ umění výtvarné pokládal jen obraz a socha a všechno ostatní, všechna umění aplikovaná nebo t. zv. umělecký průmysl byl bagatelisován jako ‘malé’ umění, jako umění odpakové a bezvýznamné [. . .] Nevěříme již v rozpor mezí uměním a životem a mezi uměním a přítomností, jako nevěříme v rozpor mezi krásou a pravdou, mezí poesií a zdravím [. . .] Štítíme se bezduchých archaeologů umění, kteří v dávno mrtvém jazyku, odumřelé řeči forem, jež dávno již ztratily svůj raison d’etre, skládají a skrádají své výtvarné padělky a plagiaty’. 6 Whistler also did much to promote a ‘Greek’ style, where this is blended with the Japanese. As Schmutzler described this dynamic (1962: 26): ‘In many of Whistler’s pictures, above all in his Symphony in White, No IV: The White Girls (1876–9), we find young girls with a distinctly Greek type of beauty, their hair arranged in Attic fashion, wearing draped chitons and posing in Greek attitudes’.

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7 Lahor (2007: 28). 8 To cite Howard (1996: 2), who first picked up on this dynamic in scholarship on Art Nouveau: ‘Currency has been given to the idea that only western Europe produced noteworthy, true Art Nouveau and that the centre, north, south and east were all derivative, impure or crude.’ 9 See for example Van de Velde (1903, 1928, 1933). 10 Mucha (1982: 154): ‘Otec nikdy nemluvil o Art Nouveau.’ 11 Wittlich (1992: 35). 12 Notably in the eighth exhibition of the Viennese Secession in 1900 which featured a whole section dedicated to Glasgow, and in the Turin Exhibition of 1902. 13 See discussion in Niefanger (1993: 281), and also Rogoyska and Bade (2011: 236). 14 Congo should be a case in point, given its history as a Belgian colony. To the author’s awareness, while remnants of Art Deco architecture are to be seen in the present-­day Democratic Republic of Congo (particularly in the eastern city of Bukavu), there is no longer any Art Nouveau architecture extant in the country. 15 For a selection on reception and transformation see: Highet (1949), Böhme et al. (2011), Hardwick and Stray (2008), Hardwick (2003), Biddiss and Wyke (1999) and Edwards (1999). See my fuller summary in the introduction to Foegen and Warren (2016). 16 See also Bolgar (1954), which should be considered alongside Highet. 17 See discussion in Hardwick and Stray (2008: 3). 18 Most notably, the Berlin-­based Sonderforschungsbereich on Transformationen der Antike (https://www.sfb-­antike.de/). See also Böhme, Rapp, Rösler (2007), and Böhme et al. (2011). 19 There is growing interest in central and eastern European classical receptions, as reflected recently in Torlone, Munteanu and Dutsch’s (2017) anthology. Neumann (1960) was an early example of an examination of the reception of the classics in Czech painting in particular. 20 Terlecki (1983: 32). 21 Beardsley (1904: 26, 145). Letters 40 and 169. 22 Probably in reference to François Fénelon’s (1651–1715) Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), which fills a gap in the Odyssey by recounting Telemachus’ educational journeys with his mentor, who ultimately turns out to be Athene. 23 As Sarmony-Parsons (1989: 17) described of Klimt: ‘Klimt discovered the art of pre-­classical Greece, especially the painted vases he could study in the Museum of Art History.’ 24 ‘J.V. Myslbek byl velkým ctitelem antického umění, které blíže poznal ve sbírkách v pařížském Louvru a systematičtěji pak studiem v univerzitní sbírce odlitků v Praze. Stálost ve smýšlení prorazuje sochařovo zaujetí polykleitovským proporčním kánonem. Návrh alegorické figury v aktu svědčí o obdivu k Polykleitovým

Notes to pp. 12–27

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atletům, zejména k soše Doryfora, jejíž fotografie byla nalezana v Myslbekově pozůstalosti.’ 25 Kirstein (1970: 198).

1  Re-­birth 1 János Vaszary, Golden Age, 1898. Oil on canvas, 93 × 155 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 2 Greek and Latin names for the classical pantheon are used interchangeably in this book, although in some cases a deliberate choice has been made based on context, particularly where a specific reception of a Greek or Latin source is concerned. 3 Kieselbach (2003: 41). 4 Janis Rozentāls, Arcadia, 1910. Oil on canvas (Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga). 5 Károly Ferenczy, Archaeology, 1896. Oil, tempera on canvas, 118 × 66 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 6 Louis Comfort Tiffany, Landscape with a Greek Temple, c.1900. Stained glass window, 227 × 114 cm (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland). 7 The Parthenon of Nashville being a case in point. 8 Frelinghuysen (1998: 45). 9 Remarks made by Louis Comfort Tiffany in an address given to the Rembrandt Club of Brooklyn in 1917. Cited in Warmus (2001: 18). 10 Frelinghuysen (1998: 6). We should additionally be mindful of the business environment of artistic collection in which Tiffany grew up. Warmus (2001: 32) summarizes as follows: ‘An eclectic mix of decorative objects, preferably from as many eras and cultures as possible – Gothic, ancient Roman, Japanese, Chinese – all piled together as high and wide as possible, advertised status and culture. Tiffany went along with the trend because that was where the money was, but he was one of the few decorators of his time who insisted on world-­class materials.’ 11 Franz von Stuck, Self-­portrait, 1905. Oil on canvas (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin). 12 Franz von Stuck, poster for the First International Exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists of Munich (Secession), 1893. Colour lithograph (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich). 13 Joseph Maria Olbrich, House of the Vienna Secession, 1898–9 (Vienna). 14 Warmus (2001: 82). 15 Cecilia Waern in The International Studio, cited in Duncan (1989: 38) 16 Henri Bergé, La Lecture, date unknown. Stained glass and lead (École de Nancy Museum, Nancy).

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Notes to pp. 27–40

17 The association between the garden and contemplation is one with an ancient pedigree, but in eighteenth-­century England, in particular, the garden had also acquired strong connotations of poetic inspiration. See further discussion in Ross (2001: 51ff).

2  Muse 1 Gustav Klimt, Allegory of Sculpture, 1889. Pencil and watercolour heightened with gold on cardboard, 43.5 × 30 cm (Oesterreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna). 2 See for example Kilinski’s (1979) study of Klimt’s relationship with archaic Greek art, and his more recent analysis of certain of his uses of Greek myth in Kilinski (2013: 168ff). Florman (1990) also analyses Klimt’s use of archaic imagery and finds inspiration for this in Nietzsche (see discussion of the Beethoven Frieze). 3 See for example discussions of the classical as a vehicle to legitimize the erotic in art in Barolsky (1999), Orrells (2015), Hauser (1985) and Adams (1974). On the critical background see Leppert (2007) and Davis (2010). 4 Spinario, Roman but likely based on third century Hellenistic original. Bronze sculpture, height without plinth 73 cm (Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome). Klimt’s version here is closer to a nineteenth-­century imitation. 5 Athena, Apollo and the Nine Muses, c. 180 AD. Roman sarcophagus (Glyptothek, Munich). 6 Gustav Klimt, The Girl from Tanagra, 1890–1. Oil on stucco base, 230 × 230 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). 7 Paul Cauchie, House and Studio of Paul Cauchie, 1905 (Brussels). 8 Maurice Denis, The Muses, 1893. Oil on canvas, 171.5 × 137.5 cm (Musée d‘Orsay, Paris). 9 Józef Mehoffer, Muse, 1897. Oil on canvas, 130 × 95 cm (National Museum, Warsaw). 10 Olszewksi (1989: 17). 11 Tsaneva (2014: foreword). 12 Jacek Malczewski, Self-Portrait with Muse, 1912. Oil on board, 73 × 91.5 cm (Private collection). 13 Josef Václav Myslbek, Music (second version), 1892–4. Bronze sculpture, height 108 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 14 Wittlich (1982: 37). 15 Myslbek (1960: 27). 16 Wittlich (1982: 27). 17 ‘Také česká plastika, jež zčásti sleduje příklad Francouzů a neztrácí se zřetele odkaz J.V. Myslbeka, zůstává s uměním antiky v neústalém dialogu.’

