Arnold Böcklin

A Swiss painter, graphic artist and sculptor. The representative of the Dusseldorf School of Art. One of the outstanding founders of Symbolism in European visual art, the author of the very famous painting “The Island of Death”.

The works of Böcklin, in the words of the master himself, “encourage thinking”. However, not complicated intellectuality and speculative secrecy of feelings, but emotionality is the basis of the ideas of the author, a true romantic of the spirit. That is why the art of Arnold Böcklin turned out to be close to the masters of Symbolism, who singled out this facet of Böcklin’s talent.

Key ideas:

– Pictures by A. Böcklin, bright and sometimes sharply contrasting in color, present a fictional world, often too much, in other words, deliberately mysterious to the viewer.

– The main advantage of the canvases is their color, not deprived of some eccentricity, bold for those times.

– Initially having devoted himself to landscape theme, Böcklin soon puts compositions, mostly mythical, to the forefront of compositions. Böcklin perceives all the bright culture of his favorite Italy as a classical myth that nourishes the imagination of the creator. Thus, real landscapes and muses, Venus, ancient heroes, as well as less harmonious, but more mysterious creatures, naiads, tritons, centaurs, begin to coexist on the canvases. At the same time, the viewer feels the complete unity of the nature and fiction.

– The theme of solitude, often fatal, characteristic of most of the Symbolists, sounds in its full force in many plots of Böcklin. First of all, in the famous canvas “The Island of the Dead”, which the author repeated five times, changing the tonality and lighting effects. In this painting, everything is symbolical, not only the image of a detached island – the presence of “trees of sorrow” (cypress trees), an abandoned deserted villa, a boat with a figure in white clothes.
– The spirit of exclusivity, the romantic elevation of feelings over prose is inherent in the self-portraits of Böcklin. These canvases are “directed” very effectively, and are very expressive in color combinations. This, on the one hand, involuntarily makes us think about the self-portraits of Van Dyck and Rembrandt, and on the other, to relate them to the self-portraits of S. Dali. In every image (near a tree, with a glass of water, or with a violin of death), an emotional beginning is always revealed. Despite the soundness of the composition, it has the nature of a certain improvisation subordinate to the master’s vision.