Existing comment:
A Literary Approach:
The paintings in this gallery, by artists born as much as four decades apart, invite a literary approach. Less concerned with surface appearance or real life, they explore an interior world of idea and emotion. Allegorical personifications and characters from myth or the Bible provide a richness of meaning through suggestion, not description. These works draw viewers along a current of allusion and sensation in an experience akin to poetry.
Puvis' enigmatic and muted figures, like Bocklin's dramatic heroics, spoke to many younger artists who found themselves in the late 1880s and 1890s unsatisfied by impressionism's reliance on fleeting visual effects and its emphasis on contemporary life. The dreamlike scenes of these older and classically trained artists helped inspired younger colleagues to a more subjective vision. |