It is precisely the Form by virtue of which art transcends the given reality, works in the established reality against the established reality… – Herbert Marcuse
In the visual arts it was possible to incorporate esoteric teachings into the very structures of composition, pointing the way forward to the creation of Abstract Art in the last years of the fin-de-siecle era. The origins of this tendency can be traced to the works of the Synthetiste painters inspired by Paul Gauguin. Synthetism (or Cloisonnism) originated around 1886 and was consolidated between 1888 and 1892 by the Groupe de Pont-Aven, a coterie of painters based at a ‘colony’ in Brittany.
In sharp contrast to the mannered ritual of the Rosicrucians, which so often embodied retrograde aesthetic tendencies, the Synthetists – Maurice Denis, Louis Anquetin, Armand Seguin, Emile Bernard, Paul Serusier and Charles Filliger – sought spiritual solace (as Huysmans had done) in rustic primitivism. Seeking no doubt to re-create for themselves the asceticism of the humble hermit, many of their works were specifically religious and a blatant exploitation of the ‘primitive’ spirituality of the Breton peasants: for example Gauguin’s ‘Vision After the Sermon’ (1888) and ‘Breton Calvary’ (1889). This can be seen as one of the earliest attempts to democratize fin-de-siecle art and in so doing inaugurate a ‘return to nature’ through a sanctification of the rustic life.
Whilst the paintings mentioned embodied an avant-garde approach to aesthetic form, they also embodied a resurgence of neo-traditionalist religiosity at odds with the urbane nihilism of the Decadents, or the Modernism of many Impressionists. These attitudes were imitated later by a group of Belgian artists who sequestered themselves in a similar artistic colony, at Laethem-Saint-Martin in Ghent. This group included George Minne, Jakob Smits, Albert Servaes and the poet Karel van de Woestyne. Van de Woestyne, together with Maeterlinck perpetuated something of a cult for the Flemish mystic Ruysbroek (d. 1381).
The significance of the Synthetists lay not in the content of their works but in their formal innovations. They fused the classic silhouette of the master idealist Chavannes with the colour and asymmetry of Japanese curvilinearism. They abandoned illusionistic rendition of light and shade and sought a purity of expression through linearism and simplification of plane. In their rejection of perspective and other devices they were continuing the experiments of the Pre-Raphaelites and the German Nazarener – groups of artists who in earlier decades had also tried to organize themselves into semi-monastic ‘fraternities’ the aesthetic counterparts of occult ‘orders’ and ‘sodalities’.
The Pont-Aven coterie was followed by the Groupe Synthetiste of 1891 which included the Theosophist Emile Schuffenecker a painter of ‘mystic landscapes’ and a graphic artist who had contributed designs to Gaboriau’s magazine Le Lotus Bleu. But in 1892 they were eclipsed by yet another group working in the same style, but combining occult ritualism with ‘primitive’ spirituality: The Nabis. Emerging in the same year as the first Rosicrucian Salon the Nabis were a small group of painters who for a time organized themselves into a semi-occult sect. They included the Synthetists Denis and Serusier and also newcomers Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and the Swiss Felix Valloton.
The name ‘Nabi’, from the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’ was coined by Jean Lahor (Henri Cazalis) an orientalist and occult poet, author of Le Livre de Neant and studies in art criticism, including L’Art Nouveau (1901). The group met regularly at Ranson’s studio (designated ‘the temple’), wore ceremonial garments, as shown in Serusier’s painting ‘Ranson in Nabi Costume’ (1890), and bestowed glamorous titles on each other. For instance Denis was known as ‘The Nabi of the Beautiful Icons and Bonnard was known as’The Japanese Nabi’. They had connections with the literary cenacle of the magazine La Revue Blanche, which included Jarry, Mallarme, Debussy, the anarchist-critic Felix Feneon and novelist Marcel Proust. The first Nabi exhibition was mounted in 1892.
It would be misleading to imply that these artists – for the most part students at the Acadamie Julian – espoused or devised any specific theory of esoteric or magical art. Rather they were responding to an intuitive perception of the origins of art in hieratic ritual and magical symbolism. They were examples of a general tendency towards syncretic mystery religion – the natural consequence no doubt of finding themselves marooned on the shores of nineteenth century secularism. Like Guaita they were ‘eclectic’, sympathetic to Eastern Mysticism, Theosophy and Swedenborgianism. Inspired by Wagner’s religious music drama Parsifal (1882), they modeled themselves on the knightly orders – The Templers, or The Teutonic Knights. Ranson’s syncretic painting ‘Christ and Buddha’ (c1890) exemplifies perfectly their vague philosophia perennis, incorporating a crucified Christ, lotus flowers, devotional figures and the image of Buddha –also the slogan: ‘knighthood of the prophets’. A similar ambience can be detected in paintings and drawings by Odilon Redon such as ‘The Buddha’ (1895), or the pastel ‘Buddha’ of 1905. One of the chief propagandists of this mystical syncretism was the Wagnerite music critic Edouard Schure. He embodied the idealistic theory of the hidden unity of all mysticisms in a series of popular books: Les Grands Inities (1889), Sanctuares d’Orient (1898) and L’Evolution Divine (1912). Ideas very similar to Schure’s have been continued in the twentieth century by such authors as Rene Guénon, Romain Rolland and Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954) allowed the American Psychedelic movement to claim the allegiance of William Blake.
Nevertheless the Synthetist style of the Pont Aven painters, The Nabis and the Belgian primitives of Laethem-Saint-Martin, in its striving to create a new art through the purification of form impinged almost despite itself, on certain deep-seated occult traditions, specifically the traditions of Alchemy and Neo-Platonism.
In their need to purify The Image of all unnecessary elements, in their striving towards an art that truly reflected the images of the mind’s eye or the unconscious these painters engaged in an enterprise akin to Mallarme’s ‘purification of the words of the tribe’, or Rimbaud’s alchimie du verbe. This synthesis of idea and image – called Ideisme by the critic Aurier, became a modern recapitulation of Neo-Platonic talismanic magic: a mystical-astrological system of ‘forms’ and primordial ‘ideas’. The first Synthetist painting, the result of collaboration between Gauguin and Serusier was called ‘Landscape; the Bois d’Amour’. It was also known as ‘The Talisman’ (1888).
These spheres of esoteric thought were embodied in the poems of Mallarme, linked to the Nabis by his friend Cazalis. In ‘Prose (pour des Esseientes)’ (1885) he tells of a distant island which the poet, attended by a mysterious female companion, finds to be a magical garden populated by irises, gladiolae, lillies and iridees, a fantastic flower, its name derived from the French word idee (idea). Here the poet experiences an enhancement of perception, a hierophany of the senses, during which the idea-flowers become symbols of aesthetic intensity, each one surrounded by an aura or ‘lacuna’. This eidetic vision is an epiphany of living energy patterns called into being by the poet who can utter their magic names. Such ideas are firmly within the Neo-Platonic tradition of eternal, symbolic essences inhabiting a supra-sensual domain somehow ‘beyond’ the mundane world of sordid reality.
A.C. Evans
illustration: Serusier/Gauguin: Bois D’Amour (The Talisman), 1888