Elena Klyushina
Saint Petersburg State University, Russia
Fernand Khnopff’s art, like the Belgian symbolism as a whole, has been little studied in Russia. Except for some modest references in several monographs on the West European art of the second half of the 19th century, we can name only one recent article by I. E. Svetlov devoted to a brief analysis of the Belgian master’s iconographic features. Such a situation in the assessment of Khnopff’s creativity should be regarded as historiographical injustice, the correction of which would allow us to estimate the role of Belgium in the Western European avant-garde formation of the 19th–20th centuries more accurately.
Named after the apt expression by Hermann Bahr, Khnopff’s logogriphic method is being studied on the basis of a detailed analysis of the artist’s masterpiece “I lock the door upon myself” (1891. Munich, Neue Pinakothek), better known in Russia as “The hermit”. The reduced Russian translation of the title, which distorts the meaning, the perception and the importance of the painting, is avoided in the report for a variety of reasons, and the authentic English version is preferred.
The report raises such important for understanding of Fernand Khnopff’s creativity problems as: Anglophile and James Whistler’s influence on the Belgian art in the first half of the 1880s, the peculiarities of visual perception of Classical Antiquity art by the artists who worked in Brussels in the second half of the 19th century, the problem of the representation of hypnotic trance in art and culture of the 1890s, and the spatial construction features of the Khnopff’s works. The other significant issue is the influence of art of the Northern Renaissance on Belgian masters. The analysis of the “sensualistic technique” of Fernand Khnopff, who was also called “modern Memling” by his contemporaries, provides additional clues to master’s artistic method.