Richard Wagner and the Art of the Avant-Garde, 1860-1910

The book discusses the unprecedented influence of Richard Wagner’s operas on a number of prominent avant-garde artists of the late nineteenth century.

This book explores the responses of leading European avant-garde painters to the operas of Richard Wagner, the most influential composer of the late nineteenth century. The term avant-garde represents a twenty-first century evaluation of certain nineteenth-century artists working in a variety of advanced styles, rather than a phrase the artists applied to themselves.

Chapters are on individual artists or groups, rather than an attempt to survey all of nineteenth-century Wagnerian visual art. They deal with paintings and drawings inspired by Wagner and his operas, not with the composer’s larger cultural influence through his writings and personal example. Thus artists such as Vincent
Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who knew of Wagner’s music and writings but did not depict scenes from his operas, are not discussed in detail.

The emphasis is on the diverse effects Wagner had on the works of leading avant-garde artists, varying according to their personalities and stylistic interests. The period beginning in the 1880s, often associated with post-Impressionism, was characterized by a movement away from realist subject matter to more personal or imaginary themes, a general intellectual trend of the fin-de-siècle. Wagner’s remote quasi-historical or mythological subjects fit well with this escapist tendency in the art and culture of the time, in part a return to the Romantic sensibility that was dominant in Wagner’s youth. Wagner’s influence peaked in the period between his death in 1883 and 1900, though a few long-lived artists continued their Wagnerian explorations from this era well into the early twentieth century. There is no “Wagner style” in art, yet Wagner’s pervasive influence is immediately evident in these works. Artists whose works are discussed include Eugène Delacroix, Henri Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon, Max Klinger, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, John Singer Sargent and Aubrey Beardsley, among others.

The book features 60 art reproductions, half of them in color.

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