This thesis examines the impact of Maurice Maeterlinck’s ideas on modern artists. Maeterlinck's poetry, prose, and early plays explore inherently Symbolist issues, but a closer look at his works reveals a departure from the common conception of Symbolism. Most Symbolists adhered to correspondence theory, the idea that the external world within the reach of the senses consisted merely of symbols that reflected a higher, objective reality hidden from humans. Maeterlinck rarely mentioned symbols, instead claiming that quiet contemplation allowed him to gain intuitions of a subjective, truer reality. Maeterlinck’s use of ambiguity and suggestion to evoke personal intuitions appealed not only to nineteenth-century Symbolist artists like Édouard Vuillard, but also to artists in pre-World War I Paris, where a strong Symbolist current continued. Maeterlinck’s ideas also offered a parallel to the theories of Henri Bergson, embraced by the Puteaux Cubists Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. Bolstered by new scientific discoveries that legitimized the existence of unseen realms, and intrigued by the idea of the fourth dimension as infinite higher space, Cubists such as Metzinger responded to Maeterlinck’s highly popular 1908 play L’Oiseau bleu, finding there an analogy to the Cubist quest for higher realities. Despite Maeterlinck’s popularity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has been largely ignored, especially with regard to twentieth-century art. By examining the responses of artists and contemporary critics to Maeterlinck, as well as the intersection of his theories with the larger cultural context, this thesis aims to bring Maeterlinck back into focus. / text

This thesis explores the relationship between photography and painting from the mid-nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century. Specifically, I focus on the artistic outputs of four painters, Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard and Sickert, and the different manners in which they incorporated photography within their creative practices. In particular, I concentrate on photography’s representation of and relationship with time, discussing this in relation to three concepts, that of the narrative moment, memory and motion; concepts that painters often experimented with and explored during the timeframe mentioned. Throughout the thesis I examine how the paintings of my selected artists compare and contrast with photographic imagery. By doing so I demonstrate how these artists incorporated and commented on photographic notions of time within their paintings. Three of the artists, Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard, also experimented with photography and I look at how their photographic experiments related to and/or impacted their painting practices. This thesis argues that the selected painters’ experimentation with photography did not hinder their creative vision, but rather enhanced it. Further, I comment on how these artists recognised the differences between photographic representations of life and their own visual and emotional experiences, thereby challenging photography’s connection with objective truth; an important critique considering that photography was still in its infancy.

Orientador: Jorge Sidney Coli Junior / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-26T14:07:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Esmeraldo_EugeniaGorini_M.pdf: 16068585 bytes, checksum: ae65babf08db331b0440cb11e4c5e997 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2000 / Resumo: Não informado / Abstract: Not informed. / Mestrado / Mestre em História