Fernand Khnopff’s Integration of the Arts Through Illustration
Between 1883 and 1893, twenty Belgian artists developed a diverse forum for avant-garde art: Les XX, founded by Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor, Theo van Rysselberghe, and Henry van de Velde and led by lawyers Octave Maus and Edmond Picard. The group possessed similarities to the English Arts and Crafts movement, and valued all artistic production and inclusion rather than exclusively focussing on fine arts the way the Belgian Academy did. Since Belgium was a newly independent country, the group aspired to make art integral to its national identity and did this by presenting an international agenda of exhibitions with concurrent talks and performance events. Les XX became the progressive exhibition society that dominated the Belgian art world because of its esoteric symbolism and the incorporation of various European artists: Gauguin, Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Sickert and Van Gogh among them. With no explicit manifesto the group presented a celebration of individualism and of the trajectory of art towards the decorative and Modernist. Like other Symbolist groups, Les XX viewed reality as a pretext and considered combinative experience to be the highest form of art. They believed that artistic harmony perpetuated a vision of social harmony, that the presence of beauty in art creates beauty in the wider world. Through creating a programme of talks by literary giants of the era like Mallarmé and Verlaine, their association with anarchism and socialism, and L’Art Moderne magazine publicising the group’s output, exhibitions, and activities, they were propelled to international fame and acclaim.
Fernand Khnopff’s reach extended to Vienna, France, England and Germany because of this international dissemination of work in a variety of forms, with the criticism of Emile Verhaeren being vital in popularising his work. Verhaeren “upheld the idealist and spiritual aspirations as well as the subjectivity of Symbolist aesthetics in opposition to the materialist and positivist aspects of naturalism.” This interest in spiritual aspiration and subjectivity meant that Khnopff was an artist of great significance to Verhaeren, his work possessing a mysticism and dreamlike quality that agreed with Verhaeren’s sentiments. Khnopff was also a divisive figure within Les XX: his individualism was problematic for James Ensor in particular, who accused him of plagiarism and felt overshadowed by him. His prioritisation of romantic symbolism where Ensor favoured Naturalism was a point of contention. Myth, legend and mystery are represented in Khnopff’s paintings, which possess elements of eroticism and sensuality, whereas Ensor’s representation of the body was more corporeal and scatological. Khnopff’s bourgeois sensibilities are clear in his paintings, as they use the emblematic to communicate the spiritual, sexual and luxurious while hinting at a more sordid undercurrent.
The influence of the English pre-Raphaelites is evident in his depictions of women, which are highly idealised and androgynous, both across his paintings and his illustrations. Joséphin “Sâr” Péladan also had a penchant for the pre-Raphaelite style, and was a crucial character in propelling Khnopff to success by employing him to design the frontispieces for his novels between 1885-9. They brought Khnopff to Georges Rodenbach’s attention, and he then commissioned Khnopff to design the frontispiece for Bruges-la-Morte (1892), the archetypal Symbolist novel of its time. Khnopff’s illustrations make clear his ideology of fusion and emblematic representation of allegory to create an “art of thought, reflection, combination”. He was particularly inspired by Wagner’s aesthetic theory of Gesamtkunstwerk - that true art must be synaesthetic, intellectual, intertextual and have the ability to unite the people for social reform through uniting the arts. Khnopff designed theatre sets and magazine layouts as well as the frontispieces, but they present an aesthetic and theoretical amalgam of the arts most directly. Harmony of sensory experience was at the forefront of his practice, which is clear from the synaesthetic quality of his work and the context of its presentation in literary formats with inspiration from across the arts.
