Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

A historical manifesto by Jean Moréas focuses the Symbolist movement on
the last decade of the 19th century, but Symbolist sensibilities were at
work for a much longer period. Lost Paradise ranges from the middle 19th
century to World War I. The volume’s 500 works by European artists
evoke fascination, horror, and spirituality in the face of radical
social change.

Its major themes include the waning of culture, the agony of the self,
the irrepressibility of life and its cycles, and the struggle toward a
new humankind. Symbolism set its sorcery against a growing
disillusionment and the rising powers of science and technology: “It
was art as the final bastion against loss of meaning,” writes Chief
Curator Jean Clair. The movement’s energy allowed it to transcend
boundaries of space, time, and the various arts, and ultimately led the
way to abstract art.

Curators who have contributed essays include Guy Cogeval, Gilles Genty,
and Constance Naubert-Riser, among others. This large, cloth-bound
catalogue, beautifully designed and produced for a 1995 Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts exhibition, has a substantial text and features 600
illustrations (400 of these in full color).

In contrast to the better-known landscapes of the French
Impressionists, Symbolist art appears fantastic, even threatening. These
artists painted nightmares as well as dreams. A century later, amid
social unrest and international chaos, it is abstract art that looks
dated while Symbolist art seems a curiously modern expression of fears
and hopes.