Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff's Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses

Abstract

Fernand Khnopff created some of the most enigmatic and allusive works in the Symbolist idiom. The images of the feminine—both positive and negative—and the androgyne dominate his paintings, yet their connection with the artist's intellectual and philosophical milieu are seldom pinpointed. Understood in terms of the dualist Idealist metaphysics of Schopenhauer, these works can be approached from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings through these figures, particularly in Avec Verhaeren: Un ange (1889) and Art, or the Caresses (1896).