Gestes esthétiques
Gestes esthétiques (French, 'aesthetic gestures') names a late-nineteenth-century ideal of art as a quasi-mystical synthesis of the visual arts, literature, and music. The idea grew out of the Rosicrucian salons that the novelist Joséphin Péladan staged in Paris in the 1890s, where painting, poetry, and concert music were presented together as a single spiritual experience, and where Symbolist artists sought correspondences between the senses. The composer Erik Satie's Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, written for that milieu, is its best-known musical product. As a program it opposed naturalism and the art market, insisting that the aesthetic gesture - the ritual act of creation and reception - mattered more than any finished object. The term survives mainly as a document of the Rosicrucian moment within French Symbolism.
Defining characteristics
- Symbolist imagery drawn from mysticism, myth, and the esoteric
- Painting, music, and poetry staged together as one ritual experience
- Suggestive, dreamlike subjects over naturalistic description
- Correspondences between the senses: color, sound, and word meant to resonate together
- Ceremonial presentation, with the salon staged as quasi-religious spectacle
Key figures
- Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918) — Novelist and self-styled 'Sâr' who founded the Salons de la Rose+Croix (1892-1897) that incubated the idea
- Erik Satie (1866-1925) — Composer whose Sonneries de la Rose+Croix (1892) gave the program its sound
Example works
- Sonneries de la Rose+Croix — Erik Satie (1892)
- Le Vice suprême — Joséphin Péladan (1886)
Sources
- Gestes esthétiques - Wikipedia encyclopedia