Although he is not formally considered part of the school, Ruelas is a bona fide symbolist and his work seems heavily influenced by Rops, to the point that they share some shockingly similar vignettes and tend to gravitate toward a consistent array of imagery and themes: blind faith, Circe, satyrs, Socrates.
FÉLICIEN ROPS (1833–1898)
I was first exposed to Rops when in Cannes promoting Cronos in 1993. A young French critic urged me to seek him out so, while staying in a crappy hotel in Paris, I bought a book or two on Rops and was blown away by his sensibility.
The similarities between Rops and Ruelas made it all click for me. The nineteenth century was a period of enormous moral contrast. Nobility, honor, and good manners, all of which were supported by the “academic” art of the age, started to be sabotaged by a wild and perverse notion: that life was full of pagan pleasures and savage impulses. Our flesh made us weaker, yes, but it also made us human.
Sex for these artists is a savage, almost demonic, task. And none of them is more accurate in portraying the hopelessness of male desire than Rops. In his paintings are abundant, detailed, and deformed genitalia that stand side by side with images of death, evil, and decay. Like his century, Rops was a prisoner of dread and desire.
It is a fact that sex and politics go hand in hand, and Rops was also blessed with a sharp satirical eye that yielded some of the best political cartoons of the time—all of them mordant portrayals of the changing social climate. Incessantly drawing, etching, and painting, Rops strived to capture a “tainted” century where the entitlements of royalty and the excuses of nobility were about to be supplanted by more mundane rights and ambitions.
Savage and sensuous as his themes may be, Rops’s line work is supremely elegant—even exquisite. His use of drypoint is testament to the precision of his draftsmanship.
ARNOLD BÖCKLIN (1827–1901)
Bocklin’s treatment of light has always fascinated me. The way he captures the soft, dying sunlight and uses it to cast deep, ominous shadows in his forests and rocky outcrops is exquisite. The jewel-like quality that his overcast skies confer to the green ocean waves is mesmerizing.
Böcklin’s superb technique makes his creatures and landscapes seem absolutely real. Hooves, roots, glazed eyes, and fur all appear to be accurate depiction of actual, living things. Look at any of his beasts and you will see that their eyes are wild and stunned by instinct, their bodies sensual but animalistic, their mouths agape and lubricated. They all have the strength and savagery that I associate with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and—in the case of Böcklin’s sea creatures—with H. P. Lovecraft.
If Rops excelled at portraying the human form, then Böcklin is the single most gifted landscape artist of the symbolist movement and the best at creating a sense of atmosphere. Böcklin’s landscapes are characters themselves—full of dramatic gloom, trees, rocks, and seas that reek of antiquity. In his most famous painting, Isle of the Dead (1880), for example, the darkness in his woods lurks like a sentient creature and the majestic vertical rocks and cypresses form a perfect mausoleum. It’s no wonder his painting was “paraphrased” by another Swiss artist almost a century later: H. R. Giger.
To me, Böcklin is perfect proof that art does not reproduce the world; it creates a new one.
ODILON REDON (1840–1916)
Most art movements are comprised of such a variety of artists and techniques that it becomes difficult to define the borders that separate one from the next, or the qualities that fuse them into a movement in the first place. If you think of Schwabe, Böcklin, or most of the other painters associated with the symbolist movement, you’ll evoke a sense of realism. By way of contrast, Redon’s diffuse pastels and line work seem weightless and luminous—sometimes almost abstract. Both his technique and concerns remain unique amongst his peers. He is the sublime anomaly.
Even so, Redon was part of a more general movement amongst painters working at the end of the nineteenth century to turn away from technical realism and to begin to value the strength of a brushstroke, the immediacy of an emotion. But these new values were typically developed with respect to the outside world, whereas only Redon looks to the inside.
Distinctive motifs in Redon’s work are: the feather, the eye, prisons and bars, botanical shapes, feathery line work reminiscent of animal fur, and spidery forms with human faces—every one of these comes straight from the id and a sense of pagan frenzy. If one needs any persuasion to find a strong connection between the Surrealists, the Dadaists, and the symbolists, one doesn’t need to look any further than Redon. Most of his images go beyond the pagan contemplation of Böcklin or Schwabe and become iconic, striving to capture not only the essence of a symbol but its direct link to the human psyche. Jungian and Freudian images populate his work and remain elusive, slippery, and hellish, but then his color work has a nimble, vital energy that captures mystic rapture and the true light of paradise.
After I die, if there is life beyond this one and I go anywhere—either up or down—I am pretty sure that both places will be art directed by Redon.
CARLOS SCHWABE (1866–1926)
The two artists who inspired me most while working on Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army were Schwabe and Arthur Rackham. Their interpretations of the fairy world are not at all similar, but both men seem to approach it as explorers attempting to document a world only revealed to their eyes.
Schwabe did splendid graphic work based on texts by Zola, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, but his drawings, etchings, and paintings should not be regarded as mere illustrations for these works. Each one of them is suffused with a mystical energy and with pantheistic conviction.
In this day and age, we confuse hip smartness that does not fully endorse any idea with intelligence, and consider callousness the product of an experienced point of view of the world. Naturally, this attitude leads us to value artists who seem to know it all. But Schwabe and the rest of the symbolists were the exact opposite: They celebrated not knowing, the twilight of our knowledge. To them, the supernatural was absolutely real, and mystery was the supreme goal of art.
ANALYZING FILM