ABSTRACT

The initial naturalism still persisted, the massive folds are based on Balzac's voluminous dressing gown: 'I wanted to show the great worker haunted at night by an idea and getting up to go and write it down at his working table,' Rodin said. So if Rodin's art is grounded in naturalism, much of it is more than naturalistic. In the spirit of symbolism, Redon, although he admired Pissarro, objected to the literalism of the impressionists: his strictures on 'the low-vaulted edifice' of their art matched Gauguin's charge that they 'neglected the mysterious centres of thoughts'. Huysmans, generally more concerned with subject than with style, viewed Redon's art in very literary terms, and partly because of this Redon had to fight against the label of illustrator, although — as the dedications of his lithographic series show — both literature and some aspects of evolutionary science were essential to his imagination.