Arnold Böcklin

A Biography - His Vision of Nature

This is one of the most comprehensive films ever made about an artist. The fantastical work of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, one of the great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, forms a keystone in the bridge from nineteenth-century Romantic and Neo-classical trends to the Modernism of the twentieth century. Yet, like many other influential artists of his era, Böcklin's reputation has not been high, his preoccupation with subject and symbol being incompatible with the prevailing picture of modern art as progressing away from `content' toward the pure `form' of abstraction. Böcklin's style, by contrast, was close to that of many Victorian artists in Britain, artists who were also derided for being narrative, fanciful, meticulous. Today, however, with the breakdown of such doctrinaire definitions of Modernism, the importance of Böcklin and his contemporaries is recognized anew.

For more information see section 10

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