This book, featuring 73 color plates, focuses on “stylistic art” from the end of the 19th and early 20th century.

In an Introduction, the authors point out that art in this genre attempted to “transport the observer into another world, which can be so far removed from the one familiar to him that, at first glance, he is unable to gauge the gulf separating the two.” Above all, the authors aver, the works raise the question of just what the artists were trying to depict. The brief notes accompanying each of the illustrations suggest some answers.

Most of the art in this category came from new developments and schools of art in London, Brussels, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Darmstadt, and Berlin. The authors, maintaining that much of it arose in opposition to the rise of technology at the time, review a lot of the “isms” roiling the art scene at the time, such as symbolism, idealism, eclecticism, and spiritualism. “Stylist Art,” they write, was a way of counteracting the “increasingly prevalent tendency to deny any place in men’s lives to the exercise of phantasy or to the use of all one’s senses in a full-bodied and imaginative response to the world.”

The art featured, because of its departure from realism, fascinates the imagination of the observer. They include such artists as William Blake, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Henri Matisse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Egon Schiele.

I became familiar with much of the art included in this book from posters in college dorm rooms. It is the type of art that appeals greatly to minds when at their most fertile and dreams most aspirational. ( )