Description
Book SynopsisExamines the influence of experimental science, concerned with the workings of the body, the mind, and their various pathologies, on the works of late nineteenth-century artists Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch.
Trade Review“There are so many contributions this author makes toward better understanding Symbolist art, from the close reading of key words, to letting the artists’ voices be heard, to learning more about the concept of truth at the beginning of the century.”
—Serena Keshavjee CAA.Reviews
“Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form provides the framework for a completely reformed picture of symbolism’s place in the broader history of art.”
—Marnin Young Art History
“The full scope of Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form will likely be most accessible to those already well-read on symbolism and its precursors, but the fresh understanding that Morehead establishes will serve a wide range of readers, and the author’s nuanced reading of Strindberg and Munch will impact multidisciplinary considerations of these luminaries.”
—Janet S. Rauscher Scandinavian Studies
“Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form argues—rightly and boldly—that symbolism’s stark formal experiments, which have so often been taken to point the way toward twentieth-century abstraction, were tied to an explorative scientific culture concerned with the status of the modern body and mind and their pathologies. It is the first book to take seriously the semantic proximity between the terms ‘form’ and ‘deformation,’ including the gamut of ethical conundrums stretching between them. In this regard, Nature’s Experiments is a revelation, allowing us to see afresh a set of familiar paintings by Denis, Vuillard, and Munch, among others, through period eyes schooled in the scientific language of experiment.”
—André Dombrowski,author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Symbolism and Nature’s Experiments
1 Toward an Experimental Symbolism: Ideas and Ideals
2 Defending Deformation: Maurice Denis’s Positivist Modernism
3 Édouard Vuillard’s Experimental Arabesques
4 August Strindberg’s Naturalistic Symbolism
5 Madness as Method: The Pathological Experiments of Edvard Munch
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
