Sholl, Robert (2024) “Joséphin ‘Sâr’ Péladan, Charles Tournemire and apocalyptic mysticism,” Art, Music, and Mysticism at the fin-de-siècle: Seeing and Hearing the Beyond, ed. Corrinne Chong and Michelle Foot (New York: Routledge), pp. 62-95. In: Art, Music, and Mysticism at the fin-de-siècle: Seeing and Hearing the Beyond. Routledge Research in Art History. Routledge, New York and London, pp. 62-95. ISBN 1032145668

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Abstract

This chapter seeks to understand the relationship between mysticism as shown in the art and aesthetics of Josephin ‘Sâr’ Péladan and the music of Charles Tournemire (Péladan’s brother–in-law) from 1907 onwards. I examine the politicisation of art as promoting subjective spiritual catharsis and transformation in the Catholic symbolist worldview of Péladan and show its use both in Tournemire’s unpublished memories and in his work the Sept Chorals-Poèmes d’Orgue pour les sept paroles du Xrist (1935) for organ. This connection anthropologically predates but validates Fulcher’s (2002), and Schloesser’s (2008) studies of political and religious artistic regeneration and trauma in the 1920s/30s. It reveals Tournemire’s unique diremption of the apocalyptic and sublime into an ecstatic or mystical art as a figment of modernist renewal.

In this study, I show how Péladan’s aesthetics of beauty, artistic astonishment, and his ideal of Catholicism can be understood as an extension of the sublime with its traumatic and apocalyptic ramifications (especially Kant, 1790; Lyotard [1989, 1991 and 1994], and Wurth, 2009) to show what is missing from the history of its conceptualisation. I wish to show that fundamental to Péladan’s thought is an attempt to re-enchant the world and that this is extended through Tournemire’s treatment of mode and dissonance as part of a cathartic reawakening to God through mysticism understood not just as a post-Wagnerian Gnostic movement, but as a means of fantasy and of evoking the absolute.

Item Type:	Book Section
Depositing User:	Robert Sholl
Date Deposited:	25 Jul 2024 07:58
Last Modified:	25 Jul 2024 07:58
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/12159

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