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18 ‘V době pozdního akademického klasicismu, kdy je antika citována v povrchním napodobování, přichází Josef Václav Myslbek s novým naplněním, s přehodnocením vztahu novodobého sochařského díla k antice, v níž vedle tvarové závaznosti domýšlí především její ethos a mravní hodnoty chápe v celé totálnosti i s rysy tragickými (Oddanost).’ 19 Gerlach and Ilg (1882). 20 Jan Preisler, Music and Song, 1895. Charcoal drawing. Printed in Gerlach (1896). 21 Wittlich (1982: 16). 22 ‘Si cette composition cherche à satisfaire l’élégance d’un salon, elle dégage néanmoins, par une subtile utilisation du fusain, une réelle nostalgie poétique.’ 23 Ferenc Helbing, Orpheus, c. 1904. Lithograph, 35.3 × 51.9 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 24 Franz von Stuck, Orpheus, 1891. Oil on gold-­ground panel, 55 × 47 cm (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich). 25 Nietzsche would famously go on to retract his veneration of Wagner in his Nietzsche contra Wagner (1895). 26 Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Casein on plaster, height 220 cm (Secession building, Vienna). 27 (1) Gustav Klimt, Music, 1895. Oil on canvas, 37 × 44.5 cm (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich). (2) Gustav Klimt, Music, 1901. Colour lithograph, published in Ver Sacrum. 28 We might differentiate this slightly from Nietzsche’s conception of art not necessarily as a force to overcome evil, but simply to bring man to a sort of reconciliation with the reality of life as at once both ecstasy and pain. 29 ‘Dohodnou se theoretikové, že není možno, aby vznikla opravdová moderní tragedie, která by náš běžný život a samu jeho praxi a organisaci dovedla nazírat ve velikých tragických liniích a v symbolicky typických figurách a kritizovat jej s opravdovostí, neúprosností a výsostí té ethické kritiky, jakou prováděla na svých recích a polobozích tragedie antická, a hle, přijde Ibsen a stvoří jí.’ 30 ‘Tak inspiruje se na přiklad řecké umění týmiž základními představami, vyznává tytež vládnoucí ideje, má společnou koncepcí heroismu, erotiky, tragiky, jak je citila a chápala, vyznávala a věřila.’ 31 For the background to the reception of Greek drama see Van Zyl Smit’s (2016) recent study, particularly part IV. See also Easterling (1997), in particular part III (Burian, Mackintosh and Goldhill’s discussions of modern interpretations and stagings of Greek tragedy) and Hall and Harrop (2010). On the relationship between literary Symbolism and Greek drama see Goodkin (1984) on Mallarmé and Oedipus, and – for an overview of Russian Symbolist reception of the classics – see Barta, Larmour and Miller (1996). 32 Gustav Klimt, Taormina’s Theatre, 1886–8. Ceiling painting, 740 × 400 cm (Burgtheater, Vienna).

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Notes to pp. 52–64

33 Gustav Klimt, Tragedy, 1897. Black chalk, pencil and gold, 41.9 × 30.8 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Published in Gerlach (1896).

3  Hero 1 Jan Preisler, Diana, 1908. Pastel, 21 × 23 cm (Litoměřice Gallery, Litoměřice). 2 ‘Citace antiky jsou v Presilerově díle vždy spojeny s uměleckou reflexí o problémech ryze současných.’ 3 Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898. Oil on canvas, 75 × 75 cm (Historisches Museum der Stadt, Vienna). The frame, Klimt’s design, was made by his brother Georg. 4 Néret (2011: 30): ‘Whenever Klimt was not working for a patron, he seemed to throw off all restraint and paint as he truly willed. A quite different type of woman entered the picture, dangerous and instinctual, as in Pallas Athene and Nuda Veritas [. . .] a creature of flesh and blood severing the links with the traditional idealisation of female nudity in art. The pubic hair alone was a declaration of war on the classical ideal.’ 5 ‘Eines der ersten Beispiele für Klimts vollständig ausgeprägten Secessionstil.’ 6 Franz von Stuck, Pallas Athene, 1898. Oil on panel, 77 × 69.5 cm (private collection). 7 Jan Preisler, cover design for Volné Směry XI (1899). Published by the Mánes Society, Prague. 8 ‘Po jedné stránce objeví se tedy v díle Preislerově nutně žena, podruhé veliký a přísný zjev samotného Umění, v podobě dívky, vznešené Pallady Athény, někdy zahalené a odvrácené bytosti jiné, k níž umělec tu toužně, tu zoufale pohlíží či v pláči se tulí.’ 9 Maximilián Pirner, Head of Pallas – Art Historical Fable, 1895. Oil on canvas, 89 × 161 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 10 Bertold Löffler, Quer Sacrum, Organ der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Irrlands, 1899. Colour lithograph, 20 × 20.4 cm (University of Applied Arts, Vienna). 11 See further on this illustration Kern, Reinhold and Werkner (2010: 42). 12 Irma von Dutczynska, Der Suchende, 1901. Colour lithograph (Secession, Vienna). Published in Ver Sacrum 1903 (Issue 1). 13 Paul Hankar, Hotel Ciamberlani, 1897. Red-­brick house, façade 12m (Rue Defacqz 48, Brussels). 14 To take one illustrative example, the Mosaic of a Lion Chasing a Bull (c. fifth century AD, stone tesserae, 81 × 150 cm) in the Paul Getty Museum. There are also a number of Roman mosaics featuring hunting scenes in the Cáceres Museum in Spain, which are stylistically particularly close to the designs discussed here. 15 Jacek Malczewski, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1920. Oil on canvas, 127 × 166 cm (National Museum, Kielce).

