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eBook
Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form
2017
Overview
This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive
artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of
experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century
modernist practices.
Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard
Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead
considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to
illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly
explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She
shows how the concept of \"nature's experiments\"-the belief that the
study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths,
above all about the human mind and body-extended from the
scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists'
solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a
ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using
experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual
form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated
concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and
madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully
strange.
Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental
tactics of symbolism, Nature's Experiments and the Search for
Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of
experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a
foundational period for the development of European modernism.
Publisher
Penn State University Press
Subject
ISBN
9780271076744, 0271076747
