A re-evaluation of Nordic symbolism and Art Nouveau
In my dissertation I aim to shed new light on Nordic symbolism and Art Nouveau and the impact of a cross-national & cross-cultural art production for Nordic art at the turn of the 20th century.
A surprisingly huge amount of Nordic visual art works from the late 19th century is regarded as, or embedded to be, an expression of the National Romanticism. At the same time Nordic art history had tended, and still tends, to only pay attention to art works which were created in a national cultural context, even though recent research contributions stress that the high number of Scandinavian artists who produced their art on the continent didn’t decrease around 1900.
In the light of these historiographical issues I intend to study a number of, quite unexplored, Nordic visual artists who were approaching and pursuing the idealistic, mystical and symbolistic movement of the early modern art scene, while they were based in Central Europe. One of my main aims hereby is to put forward that the transnational post-impressionistic avantgardistic aesthetics had a far greater influence on the Nordic symbolism and Nordic Art Nouveau than it actually is overall assumed in Nordic art historiography.
Considering that the Swedish artist, author and art mediator Tyra Kleen (1874-1951) is of great importance. Her visual and literary production has barely been noticed in earlier research. Kleen’s continental period between 1891 and 1908 is a crucial starting point for this research project. While she was living in Germany (1891-1895: Dresden, Karlsruhe, München), France (1895-1897: most of the time in Paris) and Italy (1898-1908: primarily in Rome), her creative production (of different kind of media) is characterized of ‘cosmopolitan’ instead of national Swedish motifs.
By means of a qualitative choice of Nordic artists such as Kleen and Olof Sager-Nelson (1868 – 1896), Magnus Enckell (1870 – 1925), Ellen Thesleff (1869 – 1954) and Beda Stjernschantz (1867 – 1910), whose art training and art production also took place in an international, cross-cultural setting in Central Europe during the 1890s, I aim to emphasize Nordic Symbolistic and Art Nouveau art objects and their close relation to the European early modernism (both in terms of stylistic, thematic/iconographic, art theoretical patterns, and last but not least, where there were produced).
I find following angles relevant for my undertaking:
- Medial combinations & intermedial references in the visual arts
- Synthetic intermediality: an aesthetic way of thinking where different art forms and media are unified and synthesized (rejection of a mono-media aesthetic value)
- Pictorial themes:
An androgyne ideal of beauty beyond the binary gender system in combination with the aesthetic mysticism of the adolescence (the aesthetic ideal of the ‘the third sex’ as Joséphin Péladan called it)
vs.
female stereotypical visual representations of sensual, voluptuous nature (femme-fatale figures such as Eva, Salome or other mythical female half-human beings - such as sphinxes, sirens, and the sea monster Scylla)
- Aspects of the technical & industrial development concerning reproduction possibilities
- The upswing of the graphic medium at the turn of the century which was closely associated with the movement of the Art Nouveau and the quest for a modern, artificial, non-illusionistic way of expression