Notes to pp. 65–78

197

16 Gustav Klimt, poster for the First Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1898 (pre-­censure version). Lithograph, 63.5 × 46.9 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York). 17 Aubrey Beardsley, Perseus, 1890–8. Process print from line block, 20.7 × 7.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 18 We will not discuss the classical heroine Andromeda in detail here, although it should be noted that she remained – as she had in neoclassical art – a theme that Art Nouveau artists found attractive, given her potential to show the female nude in a heroic context. An example is Beneš Knüpfer’s (1844–1910) Andromeda, 1897. Oil on canvas (National Gallery, Prague). 19 (1) Aubrey Beardsley, Atalanta in Calydon, 1896. Ink drawing, 30.5 × 11 cm (private collection). First published in Beardsley, Vallance (1897). (2) Aubrey Beardsley, Atalanta in Calydon with the Hound, 1896. Ink drawing (private collection). 20 Wilson (1976: 47). 21 Terlecki (1983: 115). 22 Terlecki (1983: 30). 23 Terlecki (1983: 30). 24 Stanisław Wyspiański, Illustrations for Homer’s Iliad, 1896–8. Fifteen drawings (National Museum, Krakow). 25 Painted Mycenaean terracotta krater depicting bulls (c. late fourteenth/thirteenth century BC). 26 Aubrey Beardsley, A Footnote, 1896. Ink drawing, printed in The Savoy (No. 2). 27 Xawery Dunikowski, Prometheus, 1898. Patinated plaster sculpture (National Museum, Warsaw). From the cycle of works Man. 28 František Kupka, Prometheus Blue and Red, 1908–10 (original version 1908). Watercolour on paper, 32 × 29 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 29 As a further sign of his interest in the classical world, the artist also produced a work entitled Colossus of Rhodes (1906). His Prometheus Blue and Red is itself really a sort of colossus. 30 Max Klinger, Prometheus Freed, 1894. Etching, engraving, aquatint and mezzotint, 27.6 × 36.2 cm (Houghton Library, Harvard College Library). 31 Less-­frequently used, but also depicted by Art Nouveau artists, was Sisyphus, the other classical hero punished for his misdeeds. One example is Franz von Stuck’s Sisyphus, 1920. Oil on canvas, 103 × 89 cm (private collection).

4  Bloom 1 Elisabeth Sonrel, The Procession of Flora, 1897. Watercolour on paper, 100 × 200 cm (Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse).

198

Notes to pp. 79–89

2 Louis Comfort Tiffany, The Blossoms of Spring (Flora), 1887–98. Oil on canvas, 151 × 239 cm (Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park). 3 Grasset (1896). 4 Eugène Grasset, Encre L. Marquet, La Meilleure de Toutes les Encres, 1892. Lithograph, 121.8 × 80.8 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York). 5 Woman with Stylus and Writing Tablet (Sappho), c. 55–70 AD. Fresco, 31 × 31 cm (National Archaeological Museum, Naples). 6 Henri Bellery-Desfontaines, L’Enigme, 1898. Colour lithograph printed in the L’Estampe Moderne series (May 1897–April 1899). 7 Kārlis Brencēns, Helios, c. 1908. Stained glass panel (restaurant of Hotel Europa, St. Petersburg). 8 Jan Preisler, Spring, 1900. Oil on canvas (triptych), (from left to right) 112 × 70 cm, 112 × 186 cm, 112 × 70 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 9 Jan Preisler, Spring Evening, 1898. Oil on canvas (National Gallery, Prague). 10 Jan Preisler, Autumn, 1897. Oil and aquarelle charcoal drawing (Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague). 11 Jan Preisler, The Wind and the Breeze, 1895. Charcoal on paper (triptych) (National Gallery, Prague). 12 ‘Le printemps et l’automne, le matin et le soir – saisons et moments de transition – prennent ici une signification plus profonde. L’automne, dont la richesse de couleurs n’empêche pas de suggérer l’extinction mélancholique de la vie, est indéniablement le sujet favori des peintres de la première moitié des années 1890.’ 13 Zlatá Praha (1899: 369). 14 Of Virgil’s Eclogues (book 5). The idea being that death is ineluctable and that he may be found even in paradise. 15 ‘Antická Arkadie se severskou Pohádkou v synkretismu, příznačném pro celý další Preislerův vývoj.’ 16 Wittlich (1992: 69): ‘Le tableau, qui exprime l’harmonie triste mais sereine de l’automne finissant, inspire beaucoup les artistes à cette époque et va devenir le symbole de l’état d’âme de toute une génération.’ 17 (1) Georges Minne, Fountain with Five Kneeling Boys, 1900. Marble (Folkwang Museum, The Hague). (2) Georges Minne, Fountain with Five Kneeling Boys, 1905 (with water-­basin 1927–30). Marble (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent). 18 Georges Minne, Boy Kneeling at the Spring, 1898. Bronze statuette, height 78.5 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). 19 Janis Rozentāls, At the Source, 1914. Oil on canvas, 35 × 50 cm (Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga). 20 Ludwig Habich, Narcissus, 1896. Bronze statuette, dark patination, dark-­green marble base, height with base 34.7 cm (private collection). 21 Ulmer (1997: 66): ‘frühen, lyrisch gestimmten Statuetten’.

Notes to pp. 89–101

199

22 Josef Richard Marek, Endymion, 1909. Ink drawing cover design for Jiří Karásek z Lvovic, Endymion (published by Kamila Neumannová in Prague 1909). The edition was part of a series of original editions of Czech authors published by Kamila Neumannová between 1905–19. 23 Louis Comfort Tiffany, The Bathers, c. 1912. Stained glass window (destroyed). 24 Ludwig von Hoffmann, Idyllic Landscape with Bathers, c. 1900. Oil on canvas, 65 × 96 cm (private collection). 25 Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1900–07. Oil on canvas, 430 × 300 cm (destroyed). 26 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 10.22.43–45. The peacock also signified the deification of dead Roman empresses on imperial coinage. 27 Duncan, Eldelberg and Harris (1989: 40).

5  Desire 1 Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907–08. Oil on canvas, 77 × 83 cm (Galerie Würthle, Vienna). 2 See also Kilinski (2013: 168): ‘The annunciation of overt female sexuality is the driving force behind his Danaë, while the composition summarily usurps the traditionally male-­focused agenda of voyeuristic titillation in previous renditions of the myth.’ Kilinski sees an allusion to female genitalia in the elliptical designs on the veil, which he identifies as an abstraction of the octopus suckers Klimt had used elsewhere in his work. 3 Jan Preisler, Leda and the Swan, 1909. Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 96 cm (location unknown). 4 Aubrey Beardsley, Venus and Tannhauser (also known as Venus between Terminal Gods), 1895. Intended for Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (1907). 5 Koloman Moser, Venus in the Grotto, c. 1914. Oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm (Leopold Museum, Vienna). 6 Moser produced posters, furniture and interior design, stage sets, costumes and glass windows for the Secession building and churches. See further Kern, Reinhold and Werkner (2010: 19). 7 Arnold Böcklin, The Birth of Venus (also known as Blue Venus) (unfinished), 1868–9. Oil on canvas, 135.5 × 79 cm (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt). 8 Aubrey Beardsley, Apollo Pursuing Daphne (unfinished), c. 1896. Indian ink and pencil (private collection). 9 Aubrey Beardsley, Illustrations to Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’, 1896. Eight large ink drawings (different collections). 10 Koloman Moser, A Modern Tantalus, 1895. Ink drawing, 27 × 24 cm (published in the Meggendorfer Blätter). 11 See O’Connor (1992) for a discussion of this dynamic in Toulouse-Lautrec’s work.

