American Symbolism

Sponsored by the Association of Historians of American Art

Chair: Erika Schneider, Framingham State University

This session seeks to situate American artistic production from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century within the discourse of the Symbolist movement. French artists have traditionally commandeered the Symbolist movement and helped to define this enigmatic style by its emphasis on inner turmoil and mysticism, its perceived fin de siècle decadence, and its multiple meanings and surprising juxtapositions. This panel attempts a more expansive dialogue on and an in-depth analysis of American Symbolists.

A Two-Step Waltz between Realism and Symbolism:

Winslow Homer's Summer Night (1890)

Hélène Valance, Université Paris Diderot

Charles Eldredge's preface to American Imagination and Symbolist Painting explicitly excluded Winslow Homer, this "objectively oriented painter" from the study of Symbolist trends in American art. Taking a different stance, this paper considers affinities between Homer's Summer Night and Symbolist aesthetics. An analysis of the painting's use of such motifs as night, women, and the sea; its synesthetic evocation of sound, touch, and smell; and its equivocal open-endedness, reveals dynamics and concerns comparable to those that fed the European Symbolist movement. This paper will examine how these Symbolist-like aesthetics reflect Homer's ambivalent attitudes towards Realism, in an era when vision and representation were increasingly challenged by modern science and technology - particularly electricity and motion photography. Focusing on the ambiguous positioning of the dancers, it will consider them as emblematic of the painting's many contradictions and inherent instability, and of Homer's own conflicted negotiation between Realism and Symbolism.

A Dreamer and Painter: Symbolism, Mysticism, and the Psychology of Dreaming in the Art of Arthur B. Davies.

Emily W. Gephart, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

While Symbolism in the visual arts was still new to American audiences in the 1890's, critic Sadakichi Hartmann established the tenor of subsequent interpretations of Arthur B. Davies's work by describing the artist as "a dreamer as well as a painter." This essay considers the beliefs and assumptions American viewers maintained about dreaming at the turn of the century as I examine Davies's paintings alongside contemporary art criticism, popular literature, and other forms of mass culture. At this pivotal moment, when dreams were the subject of emergent scientific and metaphysical investigation, they were also an important theme in American art. Whether representing dreamers or evoking the processes of dreaming through their formal properties, Davies's paintings sustained valuable yet previously unexplored connections linking American Symbolism with developing psychological and spiritualist discourses, setting the stage for the reception of psychoanalysis in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Symbolist Resonance between an American Photographer and a Belgian Writer:

Steichen and Maeterlinck (1901 to 1903)

Lucy Bowditch, The College of St. Rose

The paper outlines inspiring Symbolist confluences between American photographer Edward Steichen and the then very popular Belgian Symbolist essayist and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. (Young ladies were said to swoon at New York's Lyceum when he gave a public lecture.) In 1901, Steichen photographed Maeterlinck. The young American, who probably first learned of German Symbolist ideas through Bostonian F. Holland Day, was intrigued by Maeterlinck and solicited his ideas on photography for the journal Camera Work. While Maeterlinck celebrated the camera as the only contemporary means of personal expression, Steichen was arguably inspired by Maeterlinck's theories regarding the creative process. A selection of Steichen's portraits of sculptors may be interpreted, and more fully understood, in light of Maeterlinck's philosophy.