Symbolism and Art Nouveau by Alastair Mackintosh - Paperback USED Illustrated

Soon after the middle of the nineteenth century, the Romantic tradition in art produced a surprising new phenomenon:  a literary form of painting aiming to express only the inexpressible.  The Symbolists were an assorted collection of painters, and very few of them as it happens, were talents of the first rank.  But what they did--and the work of their most distinguished representative, Paul Gauguin, shows this most clearly--was to liberate the artist, once and for all, from the duty of depicting what could be seen.  Colors which reflect only the artist's state of mind; beings that belong only to dream or hallucination; a remarkably consistent refusal to tell, as other painters did, an unambiguous story with a describable meaning--these are the factors linking Symbolist painters who, stylistically, are at opposite poles.  Art Nouveau, unlike Symbolism, was a style--but it was Symbolism that freed form, and consequently design, from dependence on tradition, and made possible the stylized vegetable forms--even the patterning--from which the grace of Art Nouveau derives.