200

Notes to pp. 101–108

12 Josef Mařatka, Ariadne Abandoned, 1903. Bronze sculpture, height 30.5 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 13 Wittlich (1982: 208). 14 Turner (1956): prologue. 15 Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Daphnis and Chloe, 1901. Oil on canvas, 56.5 × 63.5 cm (private collection). 16 Károly Ferenczy, Daphnis and Chloe, 1896. Charcoal on paper, 18.7 × 38 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 17 Károly Ferenczy, Daphnis and Chloe (sketch), 1896. Oil on paper, 20.7 × 33.7 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 18 See Benthien, Böhme, Stephan (2011) for a detailed discussion. 19 Jozef Mehoffer, Medusa, 1904. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 35 cm (Jagellonian University Museum, Krakow). 20 Philippe Wolfers, Medusa, 1898–9. Pendant on chain, ivory, enamelled gold, and opal, height 10 cm (private collection). 21 Escritt (2000: 1874). 22 Philippe Wolfers, Maleficia, 1905. Red marble, ivory and amethyst, height 61.5 cm (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels). For other classicizing themes in a similar medium in Art Nouveau we might compare S. Obiolo’s Sappho of 1890 (private collection, London). 23 ‘Cette oeuvre, unanimement reconnue comme superbe, a deux particularités: il ne s’agit pas d’une seule tête mais d’un buste féminin et le masque de Gorgô est fiché dans une chevalure voluptueuse. En conséquence, la tension est extrême: le corps adopte une pose lascive, tendu par le désir ou la jouissance alors que l’effroi est concentré dans le bijou d’améthyste; plus, le corps et le regard de la femme invitent au même moment où le regard du bijou fige. L’homme qui ne sait résister est perdu.’ 24 Maximilián Pirner, Medusa, 1891. Pastel drawing, diameter 59 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 25 ‘at once beautiful and terrible’ 26 Franz von Stuck, Medusa, 1908. Oil on canvas, 72 × 82 cm (Civic Museums of Venice, Venice). 27 Fernand Khnopff, Blood of the Medusa, 1898. Crayon and colour crayon on Japan paper, 21.5 × 13.5 cm (Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, Paris). 28 Khnopff can be considered as an artist who straddled both Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Lahor’s (2007: 92) justification seems to stand: ‘The Symbolist movement was an important influence on Khnopff, but his effort to render multiple meanings makes him equally part of the Art Nouveau trend. Like the career of Jan Toorop, Khnopff ’s proceeded to impact the formation and spread of Art Nouveau; in turn, the ‘painter of closed eyes’ inspired other artists, including Gustav Klimt.’

Notes to pp. 109–117

201

29 Jacek Malczewski, Medusa, 1895. Oil on canvas, 42.7 × 63 cm (National Art Gallery, Lviv). 30 Jacek Malczewski, The Artist and Medusa: Portrait of Tadeusz Błotnicki, c. 1902. Oil on canvas (National Museum, Warsaw). 31 On this see in particular Leclerq-Marx’s (2002) study. 32 Jan Toorop, The Shipwreck, 1895. Ink and coloured chalk on paper, 17.2 × 28.5 cm (private collection). 33 Something which belies the ultimately Art Nouveau nature of this image, despite its Symbolist quality too. Cf. Lahor (2007: 92): ‘Around 1890, Toorop encountered Symbolism when he discovered Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck’s poetry, which Toorop considered a revelation. Although Toorop’s art would henceforth appear Symbolist, primarily on account of his frequent use of mythological subjects, the treatment and execution of his work remained firmly anchored in Art Nouveau.’ 34 Elisabeth Sonrel, Sirens, date unknown. Watercolour, 68 × 48 cm (private collection). 35 Stained glass window depicting faun, c.1907–21 (Lucerna Arcade, Prague). 36 Janis Rozentāls, Women and the Spirits of Nature, 1907. Cardboard, tempera, pastel, 98 × 67 cm (Latvian National Museum, Riga). 37 Louis Joseph Raphael Collin, Nymph and Faun, date unknown. Oil on canvas, 27 × 32 cm (private collection). 38 Henry Gerbault, The Butterflies, from La Vie Parisienne 1916. 39 Chéri Herouard, cover design for La Vie Parisienne 1924. 40 Jacek Malczewski, The Unknown Note (portrait of Stanisław Bryniarski, a Cracow painter), 1902. Oil on canvas, 42 × 63 cm (National Museum, Krakow). 41 Olszewski (1989: 16). 42 Jacek Malczewski, Self-­portrait with Fauns: Triptych, 1906. Oil on cardboard, each painting 40.5 × 32.5 cm (National Art Gallery, Lviv). 43 Jacek Malczewski, Woman with Faun: Temptation, 1918. Oil on board (Jacek Malczewski Museum, Radom). 44 Aubrey Beardsley, How King Arthur saw the Questing Beast (drawing for the frontispiece to the first volume of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur published by J.M. Dent, London 1893–4), 1893. Pen, ink and wash, 36 × 27 cm (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). 45 Aubrey Beardsley, frontispiece design for Plays by John Davidson, 1894. Graphite and ink drawing on paper, 28.6 × 18.7 cm (Tate Britain, London). 46 Aubrey Beardsley, Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook (cover design for The Yellow Book Prospectus Volume IV), 1895. Published in Leonard Smithers’ Catalogue of Rare Books (London 1895). 47 There would be a precedent in his caricature of Whistler as a faun (1893), which alluded to Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune. In another classical caricature, he had

202

Notes to pp. 117–130

also taken Walter Crane in his satirical sights for his socialist views in an illustration entitled Demos Rex (c. 1893). 48 Eugène Grasset, The Little Faunesses, 1896. Woodcut engraving, 21.1 × 14.6 cm (Cantonal and University Library, Lausanne). Published in December 1896 edition of L’Image: Revue Artistique et Litteraire. 49 Franz von Stuck, Tempting a Nymph, 1890. Oil on canvas (private collection). 50 Géza Faragó, Modern Nymphs, 1906. Gouache (reproduced in the 1906 edition of Magyar Iparművészet). 51 Gustav Klimt, Female Nude Lying Down, 1886–7. Black pencil with white highlights, 28.7 × 42.5 cm (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna) 52 Leon Bakst, A Bacchante, 1911. Watercolour, pencil and metallic paint (printed in L’Art Decoratif de Léon Bakst (Paris 1913)). 53 Leon Bakst, Terror Antiquus, 1908. Oil on canvas, 250 × 270 cm (Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg). 54 János Vaszary, The Return of the Spring: The Living Key, 1899. Oil on canvas, 134.5 × 90.5 cm (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest). 55 Gaspar Camps, poster for Vermouth, date unknown. Published by Cosme Puigmal (Barcelona). 56 Notably in Said’s Orientalism (1978). 57 Flaubert (1862: 277). 58 Flaubert (1862: 278). 59 Victor Prouvé, Salammbô, 1893. Mosaic leather and bronze (École de Nancy Museum, Nancy). Produced for an 1893 edition of Flaubert’s Salammbô (Nancy 1893). 60 Alphonse Mucha, Salammbô, 1896. Hand-­coloured lithograph, 38 × 21.5 cm (published in May 1897 edition of L’Estampe modern. 61 Carl Strathmann, Salammbô, 1894–5. Mixed media on canvas, 187.5 × 287 cm (Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, Weimar). 62 František Kobliha, Salambo, 1913. Lithograph, paper, 65 × 47 cm (from the cycle Women of my Dreams). 63 Gaston Bussière, Salammbo, 1920. Oil on canvas (Musée des Ursulines, Mâcon). 64 See Benthien, Böhme, Stephan (2011) 65 Beardsley (1904: 33), letter 50 (November 1896). 66 Aubrey Beardsley, The Birthday of Madame Cigale, 1892. Black ink, grey wash, white gouache and graphite on white paper, 24.9 × 39 cm (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA). Drawing for an illustration in The Studio, No. 1. 67 Lucian, True History, 2.34. Translation of Fowler (Oxford 1905). 68 Follower of Douris, Women at Home, with the names of heroines, c. 470 BC. Attic red-­figure pyxis (British Museum, London). 69 Aubrey Beardsley, A Snare of Vintage, 1894. Ink drawing, 15 × 11 cm (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna).

