The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (469 page)

(1618–64).
Flemish painter, an enigmatic and exceedingly attractive artist. Nothing is known of his training or early career. From about 1646 to about 1656 he was in Rome, where he came into contact with the
Bamboccianti
(see
LAER , PIETER VAN
). He painted
genre
scenes in their manner, but his work is in a class apart because of the quiet, melancholy dignity of his figures and his exquisite silvery tonality. His other pictures in Rome included views of artists' studios (an example dated 1652 is in the Detroit Institute of Arts). By 1656 Sweerts had returned to his native Brussels, where in 1659 he became a member of the painters' guild. In 1661 he was in Amsterdam, where he joined a missionary group, and he sailed from Marseilles to the Orient in the following year. Sweerts was found quarrelsome and unsuitable, however, and was dismissed; he died at Goa in India. Towards the end of his career, Sweerts seemed to have worked mainly as a portraitist. Like his genre scenes, his portraits are distinguished by delicate and subdued colour harmonies and great sensitivity of expression and handling. They have often been compared with the work of
Vermeer
, to whom Sweerts's
Portrait of a Girl
(Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester) was once attributed.

 
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Symbolism
.

A loosely organized movement in literature and the visual arts, flourishing
c.
1885–
c.
1910, characterized by a rejection of direct, literal representation in favour of evocation and suggestion. It was part of a broad anti-materialist and anti-rationalist trend in ideas and art towards the end of the 19th cent. and specifically marked a reaction against the naturalistic aims of
Impressionism
. Symbolist painters tried to give visual expression to emotional experiences, or as the poet Jean Moréas put it in a Symbolist Manifesto published in
Le Figaro
on 18 September 1886, ‘to clothe the idea in sensuous form’. Just as Symbolist poets thought there was a close correspondence between the sound and rhythm of words and their meaning, so Symbolist painters thought that colour and line in themselves could express ideas. Symbolist critics were much given to drawing parallels between the arts, and
Redon's
paintings, for example, were compared with the poetry of Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe and with the music of Claude Debussy. Many painters were inspired by the same kind of imagery as Symbolist writers (the
femme fatale
is a common theme), but
Gauguin
and his followers (see
SYNTHETISM
) chose much less flamboyant subjects, often peasant scenes. Religious feeling of an intense, mystical kind was a feature of the movement, but so was an interest in the erotic and the perverse—death, disease, and sin were favourite subjects. Stylistically, Symbolist artists varied greatly, from a love of exotic detail to an almost primitive simplicity in the conception of the subject, and from firm outlines to misty softness in the delineation of form. A general tendency, however, was towards flattened forms and broad areas of colour—in tune with
Post-Impressionism
in general. By freeing painting from what Gauguin called ‘the shackles of probability’ the movement helped to create the aesthetic premisses of much 20th-cent. art. Although chiefly associated with France, Symbolism had international currency, and such diverse artists as
Hodler
and
Munch
are regarded as part of the movement in its broadest sense. Symbolist sculptors include the Norwegian Gustav
Vigeland
.

 
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Synchromism
.

Movement in painting founded in 1912 by Stanton
Macdonald-Wright
and Morgan
Russell
, two American artists living in Paris. The term ‘synchromism’ means literally ‘colours together’ and both Russell and Macdonald-Wright were much concerned with the purely abstract use of colour; in 1912 Russell said that he wished to do ‘a piece of expression solely by means of colour and the way it is put down, in showers and broad patches, distinctly separated from each other, or blended … but with force and clearness and large geometric patterns’. Synchromism was very close to
Orphism
and the two Americans protested in manifestos that they had primacy. Although the movement petered out with the First World War, Synchromism influenced several American artists, and its founders hold distinguished places in the vanguard of abstract art.

 
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Synthetism
.

Term applied to a manner of painting associated with
Bernard
,
Gauguin
, and their associates at Pont-Aven in Brittany. It involved the simplification of forms into large-scale patterns and the expressive purification of colours. Bernard believed that form and colour must be simplified for the sake of more forceful expression, and Gauguin spoke much of ‘synthesis’, by which he meant a blending of abstract ideas of rhythm and colour with visual impressions of nature. He advised his disciples to ‘paint by heart’ because in memory coloured by emotion natural forms become more integrated and meaningful. Bernard and Gauguin each claimed credit for developing Synthetism and they probably acted as mutual catalysts. Synthetism was influential on the
Nabis
and has affinities with the more literary
Symbolism
. See also
CLOISONNISM
.

 
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Systemic art
.

Term coined by Lawrence
Alloway
in 1966 to refer to a type of abstract art characterized by the use of very simple standardized forms, usually geometric in character, either in a single concentrated image or repeated in a system arranged according to a clearly visible principle of organization. The chevron paintings of
Noland
are examples of Systemic art. It has been described as a branch of
Minimal art
, but Alloway extended the term to cover
Colour Field painting
.