By designing frontispieces for novels, Khnopff integrated literature and art by embodying the various texts in Symbolist images, which usually carried motifs of reflection, spirituality and ambivalence. His first collaboration with Péladan, the frontispiece for La Vice Supreme (fig. 1), possesses all of these qualities. Péladan’s novel cum manifesto describes how the degeneration of the city fosters a degeneration of the spirit that can only be revived through the quasi-religious intervention of the artist. Khnopff’s image of a nude woman in front of a full-breasted sphinx wearing a death mask is evocative of mysticism, moral degeneration, and the occult. The sexualised woman hints at Khnopff’s exploration of sensuality and communion between work and viewer that becomes more prevalent in paintings like The Caresses (fig. 2), which also depicts the sphinx. In one cohesive piece Khnopff refers to ruins, his own ambivalent feelings towards women and his appropriation of ancient Greek culture and the Oedipus story.
The 1880s and ‘90s were a period of great cultural prominence for the Oedipus narrative, and the sphinx has become an emblem of exclusivity and uncertainty but also one of temptation, and Khnopff’s sphinx certainly conjures these feelings. Verhaeren wrote of his sphinxes:
Delicate, exquisite, refined, subtle female Sphinx; Female sphinx meant for all the complicated perversities; Female Sphinx meant for those who doubt everything and who cause us to have doubts about doubt; Female Sphinx meant for those who have tried everything and have tired of everything, for those who are incredulous about everything; Female Sphinx meant for the Sphinx himself.
The symbolism of the Sphinx and its incorporation in artworks in the 1800s would have been present in Khnopff’s mind. Ingres and Moreau (fig. 3 and 4) would have been particularly influential, but Howe suggests that Athanasius Kircher’s 1653 frontispiece to Oedipus Aegyptiacus (fig. 5) was of even greater significance. Kircher’s work has grounding in baroque imaginative theoretics that in some ways pre-empted the thinking of Symbolist artists. In this respect, Khnopff also incorporates classicism into his art, and a degree of contemporary psychology rooted in Greek mythology. The sphinx could also be said to represent the transformation of an animal into a human, and therefore refer to a Darwinian impetus, since his theories were very present in the cultural imagination following the publication of On the Origin of the Species (1859). As well as integrating literature and fine art through illustration, Khnopff combines the humanities in visual art by self-consciously placing his work in its historical context and imbuing it with personal and traditional symbolism, concurrent with “Baudelaire’s “forests of symbols” and literary Symbolists references to an algebra of signs”.
Péladan and Khnopff were united in the belief that the idea is paramount in all art and expression; that “all materials are are reflections of higher realities, and are in fact symbols of these realities.” They were both notoriously outlandish figures drawn to Symbolism because it suited their eccentricities. Howe writes: “That the Symbolist movement was often deliberately sensationalistic and flirted constantly with the idea of decadence cannot be denied” and it therefore follows that Khnopff would be involved in it considering the “eccentric, allegedly perverse, aspects of his art and personality” which Péladan shared. Péladan and other like-minded individuals who supported Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk established the Rose + Croix salons as Les XX were disbanding and Le Libre Esthétique was emerging at the fin-de-siècle. The six salons featured “unique exhibitions and productions seeking to unite the arts into a revival of initiatory drama, with a philosophical underpinning rooted in the Western esoteric traditions, and with the ultimate goal of the spiritual regeneration of society.” The prevalence of Khnopff in the Salon de la Rose + Croix and the collaborative nature of this association attests to Khnopff’s belief in interdisciplinary and integrated artworks and the social environments that would allow for them to flourish. Le Vice Supreme lay the foundations for the society, which revolved around the essentially sacred nature of art and the spiritual mien of Belgium at the fin-de-siècle.
The characterisation of Belgium as a spiritual or mystical city was essential in Khnopff’s practice. Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte canonised the sentiment that the medieval town was at once a symbol of the city’s historical richness and its mysticism, a perfect location and inspiration for Khnopff’s artistic ideals. Bruges-la-Morte conflated the protagonist’s dead wife with the city of Brussels itself and Khnopff depicts this metaphor directly, equating the two on the frontispiece (fig.6). Kosinski writes that “Khnopff (perhaps inspired by Schopenhauer) suggests that no reality exists - merely representation”, which emphasises his integration of philosophy as part of his artistic method, but also of the significance of prioritising the imagination as a creative source in the Symbolist ethos. That Rodenbach delivered a lecture on Schopenhauer in 1879 is also significant in this evaluation of Khnopff’s integration of the arts and the atmosphere of interdisciplinary harmony.
