Word: symbolists
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...symbolist, working in an age of symbols. The imposing and inculating role symbols play in our lives--all the flags in the world, cigarette brands, fast-food chains and supermarkets, groupies, cliques and teams and fetishes and Brooks Brothers and every manner of damned patriotism--has sprung forth a new kind of cynicism...
...memory-but the span of memory was as short as the walk from the pond to the studio. In his genius for rendering evanescence within a monumental structure, Monet became a master of le temps retrouvé: the most Proustian of painters. His truer literary equivalent, though, was the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The blank page, for Mallarmé, trembled with possibility, as calm water or the tight-stretched canvas did for Monet. Its white flatness was not an absence: it was a poetic element, possessing the character of thought. "The intellectual armature of the poem," Mallarm...
...lilies crossing them like clouds. Toward the end of his life, as his vision degenerated-first, after a series of primitive cataract operations, distorting his sight toward yellow, and at last toward blue-Monet rarely left his garden; but then, he did not need to. He had constructed a symbolist heaven on his front doorstep, and (since nature and culture fuse in the hortus conclusus-the enclosed garden-of paradise) the circle of his desires was complete. The result was the most consoling art of the 20th century: not simple in its pleasures, but oceanic in its peace, wave upon...
Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun sets to music Mallarme's L'Apresmidi d'un Faune, a symbolist poem replete with a striking vagueness, fluidity and sense of reverie. A faun--half man, half goat--arises from his sleep near Mount Aetna in Italy and wanders through the woods. The whole image is one of dreamy light and dark, tentativeness and delicacy. The faun chases a group of nymphs up and down the mountain, but ultimately loses them as he once again yields to the soothing oppressiveness of sleep...
...that Matisse was obsessed with dialogue between nature and culture is, perhaps, to say no more than that he was a painter. But the intensity of that conversation between perceived and stylized form in the cut-outs renders them heroic. They are the climax of the symbolist tradition in France, and may be the greatest works of visual art in that tradition...