Stéphane Mallarmé
French symbolist poet
1842 CE to 1898 CE
Stéphane Mallarmé (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name is Étienne Mallarmé, is a French poet and critic.
He is a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipates and inspires several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.
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Manet is friendly with Monet and the others, but despite the insistence of Monet and Degas he does not participate in their independent exhibition.
Hoping for academic success, he continues to submit his paintings to the Salon, which accepts his painting set in the Gare Saint-Lazare, The Railway (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), influenced by the Impressionist palette.
However, the Salon rejects his two other submissions, The Artist (Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin) and The Laundress.
In the last few months of 1874, Manet's friend Stéphane Mallarmé, schoolteacher and leading Symbolist poet, edits a magazine in which he protests the Salon's rejection of Manet's paintings.
Jules Bastien-Lepage, a French painter of rustic outdoor scenes who studied under Alexandre Cabanel, had first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870; he wins a medal at the Salon of 1874 for Spring Song, which stylistically owes a little to Manet.
Mary Cassatt, a regular Salon exhibitor who shares with the Impressionists an interest in experiment and in using bright colors inspired by the out-of-doors, in this year chooses Paris as her permanent residence and establishes her studio here.
Édouard Manet exhibits Argenteuil at the Salon of 1875, and travels to Venice at the end of the year.
Stéphane Mallarmé's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven is published with illustrations by Manet.
The second Impressionist exhibition, with twenty participants, is held in Paris at No. 11 rue Le Peletier, Galerie Durand-Ruel, in April 1876.
The Impressionists stubbornly strive to produce light-suffused paintings from which black is excluded, but their pursuits lead to many disappointments, as their paintings, so divergent from traditional formulas, continue to be frequently rejected by the juries of the Salon and are extremely difficult to sell.
Edouard Manet exhibits together with other works the two paintings refused by the Salon of 1875, The Artist (Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin) (1875, Museum of Art Sao Paolo, Brazil) and The Laundress, in his “open studio,” where he and Stephane Mallarmé meet Méry Laurent.
Mallarmé publishes a flattering article about Manet.
The Bordeaux native had studied under Jean-Léon Gérome; mastered engraving from Rodolphe Bresdin, who had exerted an important influence; and learned lithography under Henri Fantin-Latour.
His aesthetic is not one of visual perception but of imagination, for which he finds an intellectual catalyst in his close friend Stephen Mallarmé.
Odilon Redon completes another print series in 1882, dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems had been translated into French with great success by Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire.
Rather than illustrating Poe, Redon's lithographs are poems in visual terms, themselves evoking the poet's world of private torment.
Emmanuel Chabrier's visit to Spain in 1882 results in his most famous musical work, España (1883), a mixture of popular airs he had heard and his own imagination.
In the view of his friend Henri Duparc, this composition for orchestra demonstrates an individual style that seems to come from nowhere; other contemporary musicians are more condescending.
National qualities appear in Chabrier's serious music.
Of several stage works begun during the 1870s, his first to be completed is L'étoile, which had achieved forty-eight successful performances at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens in 1877, showcasing his light touch, musical aplomb, and comic wit.
Chabrier's friends from the artistic avant-garde in Paris include Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d'Indy, as well as painters Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, whose 'Thursday' soirées Chabrier attends, and writers such as Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Jean Moréas, Jean Richepin, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé.
On a trip to Munich with Henri Duparc in 1879, he had discovered Wagner's masterpiece Tristan und Isolde.
This event had led him to realize his true passion for composition, and he had quit the Ministry of the Interior in 1880.
That year, he had composed his piano cycle Pièces pittoresques, of which the Idylle will greatly influenced Francis Poulenc.
Chabrier had plunged himself into the scores of Wagner, and became an important assistant to Charles Lamoureux in preparing concert performances of the German master's works in Paris.
He has traveled to London (1882) and Brussels (1883) to hear Wagner's Ring cycle.
However, the strength of Chabrier's musical personality and his essential 'Frenchness' of temperament and sensibility make it impossible for him to do more than experiment with Wagner's more superficial technical procedures, without getting involved in the aesthetic and philosophical theories.
Félicien Rops, a Belgian painter and graphic artist who has lived in Paris since 1875, becomes a member of the newly formed Les Vingt.
Devoting himself principally to illustrating books, Rops has also published Cent croquis pour réjouir les honnêtes gens (One Hundred Sketches to Delight Solid Citizens).
Among his notable book illustrations are those for Légendes flamandes (Flemish Legends), by C. de Coster; Jeune France (Young France), by Théophile Gautier; Les Diaboliques (Weird Women), by Barbey d'Aurevilly; Zadig, by Voltaire; and the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Berthe Morisot begins to hold Thursday evenings at home, which Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Stephen Mallarmé, and Edgar Degas regularly attend.
Berthe Morisot, now forty-five, shows fourteen works at the group show, as does Edgar Degas.
Morisot, whose work has retained its Manet-like insistence on design—e.g., In the Dining Room (1886, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)—has not taken color-optical experimentation as far as have her fellow Impressionists.
She has continued to participate in their struggle for recognition, however, despite the protests of friends and family.
Cultured and charming, Morisot continues to hold Thursday evenings at home, with Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Stéphane Mallarmé as regular attendees.