Notes to pp. 130–146

203

70 Lucian, True History, 11. Translation of Hickes (London 1663). 71 Beardsley (1904: 16), letter 32 (July 1896). 72 Beardsley (1904: 42), letter 58 (December 1896). 73 Aubrey Beardsley, Messalina Returning Home, 1895. Pen and ink drawing with graphite and watercolour, 17.5 × 14.5 cm (Tate Britain, London). Drawing for an illustration of the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. 74 Juvenal, Satires, 6.120–132. Translation of Smart (1829). 75 Aubrey Beardsley, Messalina Returning from the Bath, 1897. Pen and ink, 28 × 18 cm (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Drawing for an illustration of the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. 76 Beardsley (1904: 16), letter 32 (July 1896). 77 Beardsley (1904: 29), letter 45 (November 1896). 78 Donnay (1892: 4): ‘Seulement ils avaient des Dieux,/ plutôt cela qui vous manqué;/ C’était leur côté radieux,/ Leur temple n’était pas la Banque,/ Mais depuis le vieux Parthénon/ Debout sur ses colonnes blanches,/ Jusqu’à l’humble rocher sans nom/ Perdu sous la mousse et les branches,/ Chaque endroit était habité/ Par la pure divinité.’ 79 ‘Kultura nevěří v krásné duše v ubohých, zanedbaných tělech, kultura je sňatek ducha a hmoty, Fysis a Psyche, je říší naplnění.’ 80 Max Klinger, Psyche on the Cliff, 1880. Engraving (Print Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). 81 Jan Toorop, Psyche, 1898. Binding for Louis Couperus’ Psyche, 15.5 × 10.5 cm. 82 James Herbert McNair, Psyche at the Well of Forgiveness, 1911. Pencil and watercolour drawing, 15.4 × 16.2 cm (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) 83 Jan Kotěra, Temple of Amor and Psyche. Roman fantasy, 1898 (location unknown).

6  Nation 1 See my summary in the introduction to Foegen and Warren (2016). 2 Masini’s (1984: 123) view of this dynamic is overly simplistic: ‘In Eastern Europe Art Nouveau was received under similar circumstances to those operating in Scandinavia. The new style was adapted to already well established traditions, especially in architecture and in the applied arts.’ 3 Stanisław Wyspiański, Ascension, 1904. Stained glass window (Franciscan Church, Franciszkanska Street, Krakow). 4 Stanisław Wyspiański, Apollo: The System of Copernicus, 1904. Stained glass window (Medical Society building, Krakow). 5 Stanisław Wyspiański, Head of Apollo, 1904. Lithograph, paper, 34.9 × 32.5 cm (National Museum, Warsaw).

204

Notes to pp. 146–162

6 Jacek Malczewski, Law, Fatherland, Art, 1903. Oil on canvas, left panel (‘Law’) 69.5 × 98 cm, central panel (‘Fatherland’) 69.5 × 98 cm, right panel (‘Art’) 69.5 × 97.5 cm (National Museum, Wroclaw). 7 Jacek Malczewski, Polonia II, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 145 × 98.5 cm (Private collection). 8 Jacek Malczewski, Nike of the Legions, 1916. Oil on plywood (National Museum, Krakow). 9 Jacek Malczewski, The Story of a Song (Portrait of Adam Asnyk), 1899. Oil on canvas (National Museum, Warsaw). 10 Wacław Szymanowski, Caryatids Group, 1896 (National Museum, Krakow). 11 Wittlich (1982: 324). 12 Jiránek (1912: 174): ‘Až se neodvislost mladých bouřila proti takovému morálnímu nátlaku [. . .] A chtělo se nám nejprve zmocniti se všeho, co se pracovalo v cizině, vyrovnati se v kroku ostatní Evropě.’ See further Wittlich (1982: 129). 13 ‘Procházka considère néanmoins l’art décadent non comme un déclin, mais comme une conscience de la déchéance qui invite l’artiste à défier les conventions hypocrites de la société.’ 14 Žákavec (1921: 48): ‘Najdeme u nás při nejmenším poměrně tolik talentů jako u národů vyspělých, zrovna tolik chuti k životu a růstu [. . .] Je tu jistá neúprosná logika, že malý národ může si dopřát jen málo silných lidí.’ 15 ‘Jsme si začali uvědomovat opravdově, že máme právo na existenci jako každý jiný národ, a když politické poměry konečně dovolily, že jsme mohli aspoň trochu volněji dýchat, také ve výtvarném umění se začalo u nás intensivněji pracovat.’ Cited in Matějček (1950: 106). 16 Jan Preisler, U Nováku Commercial Building façade, 1902–04. Mosaic façade (Vodičkova 30, Prague). 17 ‘Věřil, že přišla doba, kdy slovanský živel bude určovat dějiny [. . .] Věděl ale, že dějiny nejsou předepsané, že lidé mohou chybami svou příležitost prohrát [. . .] Přiznáme-­li mu právo na přání, vyrostlé z kořenů devatenáctého století, aby po Románech a Germánech přišli i Slované ke slovu, o kterém věříl, že bude poselstvím lidkosti, pak můžeme spíš mluvit o poselství předčasném než opožděném.’ 18 See also my forthcoming review of Winkler in The Journal of Roman Studies in Warren (2017). 19 Mucha (1966: 114). See also Dvořák (1980: 131). 20 See further my chapter on this and another Czech representation of Arminius in Foegen and Warren (2016). 21 Particularly evident in the Casa Vicens, although more a synthesis than simple copying of Moorish elements – on which see Howard (2008: 52). See also Sembach (2002: 73) and Kliczkowski (2004: 75). 22 Antoni Gaudí, Plaça Reial lampposts, 1879. Two designs for streetlamps (Plaça Reial, Barcelona).