Khnopff’s illustration also presents a Darwinian conceit of people as products of their environment: their evolution being structured by the environment acting upon them and causing them to adapt in a way that internalises that environment in response. By making Bruges and the protagonist’s wife symbiotic through evocations of death and mysticism, the artist himself is made a vehicle for this representation. This agrees with Péladan’s theory of the artist as priest in the sermon of expression and Kosinski’s theory of how Khnopff treated issues of self-representation in his work:
The eradication of self from the work of art brings to mind Mallarmé’s dictum (Mallarmé was Khnopff’s favourite poet) concerning the silencing of the poet’s voice or the ceding of the artistic ego to the metaphysical purity of the poem.
Through this eradication and fusion of arts, his sense of nationalism and his referentiality Khnopff creates a cohesive image of great cultural significance. The frontispiece becomes a symbol of the eternal through its depiction of the medieval Belgian bridges and architecture conflated with the plants surrounding the Ophelia-like figure. She is stylistically presented like Millais’s Ophelia (fig. 7), which is instantly evocative of tragedy, and has the same androgyne noble profile as many of Khnopff’s women, creating a sense of ambivalence. The ruins appear as “symbols of transcendence and the spirituality of a lost age” and when represented in tandem with the dead woman, a sacramental funereal atmosphere is created, drawing together the conceits of mysticism, classicism, and idealism perpetuated throughout Khnopff’s oeuvre.
That it seems impossible to discuss just two of Khnopff’s illustrations without referring to Wagner, Baudelaire, Péladan, Mallarmé, Rodenbach, Sophocles, Kircher, Darwin, Millais and Shakespeare attests to his integration of the arts in both theory and practice. Khnopff’s manifestation of Belgian Symbolism is one of theoretical ambivalence: literary painting fused with abstraction; mutual social consciousness and individualistic imagery; the conflation of the mystical with the psychological; his disdain for materialism and “distrust of all but subjective perceptions”; and his simultaneous idealisation and condemnation of the ‘eternal’ woman. Idealism in all things, especially artistic unity, marks his practice and the ethos of Les XX and Symbolism more broadly. This corresponds with Verhaeren’s analysis of the ‘symbol’ in Khnopff’s practice:
The symbol therefore purifies itself through the process of evocation as it becomes an idea; it is a sublimation of perceptions and sensations; it is not demonstrative but suggestive; it destroys any contingency, any fact, any detail; it is the highest and most spiritual artistic expression possible.
This sublimation extends to the immediate art environment Khnopff and Les XX existed in, and attests to the integration of the arts in their movement, and movements like the German Jugendstil that were inspired by them.
APPENDIX
Fig. 1: After Joséphin Péladan, The Supreme Vice, Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), 1885, Pastels, pencil, and charcoal on paper, 23.9 x 12.3cm.
Fig. 2: The Sphinx, or, The Caresses, 1896, oil on canvas, 50 × 150 cm, Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts
Fig. 3: Jean-Auguste-Dominique INGRES (Montauban, 1780 - Paris, 1867), Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, 1.89 m x 1.44 m
Fig. 4: Oedipus and the Sphinx, Gustave Moreau, 1864, Oil on canvas, 205 x 104 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 5: Frontispiece to Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4) by Athanasius Kircher
Fig. 6: Fernand Khnopff, frontispiece for Georges Rodenbach’s, Bruges-la-Morte, pen and ink drawing, Paris, 1892
Fig. 7: Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, 1852, Oil paint on canvas, 762 x 1118 mm (support), 1105 x 1458 x 145 mm (frame), London, Tate Britain
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