Symbolism

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 century 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 the words they used 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 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 broad tendency, however was towards flattened forms and broad areas of colour—in tune with Post-Impressionism in general.

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 Belgian Georg Minne and the Norwegian Gustav Vigeland. George Heard Hamilton comments that ‘the Symbolists, by freeing painting from what Gauguin called “the shackles of probability”, created the philosophical as well as practical premises for much twentieth-century art'.