Préraphaélisme et symbolisme: peinture littéraire et image poétique

Abstract

By Laurence Brogniez. Paris, Champion, 2003. 403 pp. Hb €70.00. The title of this book announces an ambitious programme: studying the manner in which two significant schools of artistic-cum-literary expression interacted during a period of vital reassessment in both media. Laurence Brogniez's volume is itself an in-depth reassessment of the essential features and guiding principles at work in a notoriously complex area. Two introductory chapters sketch the initial reception of the Preraphaelites in France and Belgium, and the first ‘correspondances’. The centrality of Rossetti as an exemplary figure is studied early on, as is the reactivation of the ut pictura poesis debate (in the case of Whistler, ut pictura musica). The general perception of the Preraphaelite movement is that of an interdisciplinary one. No surprises here. But the extremely detailed third chapter goes much deeper, taking as its cue the thesis that the Preraphaelites provided a welcome counter-model to Naturalism and represented ‘avec Wagner, le roman russe et le théâtre scandinave, le creuset d'où émergera le symbolisme’ (p. 74). Brogniez closely analyses novels which partake of a ‘littérature préraphaélite’: not just Bourget, but also the Swiss William Ritter and Édouard Rod (idealism as ‘entrevision’). If there is a central image in all this, it is Burne-Jones's King Cophetua, with its ‘images parlantes’. It directly inspired poems (Régnier, Fontainas) and prose (Kahn, Lorrain, Gilkin), and gave rise to a metalanguage of ‘spiritual realism’ common to painting and literature which adumbrates the change from Naturalism to Symbolism. Thus the Symbolist painter is ‘non pas copiste mais interprète’ (p. 154), a shift which derives in large part from the commentaries of Belgian writers, not just the expected Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, but also Schlobach, Samain and Giraud; it is no accident that the first monograph on the Preraphaelites in French was by a Belgian, Olivier-Georges Destrée (1894). Brogniez usefully draws on illuminating material from an increasingly recognized source of penetrating analysis during the Symbolist period: Van Lerberghe's diaries (still scandalously unpublished). They provide a sort of running commentary by a practising Symbolist poet on the pervasiveness of Preraphaelite imagery in his poetics. Khnopff was of course a constant admirer of Burne-Jones, and was closely associated with Péladan and the salons of the Rose-Croix, the first of which Brogniez terms ‘une greffe littéraire réussie’ (p. 239). But the moment of harmonious interplay was not to last. Octave Mirbeau, ironically the man who had revealed Maeterlinck's early theatre, was to initiate the ‘démolition du culte préraphaélite’ in 1896. The ‘internationale idéaliste’ had already had its day. Brogniez intertwines all these aesthetic stories with assurance, impeccable scholarship, clarity and wit. This is a major contribution to the study of Symbolism.