Notes to pp. 163–176

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23 Antoni Gaudí, Güell Pavillion gate (Can Cuyàs de la Riera estate), 1884. Cast iron, width 5m (Avenue de Pedralbes, Barcelona). 24 Zerbst (1988: 62): ‘Le premier grand exemple d’élément d’Art Nouveau que nous rencontrons dans son œuvre.’ 25 Roe (2012: 144). 26 See further on this Roe (2012: 144). 27 Zerbst (1988: 153): ‘Les colonnes externes sont – tout à fait selon l’usage grec – légèrement penchées et s’élargissent un peu vers le bas; seulement chez Gaudí tout est un peu plus marqué que dans les colonnes doriques originales. Les autres colonnes à l’intérieur de ce ‘portique’ partout de même diamètre.’ 28 Szabadi (1989: 95). 29 Szabadi (1989: 7). 30 Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, Miksa Róth, Siege of Aquileia, 1908. Glass mosaic (location unknown). Exhibited in the Hungarian Pavilion of the 1908–9 Venice Biennale. 31 See Bernabò (2003) for the background to this. 32 Miksa Róth, Orpheus, c. 1910. Glass, schwarzlot painting set in lead, 72 × 50 cm (Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest). 33 Miksa Róth, Artemis, c. 1910. Glass, schwarzlot painting set in lead, 72 × 50 cm (Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest). 34 Henri Bellery-Desfontaines, Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles 1910, 1910. Engraving (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris). 35 Koloman Moser, Dedikationsblatt anlässlich des 50. Regierungsjubiläums von Kaiser Josef I, 1898. Print, 23.5 × 20.5 cm (University of Applied Arts, Vienna). 36 Charles l’Eplattenier, La mort, la douleur et la paix. La purification par le feu. Le silence. La flamme de souvenir, 1909–1910. Four oil-­on-panel paintings, two of which 900 × 200 cm, and two of which 220 × 220 cm (Cimitière de la Charrière, La Chaux-­de-Fonds).

7  Death 1 Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1891. Oil on canvas, 72 × 140 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich). 2 Jan Toorop, The Sphinx, 1892–7. Black and coloured chalk and pencil on canvas, 126 × 135 cm (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague). 3 Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx, 1895. Oil on canvas (Museum of the Fine Arts, Budapest). 4 Fernand Khnopff, The Caresses of the Sphinx, 1896. Oil on canvas, 50 × 150 cm (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). 5 Jacek Malczewski, Thanatos, 1898–9. Oil on canvas (National Museum, Warsaw).

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Notes to pp. 176–184

6 Maximilán Pirner, Hekate, 1901. Pastel, paper, 89 × 55 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 7 ‘Lze říci, že čím více mizí z umění kult romanesknosti a fantastičnosti, tím více mytiky do něho vtéká.’ 8 Maximilán Pirner, Empedokles, 1898. Oil on canvas (National Gallery, Prague). 9 Philippe Wolfers, Night, 1899. Gold, enamel, opal, pearl and cast glass (private collection). 10 Jacek Malczewski, The Pythia, 1917. Oil on canvas (National Art Gallery, Lviv). 11 Aubrey Beardsley, Ave atque Vale, 1896. Pen and ink, 16 × 10.5 cm (Private collection). Drawing for an illustration to Catullus’ poem Carmen CI. 12 Beardsley (1904: 21), letter 36 (October 1896). 13 Walker (1967: 93). 14 Maximilián Pirner, Finis, 1887. Oil on canvas, 100 × 130 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 15 Maximilián Pirner, Love, Life, Hate and Death, c. 1893. Black and white chalk, 19.5 × 31.5 cm (National Gallery, Prague). 16 ‘[La peinture] illustre bien l’inspiration néo-­platonicienne du néo-­romantisme de Pirner, sa conviction que l’âme créatrice est immortelle.’ 17 Alphonse Mucha, Medée. Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1898. Colour lithograph, 199 × 69 cm (Mucha Trust, Prague). Printed by F. Champenois, Paris. 18 Mucha (1982: 259). 19 Beardsley (1904: 65), letter 84 (March 1897).

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Index Academic art 2–3, 6–7, 10, 12, 19, 23, 39, 42–3, 72, 91, 152 Aeschylus 12, 51, 75, 188 Agamemnon 70–1 Aleš, Mikoláš 152 Alexandria 128 Aphrodite 15–16, 98–9, 128, 154, 167 Aphrodite of Knidos 15, 99 Apollo 16, 32–3, 44, 51, 70, 91, 100–1, 144–6, 151, 165, 178, 180, 194, 199, 203 Apuleius 135–7, 209 Aquileia 167, 205 Arcadia 1, 15–16, 18–19, 37, 39, 42, 86, 88, 103, 120, 182, 193 archaeology 13, 19–20, 33, 166, 193, 209 Ariadne 101, 141, 200 Aristophanes 100, 131, 133–4, 199 Armand Colin 160, 211 Arminius 160–1, 204, 212 Artemis 16, 167, 205 Arts and Crafts movement 6, 29, 78, 140 Asclepius 92 Asnyk, Adam 150, 204 Athena viii, 25, 32–3, 56–61, 65, 106, 168, 187, 194 Athena Parthenos 32, 57–8, 61 Athenian Acropolis 58, 120, 142, 151 Atlas 156–9 Attila the Hun 167 Aulos 41–2, 51, 116, 150

127–35, 180–4, 188–9, 192, 197, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206. Beethoven, Ludwig van viii, 45–8, 51, 53, 183, 194, 195 Bellery-Desfontaines, Henri 81, 85, 87, 168, 192, 205 Belli, Robert 169 Bergé, Henri 27–8, 193 Berlin 38 Bernhardt, Sarah 184 Bierbaum, Otto Julius 7 Bílek, František 177 Bing, Siegfried 4–5, 8 black-­figure Attic vase painting 33, 53, 58, 163 Bohemia 60, 83, 151, 155, 159 Borde, Henri 124 Borisov-Musatov, Viktor 103, 200 Botticelli, Sandro 78, 98 Bourdelle, Antoine 151 Brahms, Johannes 75 Brencēns, Kārlis 81–2, 198 Brožík, Václav 39, 152 Brussels 16, 33, 35, 57, 62–3, 87, 93, 107–8, 168 Brussels Universal Exhibition 168 Budapest 17, 103, 167 Burne-Jones, Edward 43, 79, 111 Bussière, Gaston 127, 202 Byzantium 9, 21, 127

Bacchants 111, 115, 117–19, 124, 189, 202 Bakst, Leon 119–21, 188, 202 Ballets Russes 119 Balowa, Maria 38, 65, 116, 148, 178, 180 Balšánek, Antonín 159 Baroque 2, 4, 12–13, 18, 29, 95, 189 bathing 18–19, 90–1, 199 Bayreuth 144 Beardsley, Aubrey viii–ix, 4, 8, 12, 66–8, 72–3, 85, 93, 98–101, 110, 116–18, 121,

Camps, Gaspar 121–2, 202 Can Cuyàs de la Riera estate, Barcelona 163–4, 205 Canova, Antonio 13 Carthage 12, 122–5 caryatids 91, 151, 174 Casa Vicens, Barcelona 163, 204 Catalonia 119, 141, 161–6 Catullus 180–2, 206 Cauchie, Paul 33–6, 63, 194 Cercle des Vingt 7, 108

