Van Gogh Museum Journal 1997-1998

[p. 100]

fig. 1
Carlos Schwabe, Madonna with lilies, 1899, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum

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The visual imagery of a symbolist: Carlos Schwabe's Madonna with lilies
Henk van Os

For Ronald de Leeuw

In the Van Gogh Bulletin 1993 (no. 3), Edwin Becker gave a definitive account of Carlos Schwabe's Madonna with lilies (fig. 1). Nonetheless, this wonderful watercolour can still provide us with an opportunity to further explore the imagery of the symbolists, and in particular their approach to traditional depictions of Christian subjects. Becker rightly observed that the greater part of 19th-century religious art is usually associated with clichés and phoney sentimentality. But why is this? Often it is due to the artists' attempts to imbue biblical stories and Christian scenes with the greatest possible realism and conviction. They had to be made ‘real.’ Not only were these themes fully exploited for their dramatic potential; the artist also strove to portray the full affective significance of the religious experience. As they themselves were well aware, 19th-century painters of Christian images mostly worked for pious viewers. Mawkishness was the result. More enlightened minds were infuriated by such insubstantial realism and by the inherent meekness of products of this sort. Only when a considerable distance from the art and religiosity of the 19th century had been achieved did it become possible for a handful of amateurs to take pleasure in these Christian works; others, however, continue to revile them as examples of insupportable sentimentality.

But something more exceptional was afoot with the 19th-century religious symbolists. For them, it was not enough just to add an emotional charge to a Christian story: instead, they used elements from older works to create their own world of visual imagery. Quite often their paintings were accompanied by arcane texts. These made one thing abundantly clear: that the artist was filled with profound thoughts and beautiful sentiments. To be sure, such thoughts and sentiments are comprehensible when rendered in a visual form; when expressed verbally, however, they are disorganised and vague. In this respect there is a great similarity between symbolists of this sort and modern artists, who often have a striking predilection for texts that lie somewhere between philosophy and mysticism. Art critics in the years around 1900, and many art historians with them, did much to ensure that symbolist religious art was almost entirely engulfed by an avalanche of semi-hysterical, semi-mystical gibberish. Artists' subjective representation of Christian motifs became an excuse for others to unleash their own subjectivity. Becker cites the example of G. Soulier's discussion of Schwabe's watercolour in Art et Décoration (1899), in which the critic attempts to describe the sentiments evoked by the work. In his opinion, the lilies are filled with a ‘tender significance [sens attendri], simultaneously that of an enclosure which protects her [the Madonna] and of an offering that raises itself around her; of a compassion that surrounds her and of a pleading caress [...] In his [Schwabe's] hands, the plants become more human; he always seeks to express that brotherhood shared by all creation.’

It is scarcely surprising that many people sought to keep their distance from works associated with such verbiage. And precisely because art historians saw this art as an excuse to open the floodgates of their own emotion, remarkably few sober analyses of symbolist religious art have ever been made. So how in fact did these painters approach Christianity's existing iconographic tradition? Such a question is entirely justified with regard to the work at hand. Schwabe employs a range of traditional Christian motifs: the Madonna and Child, the sky, the earth, clouds, lilies. Is there indeed anything in this painting that is not traditional or symbolic? To answer this, we must look at the artist's treatment of clouds in particular. From time immemorial, clouds have served to announce an apparition. From elsewhere, for example the sky - but in any case from above - God, Jesus, the Virgin or a saint would appear to the spectator. Clouds marked this temporary visibility in the mortal world (fig. 2). As the dynamics of the

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fig. 2
G.B. Tiepolo, The vision of St Anne, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

apparitio dictate, they who appear must also disappear, for those who represent salvation are viewed only briefly.

Clouds were also used in scenes that are far more static, those in which it is important to make a distinction between heaven and earth. Above, God sits enthroned, perhaps with the Virgin Mary and Jesus, amid the heavenly host; below is the earth, the realm to which the viewer belongs, aspiring to a future place above. But a footpath of clouds linking ‘above’ with ‘below,’ as in Schwabe's watercolour, is highly unusual. For while it is the function of clouds to separate heaven and earth, both in static and dynamic representations, here a cloud-path connects them. With this motif, Carlos Schwabe has devised something exceptional.

This work makes the impossibe possible. But how possible is it? Who, for example, can walk on clouds? The answer is: Schwabe's Madonna. In order to achieve this, however, she has been completely deprived of her corporality: in fact, she is little more than a translucent gown. Her child is so ethereal that only His eyes provide some kind of certainty. And from the single lily Mary received from Gabriel upon his annunciation of the Saviour's virgin birth, Schwabe has made an entire hedge, running along the cloud-path. The radiant haloes, attributes of sainthood, contribute to the transparency of the figures' presence.

The viewer could meet the Virgin halfway down the cloud-path, but then he, too, would have to become free of his body. The fin de siècle was characterised by a longing for spiritualisation, for the transcendence of material existence. In Carlos Schwabe's world, the most celebrated spokesman of this desire was Joséphin Péladan, the founder of the Salon de la Rose + Croix. In 1892 Schwabe designed the poster for its first exhibition (fig. 3). Two years later he painted the Madonna with lilies (Lausanne, private collection), the first in a long series to which the Van Gogh Museum version (1899) also belongs. While both works have the same theme, in the poster the upward path is a staircase on which lilies grow, and the ‘ethereal’ is given a somewhat more straightforward symbolisation, in that the woman on the higher tread is simply presented in outline. The cloud-path in the watercolour takes the viewer from darkness into light, and on that road Mary awaits him. Although seen here with her son, she is not really shown as the Mother of God, and neither figure is represented as a saviour. They merely look down towards the mortals below, who are free to set out on the journey of self-transcendence. The Virgin personifies a spiritual ideal; she is a symbol of something incorporeal. It thus became possible for a Protestant like Carlos Schwabe to accept her.

Behind this symbolic imagery lies a concept of redemption which, despite its many Christian elements, is not essentially Christian in nature. Although Schwabe's watercolour is a kind of altarpiece, and although it is the Virgin whom we encounter as we transcend the world, this work actually encourages spiritual self-activation. It rises

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fig. 3
Carlos Schwabe, poster for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, 1892, private collection

upward from below. For the symbolists there was redemption, but no redeemer - at least not one who descended from on high. Instead, there was a saviour who showed the true path on earth, one who knew by his suffering that there was a higher purpose: the artist himself. In 1920 Schwabe attempted to portray this worldly redeemer

fig. 4
Carlos Schwabe, Le poète en marche, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva

(fig. 4). With one foot on a thorn and his head in the clouds, the artist goes on his way, his lyre marking him out as a poet. His words alone bring him to heaven. Schwabe himself also tread the path of imagination. In the Madonna with liles he revealed that path to the viewer: thanks to the artist, heaven opens.