Delirium: The Art of the Symbolist Book

January 20 - May 14, 2017 - This exhibition, drawing entirely on the Morgan’s collection, explores some of the encounters between Symbolist authors and artists and the creative approaches they took to illustrate the invisible.

Baudelaire believed poetry should not describe the external world but suggest the writer’s interior reality, using a vocabulary of delirium, dreams, mysticism, and disordered states of mind. His revolt against the dominant naturalism of the day influenced a younger generation of writers who helped to shape the Symbolist movement in literature.