Paul Binding

Artist of the Archipelago

August Strindberg: Painter, Writer, Photographer

By

Tate Publishing 160pp £19.99 order from our bookshop

A Dream Play

By

‘Everything exists in everything,’ August Strindberg pronounced from the depths of his immersion in Eastern religion. He had come to see resemblances between the markings on the shell of a crab and the patterns made by salt crystals after he’d left them in solution on sheets of glass; in cliffs going down to the sea he’d found his very own profile, upside down. The whole visible world presented, he felt, ‘analogies’ for the invisible without and the spiritual within, and artists must at once look hard about them and seek out the inner, the occult significance of what they saw. ‘Copy nature,’ yes, by all means (and in his earlier work, both literary and visual, Strindberg had made himself do so with nervous concentration), ‘though never slavishly,’ he added. ‘Above all, imitate nature’s own way of creating.’  

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • One woman 'travelled round the south of India with a retinue of 750 people, fourteen elephants, two racing camels f… ,
    • Stuck for a gift idea for Father's Day? Subscribe to Literary Review and get a FREE copy of 'An Impeccable Spy' –… ,
    • 'Gone. All gone. The ease, the pleasure, the effortless eloquence' From May 1995, Margaret Forster's withering rev… ,
    • RT : SO excited to tell you about this event! 😆 The amazing digital colourist, will be joining w… ,
    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    Follow Us