Article: The secret history of modern art.(Critical essay)

Venture deep into the hinterlands of modern art history, and you come across the artistic movement of the 1880s and 1890s known as Symbolism. An international, diffuse, idealist, and mystical reaction to the naturalism of the 1860s and 1870s, Symbolism is usually presented as a detour or more likely a dead-end backwater for the losers and losing ideas of progressive modern art. "Whereas naturalism finds support in the French philosophy of Comte and Littre," wrote the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, "Symbolism finds it in the German philosophy of Kant and Fichte." Academics have long dismissed Symbolism as conservative. Even in the 1890s, Symbolism was criticized for its ...

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