Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (review)

Abstract

Passionate Discontent is an ambitious book, entering a field--fin-de-siècle Symbolism in France--strangely neglected in art history in the last two decades. Most scholars of this period have repeatedly focused on the major figures of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, considered in varying degrees of isolation from the larger Symbolist movement.1 And no major synthetic study [End Page 369] of French Symbolism, with its large and fascinatingly contradictory range of artists and critics, has been published since Robert Goldwater's Symbolism (New York: Harper & Row) was posthumously assembled in 1979. Probably the most difficult modern movement in the visual arts to grasp, French Symbolism initiated a body of theory that shaped all subsequent manifestations of modernism in France at least to the First World War, including, most significantly, Fauvism and Cubism. Mathews's book, though in no sense a 'survey,' lives up to this daunting critical challenge, forcing us to reconsider French Symbolism as well as modernism broadly conceived.