The Imagery of Anxiety and Fear in 'Expressive' Symbolism ‒ Focusing on Gustav Mossa, Alfred Kubin, Félicien Rops, Jean Delville - CHOI MINJAE Advisor : Prof. Seoung-Hwan Kim, Ph.D. Department of Aesthetics and Art History Graduate School of Chosun...
The Imagery of Anxiety and Fear in 'Expressive' Symbolism ‒ Focusing on Gustav Mossa, Alfred Kubin, Félicien Rops, Jean Delville - CHOI MINJAE Advisor : Prof. Seoung-Hwan Kim, Ph.D. Department of Aesthetics and Art History Graduate School of Chosun University This study examines ʻExpressive’ Symbolism through the cultural psych ology of anxiety and fear that characterized the fin de siècle. Its purpos e is to investigate the formal language through which images reflecting artists’ personal experiences and the crises of fin-de-siècle European soci ety were expressed, and to clarify what these images symbolized. In this study, anxiety and fear are understood as a cultural psychology of the fi n de siècle, formed and disseminated amid industrialization and urbaniz ation, the development of capitalism, class conflict, changes in women’s social status, medical and social debates concerning sexuality, seculariza tion, and the weakening of Christian authority. As a cultural psychology, anxiety and fear appeared in various forms across philosophy, literature, medicine, religion, art, and constituted a central affective structure thro ugh which European people experienced the crises and fractures of thei r age. ʻExpressive’ Symbolism did not disregard these historical crises or retreat from them. Rather, by representing the anxiety and fear experie nced by European people through symbols, it actively responded to the problems and crises of contemporary reality. Previous studies of Symbolism have primarily focused on French artist s such as Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Odilon Redo n, emphasizing their inner worlds and often interpreting Symbolism as an escapist art lacking a sense of reality. In contrast to this narrative of ʻAestheticist’ Symbolism, this study proposes a new narrative of ʻExpressi ve’ Symbolism. To this end, Gustav Mossa, Alfred Kubin, Félicien Rops, and Jean Delville, who worked in France, Belgium, and the German-spea king regions, are selected as the principal subjects of analysis. Although these artists worked under different social and cultural conditions, they shared a tendency to express the crises and fractures of the fin de siècl e through intense and radical formal languages, addressing such themes as female sexuality and desire, death and disease, the weakening of Chri stian authority, and the search for a new spirituality. Mossa symbolically represented the sense of crisis, anxiety, and fear e xperienced by fin-de-siècle European men through the femmes fatales d epicted in Elle and his Salome series. He recast Salome as a nineteenth- century bourgeois woman and combined fragmented bodies, unreal and unconscious spaces, and poetic texts in order to express the disruption of the male-centered sexual order and the crisis of the modern male su bject. In Kubin’s works, recurring forms such as female genitalia, anima l mouths, and tunnels converge into the symbol of the ʻHole’. This imag e reveals the artist’s personal experiences of loss and sexual trauma whi le also evoking an apocalyptic fear associated with the decline of the Au stro-Hungarian Empire and the anticipation of an impending historical c atastrophe. His nervous and incisive lines, grotesquely transformed bodi es, and unstable, surreal spaces constitute a distinctive formal language that connects the artist’s inner anxiety and fear with the broader crisis of his age. Rops symbolically revealed the poverty, sexual desire, diseas e, death, melancholy, and alienation concealed beneath the splendor of metropolitan Paris through images of La Buveuse d'absinthe, prostitutes, skeletons, and diseased bodies. In particular, he reinterpreted traditional art-historical motifs such as memento mori and the Dance of Death in a modern context to express the pathology and decadence of fin-de-siècle urban civilization. In terms of religious themes, Rops combined Christian iconography wi th Satanism in La tentation de Saint Antoine and Les Sataniques series. Images of a woman crucified on the cross, a demon displacing Christ, a nd scenes in which sexuality and death are intertwined were not merely obscene expressions, but symbolic devices intended to expose the contra dictions inherent in Christian dogma and sexual morality. Delville, by co ntrast, combined Theosophy with Idealist aesthetics to propose a new sp iritual order in the space left by the weakening of Christian authority. I n L'Homme-Dieu and Prométhée, Christ and Prometheus are reinterprete d as visionary and mediating figures who guide humanity toward spiritu al elevation. By employing idealized bodies derived from ancient Greece, the exaggerated human forms of Mannerism, and symbols of light and s tars, Delville transformed the spiritual loss of the fin de siècle into the possibility of transcendence and regeneration. The analysis demonstrates that anxiety and fear were manifested not o nly through particular themes and motifs in Symbolism, but also throug h such formal characteristics as the distortion and fragmentation of the body, spatial rupture, incisive lines and unreal colors, the transformatio n of traditional iconography, and the juxtaposition of heterogeneous ima ges. It further shows that ʻExpressive’ Symbolism constituted a pan-Euro pean cultural and artistic movement that represented a shared sense of fin-de-siècle crisis through different formal languages shaped by the dist inct historical conditions of each cultural region. The significance of this study lies, first, in its proposal of a new narra tive of ʻExpressive’ Symbolism. It also comparatively examines Mossa, Ro ps, Kubin, and Delville who have received relatively limited attention in Korean art-historical scholarship—through the cultural psychology of anx iety and fear, situating their works at the intersection of personal experi ence, literary and art-historical traditions, and the social, political, and r eligious realities of fin-de-siècle Europe. In doing so, this study argues t hat Symbolism was not detached from reality, but was instead a modern artistic practice that actively explored the desire, death, alienation, and spiritual emptiness underlying the progress and rationality promised by modern Western civilization. Key Words : Symbolism, ʻExpressive’ Symbolism, Anxiety and Fear, Gusta v Mossa, Alfred Kubin, Félicien Rops, Jean Delville