Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Morehead, Allison

Hardcover

Series: Refiguring Modernism, Book 21

Art HistoryEuropean ArtIndividual Artists

ISBN10: 0271076747
ISBN13: 9780271076744
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: Feb 27 2017
Pages: 264
Weight: 2.95
Height: 1.00 Width: 9.20 Depth: 9.80
Language: English

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices.

Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of nature's experiments--the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body--extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists' solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange.

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