Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe, 1880%E2%80%931910

This coffee-table-sized exhibition catalogue is dedicated to symbolist landscape painting across Europe and provides an extensive introduction to Symbolism, its practitioners, and how this movement found an apt expression in landscape painting. As Rapetti points out in the introduction, Symbolist landscape painting is now relatively unknown, due to both landscape painting's strong association with Impressionism and 20th-century critics' emphasis on aesthetic qualities rather than subject matter. Subjects here include: Giorgio de Chirico's visions of dead and decaying cities; the luscious and fantastic visions of nature and the imaginary worlds of Claude Monet and Frantisek Kupka; Whistler's and Paul Signac's experiments with color; and the abstracted landscapes of Van Gogh and Kandinsky. Thomson eloquently articulates the essence of the relationship between Symbolism and landscape: "Landscape was so variously associative%E2%80%94legible to all, stimulant of emotion and mood, evidence of perpetual process, redolent of superhuman, even divine forces%E2%80%94that it gave the artist a common base matter from which to conjure up in paint feeling, ideals, and yearnings that were at once invisible, profound, and essential." Some nuances of these often misty paintings may be lost in reproduction, but this volume may spur readers to visit the originals. Illus. (Sept.)