Lot Essay
(fig 1.) Carlos Schwabe, The Profane and the Sacred, L'Evangile de l'Enfance, chapter 15, verses 19-21.
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'NATURAL THINGS EXIST ONLY A LITTLE; REALITY LIES ONLY IN DREAMS'
Charles Baudelaire
The term Symbolism is almost impossible to define. The artists associated to the movement at the end of the 19th Century were different in temperament, philosophy and nationality, and the one thing that bound them together was their rejection of both the Academic tradition of the Salon and the budding new movement of Impressionism. The nomenclature evokes images executed in jewel-like colors or shrouded in mists, of fantastic beasts and beautiful women, of tortured souls and demons from Hell, and idyllic dalliances and crushing cruelty.
The spirit and technique of the Symbolist movement was founded on the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolist artists relied heavily on literary and sometimes musical inspiration, and the artists, writers and poets were intricately intertwined; many of the Symbolist artists, like Carl Schwabe, spent their entire careers illustrating the works of the Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire, whose Les fleurs du mal was an important source of imagery but more importantly defined a state of mind. In his Correspondances Sonnet, he wrote:
Nature is a temple whose living pillars
Breathe forth confused words from time to time,
A forest of symbols where mankind passes through,
Watched by those familiar eyes.
Like distant, drawn out echoes intermingling
In a unity that's shadowy, deep,
Vast as the night, broad as daylight,
Sounds, odors, colors echo each other.
The movement's greatest poet, Stephane Mallarmé, wrote 'Poetry endows our state on earth with authenticity and constitutes the only spiritual task. To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem...suggestion, that is the dream.' This deliberate ambiguity is central to Symbolism in general. A picture is much more than simply an arrangement of lines and colors, and more than what can be seen in nature. It is what the picture suggests in the mind that is its most important aspect. Every artist in the movement expected his viewer to have a certain amount of knowledge, and was fully aware that the interpretations of a painting would differ with each viewer. Paul Verlaine, one of the most important Symbolist poets wrote:
For we want nuances,
Not colors, nothing but nuances!
For only nuances marry
Dream to dream and flute to horn
(Art poetique, 1874)
In the following lots appear work by some of the most important and respected artists in the Symbolist movement, such as Franz van Stuck, Ferninand Khnopff, Alphonse Mucha, Simeon Solomon and Carlos Schwabe. Schwabe designed the poster for the first Rose + Croix exhibition which was held in Paris in 1892 at Durand Ruel Gallery, and true to the philosophical pillars of the movement, it is filled with thought and fraught with intellectual content. The artists included here come from different countries and different artistic traditions: Stuck from Germany, Khnopff from Belgium, Solomon from Great Britain, Lévy-Dhurmer from France, Schwabe from Switzerland and Mucha from Czechoslovakia. These works vary in content, media, size and subject matter, but all are joined by the thread of intellectual content which is displayed in order to be interpreted by the viewer.
THE PROPERTY OF A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Carlos Schwabe (Swiss, 1866-1926)
The Profane and the Sacred
Details
Carlos Schwabe (Swiss, 1866-1926)
The Profane and the Sacred
signed and dated 'CARLOS SCHWABE 91' (lower right)
pencil, ink and watercolor on card, gold leaf applied to cross
12¾ x 8½ in. (32.4 x 21.6 cm.)
Executed in 1891.
The Profane and the Sacred
signed and dated 'CARLOS SCHWABE 91' (lower right)
pencil, ink and watercolor on card, gold leaf applied to cross
12¾ x 8½ in. (32.4 x 21.6 cm.)
Executed in 1891.
Provenance
with J. C. Gaubert, Paris.
Literature
An illustration of The Profane and the Sacred appears in chapter 15, verses 19-21, of L'Evangile de l'Enfance.