214 Charcot, Jean-Martin 104 Chavannes, Puvis de 79, 91, 153 chiton tunic 20, 41, 79, 148, 191 Chittussi, Antonín 152 Ciamberlani, Albert 62–4 Cleopatra 93, 123–4 Collin, Louis Joseph Raphael 113, 201 contrapposto 15, 19, 30, 67, 88, 154 Corinthian architectural order 51, 175 Corneille, Pierre 19, 69 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da 97 Couperus, Louis 136, 203 Cuba 173 Czech National Revival 151–2 Czech National Theatre 152 Danae 96–7, 99, 119, 199 Daphne 100–1, 199 Daphnis and Chloe 102–4, 118, 200 Darmstadt 7, 88–9, 91 Daum brothers 27 Davidson, John 116–17, 201 Debussy, Claude 120 Decadence 102, 104, 119, 124, 153, 204 Delphi 165, 178 Denis, Maurice 36, 194 Diana 56–7, 196 Dionysus 42, 44, 92, 95, 101, 111, 115, 117–19, 122, 124, 141, 189 Donatello 86, 89 Donnay, Maurice 134, 203 Doric architectural order 19, 21, 62, 159, 165, 169, 188 Douris 128, 130, 202 dragons 53, 163–5 Dresden 152 Dunikowski, Xawery 74, 197 Dutczynska, Irma von 62, 196 Egypt 9, 22, 27, 33, 93–4, 120, 122–5, 174 Ekielski, Władysław 142, 144, 164 Empedocles 177 Endymion 87, 89–90, 178, 199 Ephebe 86–7, 89 Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse 7, 88 Eros 102, 108, 135–7, 189 Erynnyes 184 Euripides 51, 118, 183–4, 188

Index Fanta, Josef 156 Faragó, Géza 119, 202 fauns 41, 111–20, 146–7, 150, 189, 201, 202 Ferenczy, Károly 19–20, 33, 103–4, 193, 200 First World War 1, 7, 148, 186 Flaubert, Gustave 12, 122–8, 202 Flora 78–80, 154–6, 197, 198 Fouquet, Georges 184 Franciscan Church, Krakow 141–2, 203 Free Society of Darmstadt Artists 88 Freud, Sigmund 2, 104–5, 111, 121, 127, 135 Friedrich, Caspar David 109, 172 Garden of the Hesperides 163 Gaudí, Antoni 4, 6, 13, 161–6, 188, 204, 205 Gauguin, Paul 7, 18, 159 Gerbault, Henry 113, 201 Gerlach and Schenk 41, 53, 61, 85, 195, 196 Gesamtkunstwerk 26, 39, 44 Giergl, Kalman 167 Glasgow Four 6, 136 Gödöllő colony 7 Gorgons 35, 46, 49, 57, 59, 61, 66, 105–8, 111, 118, 168, 183, 189 Grasset, Eugène 78, 80, 118, 198, 202 Greek vase painting 12, 25–7, 33, 47–8, 53, 58, 68, 71, 86, 111, 114, 120–1, 128, 130, 163, 182, 188, 192 Grüber, Jacques 93 Güell, Eusebio 161–5 Güell Park, Barcelona 164–6 Guimaud, Hector 7 Habich, Ludwig 88–8, 198 Hankar, Paul 62–3, 196 Hector 144 Helbing, Ferenc 43 Helios 81–2, 184, 198 Hera 93 Hercules 61–5, 75, 163, 196 Hermes 44, 69, 146, 148, 151, 162, 165, 172, 165 Herouard, Chéri 113–14 history painting 6, 8, 17, 52, 55, 140 Hoffmann, Josef 45, 57 Hoffmann, Ludwig von 91, 199 Hölderlin, Friedrich 75, 141 Homer 12, 68–72, 77, 109, 141, 144, 188, 197

Index Horace 12, 52 Horta, Victor 6, 7 Hôtel Ciamberlani, Brussels 62–4, 93, 196 Hygeia 92 Hynais, Vojtěch 39, 152 Hypnos 172–3 Icarus 84 Iliad 68–72, 144, 183, 188, 197 Impressionism 5, 7, 17–18, 26, 29, 66, 77–8, 88–9, 159 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 174 Ionic architectural order 53 Ixelles, Brussels 33, 35, 62–3 Jachmann, Reinhold 136 Japanese art 4, 9, 53, 90, 93–4, 107, 124, 128–30, 135, 191, 193, 200 Java 110 Jeanrenaud, Ali 168 Jiránek, Miloš 152, 204 Josef I, Kaiser 168 Jubilee Country Exhibition of the Czech Kingdom 151, 183 Jugendstil 3–5, 8, 22, 25, 55, 57, 153 Jujol, Josep Maria 166 Juvenal 131–3, 203 Karásek z Lvovic, Jiří 89–90, 153, 199 Kasselik Foundation, Budapest 167–8 Khnopff, Fernand 107, 172–4, 175–6, 200–5 Klimt, Gustav 7, 12, 30–6, 41, 45–9, 51–4, 57–61, 65–7, 77, 92, 96–7, 99, 105, 119, 183, 188, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 208, 209 Kobliha, František 127, 202 Korb, Floris 167 Körösfői-Kriesch, Aladár 167, 184, 186, 205 Kotěra, Jan 137, 154, 203 kouros statues 13, 86, 120, 188 Krakow 7, 37, 68–9, 141–6, 197, 200, 201, 203, 204 Kupka, František 74–5, 197 La Chaux-­de-Fonds 168–9, 205 Ladon 163–4 La Libre Esthétique 7, 87 Lane, John 98

215

laurel 31, 41, 81, 101, 147, 148, 160, 168, 182, 183 Laurelton Hall 90, 93–4 La Vie Parisienne 113–14, 201 Leda 97, 199 Lemoine, Georges 160 l’Eplattenier, Charles 168–9, 171, 205 Löffler, Bertold 61, 196 Longus 102–4, 118 Lorraine, Claude 182 Louvre 12 Louÿs, Pierre 128 Lucian 129–31, 202, 203 Lviv 151, 201, 206 Lyka, Károly 166–7 Lysippus 29, 188 Lysistrata 100, 131–4, 199, 208 Mádl, Karel 40, 137, Maeterlinck, Maurice 87, 201 Malczewski, Jacek 37–9, 64–5, 85, 109, 114–16, 146–51, 155, 176, 178–9, 180, 194, 196, 201, 204, 205, 206 Malory, Thomas 67, 116, 201 Mánes, Josef 83 Mánes Society 83–4, 152–3, 196 Mařatka, Josef 101, 200 Marek, Josef Richard 89–90, 199 Marten, Miloš 50, 52 Maus, Octave 7 McNair, James Herbert 6, 136–7, 203 Medea 183–5 Medical Society, Krakow 144–6, 203 Medusa 25, 67, 106–9, 200, 201 Mehoffer, Józef 37, 106–7, 109, 144, 194, 200 mermaids 53, 111, 137 Minne, Georges 87–9, 198 Moderní Revue 153 Moravia 151, 160 Moser, Koloman 61, 98–9, 101–2, 168, 199, 205, 209 Mouray, Gabriel 153 Mucha, Alphonse 6, 7, 8, 49, 77, 78, 125–7, 130, 159–61, 162, 167, 171, 183–5, 188, 192, 202, 204, 206 Munch, Edvard 110 Munich 7, 12, 22, 32, 38, 59, 62, 106, 153, 187, 193, 194, 195, 205

