For the 2018 College Art Association Annual Conference, I and art historian Juliet Bellow (American University) organized the panel “Inter-Arts Exchange as Modernist Method, circa 1900.” Panelists included Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Williams College), who spoke about Vaslav Nijinski’s ballet The Afternoon of a Faun (1912), Katherine Brion (New College), who discussed Maurice Denis’s History of Psyche (1908), and Juliet Bellow, who presented on Auguste Rodin and Loïe Fuller’s relationship and their shared interest in photographs from her book project, Rodin’s Dancers: Moving Toward the Limits of Sculpture.
During the fin de siècle, artists sought to forge novel relations between media, aiming to reinvent the art object as well as the processes of its making and consumption. A central point of reference for these endeavors, which freely crossed national borders, was Charles Baudelaire’s 1861 essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris,” in which he defined a modern aesthetic originating in synaesthesia and the interrelationship between the arts. By 1900, Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), disseminated through critical texts in several languages, proved influential upon a new generation of writers, painters, sculptors, and choreographers. Reformulating the concept of the paragone, premised upon a competition that implicitly enshrined the singularity of the artist’s vision, these artists embraced a synergistic model of creative practice—one commensurate with Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences among the arts.
This session asked how such inter-artistic exchange resulted in the emergence of new modernist languages around 1900. The papers examined how interactions between painters and poets, sculptors and dancers, fine and applied artists yielded new formal languages. Collaboration, however fraught, appealed as a means of overcoming artists’ alienation in the modern world, even if they disagreed over whether aesthetic unity might forge a broader social consensus. While grounded in the art of fin-de-siècle Europe, the papers offered broader methodological reflections on transpositions between the arts—from canvas to stage, from choreography to sculpture, from painting to applied arts and architecture—thereby challenging art history’s equation of an oeuvre with the work of a single artist.