Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Contents

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

“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