216

Index

Municipal House, Prague 159–60 Mycenae 47, 70–2, 120, 197 Myslbek, Josef Václav 12, 39–42, 192, 193, 194, 195 mysticism 2, 42, 106, 171, 174, 177, 178, 189–90 Nancy 7, 8, 16, 27, 93, 124, 193, 202 Napoleon 6, 189 Narcissus 87–9, 198 Národní Listy newspaper 152 Neoclassicism 2, 9–10, 12, 37, 62, 64, 67, 74, 95, 98, 102, 105, 111, 120, 151, 161, 169, 174, 187, 188, 189, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich 44–5, 47, 50, 99, 141, 194, 195, 211 Nijinsky, Vaslav 119–21 Nike 31, 51, 52, 58–61, 148–50, 168, 204 Novák Commercial Building, Prague 154–6, 168, 204 nymphs 102, 111–13, 118–20, 201, 202 occultism 108, 168–9, 171, 174, 175, 176 Odyssey 12, 68–9, 109, 192 Oedipus 69, 174, 189, 195 opera 36, 44, 46, 49, 98, 103, 144, 167, 195 Oracles 135, 165, 178–80 Orpheus 43–4, 148, 167, 195, 205 Osthaus, Karl Ernst 87 Ovid 62, 69, 95, 100, 168 Pan (god) 42, 73, 98, 102, 106, 111, 116, 117–18, 201 Pan (journal) 7 Pan-Slavism 159–60 Paris (city) 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 16, 17, 22, 23, 37, 38, 39, 69, 80, 89, 113, 119, 159, 160, 161, 167, 171, 183, 184 Paris (Homeric) 39, 98, 144 Paris Salon 7 Paris World Exhibition 17, 89, 167 Parnassians 69 Parthenon 32, 57, 134, 193, 203 peacocks 27, 63, 64, 90, 91, 93–4, 123, 125, 129, 155, 199 Pegasus 183 Perseus 66–7, 197 Phidias 32, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 188

Pirner, Maximilián 60, 108, 176–7, 183, 196, 200, 206 Plaça Reial, Barcelona 162, 165, 204 Polish Applied Art Society 140–1 Polívka, Osvald 159 Polycleitus 12, 29 Post-Impressionism 5, 7, 17, 159 Prague 7, 12, 13, 84, 86, 112, 151–9, 176, 183, 201, 204 Prague Academy of Fine Arts 154 Prague Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering 151 Prague Secession 3, 4, 7, 39–42, 152 Praxiteles 29, 188 Preisler, Jan 41–2, 56, 60, 61, 82–7, 97, 115, 153–6, 168, 195, 196, 198, 199, 204 Pre-Raphaelitism 6, 17, 29, 35, 43, 74, 79, 105, 108, 110, 111, 118, 140, 172 Priapic cult 11, 121–2, 189 Procházka, Arnošt 53, 204 Prometheus 73–6, 197 Prouvé, Victor 124–5, 202 Psyche 111, 135–7, 189, 203 psychoanalysis 2, 104, 105, 127, 135, 189 Pythagoreanism 177 Renaissance 2, 12, 13, 17, 18, 29, 31, 47, 55, 62, 63, 77, 79, 86, 95, 97, 98, 118, 121, 152, 154, 156, 161, 171, 174, 183, 189 Riquer, Alexandre de 119 Robert, Henri 169 Rochegrosse, Georges Antoine 127, 160 Rococo 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 18, 29, 42, 68, 95, 189, Rodin, Auguste 101 Roman glasswork 26–7 Roman sarcophagi 32–3, 35, 89, 194 Rome (city) 13, 121, 131 Rome (civilization) 21, 22, 26–7, 32–3, 35, 51, 59, 64, 69, 78, 79, 82, 89, 93–4, 102, 121, 124, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 160–1, 167, 172, 180, 182, 193, 194, 196, 199, 203, 204 Rossetti, Christina 172–3 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 110, 172 Róth, Miksa 167–8, 205 Rozentāls, Janis 18–19, 88, 103, 113, 193, 198, 201 Rūkis 18, 81

Index Ruskin, John 29 Russia 65, 82, 103, 119, 140, 146, 150, 195 St. Augustine 12, 121 St. George 164 Salammbô 12, 122–7, 202 Šalda, František Xaver 50–1, 135, 177 Salome 122, 124, 125 San Francisco Pan Pacific Exhibition 90 satyrs 73, 85, 111–14, 118, 146 Savoy, The 180, 197 Seignobos, Charles 160 Selene 86, 89, 178 Sienkiewicz, Henrik 125 sirens 105–6, 109–11, 119, 201 Škréta group 152 Škréta, Karel 152 Smithers, Leonard 134, 183 snakes 26, 67, 82, 92, 106–9, 123, 125, 127, 129, 165, 184 Sokol gymnastic society 159 Sonrel, Elisabeth 78–9, 80, 83, 110–11, 197, 201 Sophocles 51, 69, 188 sphinxes 51, 174–6, 205 stained glass 20–1, 27, 29, 30, 80, 81–2, 90, 93, 112, 141–3, 144–5, 167–8, 193, 198, 199, 201, 203 Strathmann, Carl 127, 202 Stuck, Franz von 22–3, 43–4, 59–60, 61, 91, 108, 118–19, 174–5, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 202, 205 Studio, The 128, 202 Switzerland 80, 168–9 Symbolism 5, 18, 22, 36, 37, 42, 49, 51, 62, 65, 75, 87, 99, 104, 108, 135, 136, 137, 169, 172, 173, 174, 189, 190, 195, 200, 201 symmetria 30 Szymanowski, Waclaw 151 Tacitus 160–1 Tannhäuser 98, 199 Tantalus 101, 199 Theseus 65–6, 67, 101, 108 Thorvaldsen, Bertel 13 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 4, 8, 20–2, 26–7, 77, 79–80, 90–2, 93–4, 193, 198, 199, 208, 212 Titian 141

217

Toorop, Jan 77, 110, 119, 136, 174–5, 177, 200, 201, 203, 205 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 101, 199 tragedy 12, 44, 47, 50–4, 69, 183–6, 188, 195, 196 transformation (classical reception) 1–2, 8, 9–13 Troy 68, 144 Turkey 38 University of Vienna 92 Vaszary, János 15–18, 19, 81, 121, 193, 202 Velde, Henry van de 5–6, 87, 192 Venice Biennale 167, 205 Venus of Milo 107 Ver Sacrum 7, 23, 26, 61, 62, 66, 195, 196 Verdageur, Jacint 163 Vērotājs 18 Vienna 12, 16, 22, 23–6, 33, 38, 46, 51–2, 61, 92, 106, 152, 159, 166, 169 Vienna Burgtheater 51–2, 195 Vienna Künstlerhaus 7, 66, 92 Vienna Secession 7, 22–6, 45–6, 59, 61, 65–6, 87, 152, 159, 166, 169, 187, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199 Viollet-­le-Duc, Eugène 141 Virgil 12, 52, 68, 85, 182, 198 Volné Směry 3, 50, 60, 135, 153, 191, 196, 210 Wagner, Otto 8, 99, 191 Wagner, Richard 44–6, 49, 98, 144, 195 Warburg, Aby 11 Waterhouse, John William 84, 118 Wawel Hill, Krakow 142–4 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 4, 63, 93–4, 191, 201 white-­ground lekythos vases 47–8, 53, 68, 182 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 11 Wolfers, Philippe 107–8, 110, 177–8, 200, 206 Wyspiański, Stanisław 7, 12, 49, 68–72, 141–6, 164, 183, 188, 197, 203 Yellow Book, The 67, 98, 117, 131, 201 Young Poland movement 7, 38, 68, 70, 140