Rediscovering the Inspiration of Symbolism

Venice's Palazzo Grassi hosts works by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and followers Picasso, Delacroix and others

His ascetic Géneviève, patron saint of Paris, keeps vigil on the eternal sleep of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and other great French figures in the Panthéon. His sacred wood where astonished nymphs dwell embraces the entire half-circle of the Sorbonne's Great Hall. The snow of his motionless winter and the twilight of his pale summer cover the walls of City Hall in Paris.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's imposing frescoes, created from the mid-1870s to the closing years of the XIX century, decorate some of the architectural symbols of power in France and bear witness to the fame enjoyed by this artist from Lyon, a living legend to Parisian young painters who rebelled against the arrogance of academics and the excesses of the Pompiers.
He was an undisputed leader, even more than Delacroix, Courbet, or Daumier; in 1895, three years before his death, the whole Paris of art and science attended a gala in honour of Puvis de Chavannes, then 71. Verlaine and Mallarmé enthusiastically saluted the insuperable painter of celestial silence in heavenly kingdoms. This celebrity accompanied this romantic and solitary provincial nobleman until at least the Twenties. Then, inexplicably, his name fell into oblivion, while another painter, Paul Cézanne, who also had died at the turn of the century, began to be considered the beacon of art of the 1900s.
While the 1889 exhibition at Café Volpini in Paris - with Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, and the other artists of the Pont-Aven school - is considered the apex of Symbolism, almost nobody remembers that Puvis de Chavannes visited that exhibition as the guest of honour.
There is a certain commitment to "reparation" in the spirit which Serge Lemoine, director of Paris' Musée d'Orsay, put in the organization of Da Puvis de Chavannes a Matisse e Picasso. Verso l'arte moderna ("From Puvis de Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso. Towards Modern Art"), an exhibition at Venice's Palazzo Grassi that will run until June 16. Lemoine, however, goes beyond simple homage, and turned this into a celebration of the painter whom he calls "the only father of modern art."
This idea will certainly fuel controversy, and in any case will mark this exhibition as an event, or possibly even a milestone, in art criticism. In order to support his idea, Lemoine brought 200 masterpieces of great modern artists influenced by Puvis de Chavanne, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Auguste Rodin and his pupil Bourdelle, Maurice Denis, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Odilon Redon, Max Klinger, Henri Martin.
The list runs long, even including Italians Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Giovanni Segantini, Massimo Campigli, Mario Mafai, and Mario Sironi. All of them, Lemoine maintains, are indebted to the Lyonese painter.
Even beyond the merits of this critical interpretation, visitors of the exhibition are guaranteed a path through dreamy and fantastic art, chromatic vibrations that depict the inexorable flow of time: the paradigms of the artistic adventure of modern art.

Publication Date: 2002-03-03
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1006