SYMBOLISM

Symbolism was an interdisciplinary movement in literature, art, music, and theater at the fin de siècle. The term symbolism is something of a misnomer, for it suggests that concrete images represented specific messages. On the contrary, symbolists often used words, images, or sounds in ways that were intentionally open ended and evocative. To avoid precision and a sense of deliberation in their work, symbolists experimented with innovative form. Poets used free verse as opposed to rhyme; artists either avoided naturalistic imagery, experimenting with line and color to stimulate emotions, or subverted naturalism by using it to create bizarre scenes and creatures that the senses have difficulty grasping. Symbolists were interested in the validity of the audelà (the beyond): that which lies beyond the superficial appearance of things in the natural world. Lines from the poem "Correspondance" (1857) by Charles Baudelaire exemplified the connection between nature and the soul: "Nature is a temple of living pillars / where often words emerge, confused and dim / and man goes through this forest, with / familiar eyes of symbols always watching him."

origins and context

Symbolism was a movement of individuals who cultivated unique approaches and therefore has no unified stylistic tendency such as one might find, for example, in naturalism in literature or impressionism in art. Its beginning and end dates are imprecise. In literature, Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud are variously treated as precursors or "masters"; the same is true in art of Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bçcklin, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. These artists of a slightly older generation were all active in the third quarter of the nineteenth century and in many ways continued the experiments of the Romantics of the first half of that century. Symbolism was built on the foundations of Romanticism, with its cult of the individual and its emphasis on the primacy of the imagination. Symbolism is generally thought of as a reaction against naturalism, a movement that had greater visibility in the third quarter of the nineteenth century than did late Romanticism. Naturalists such as the artist Jules Bastien-Lepage or the writer É mile Zola wished to express the details of contemporary life, especially among the poor. Many of them were influenced by a popular enthusiasm for science in the 1870s and 1880s; thus, these artists and writers were concerned with the relationship of the human figure to the natural world, including its environmental and hereditary circumstances. In an apparent paradox, Zola, along with other naturalists, believed that the way an artist depicted subject matter was influenced by his unique temperament; therefore, imagery contained subjective aspects that were tied to the life of the artist. This understanding of subjectivity drew on scientific inroads into the study of the unconscious in the nineteenth century.

Both in foregrounding subjectivity and in their concern with socially specific themes such as prostitution, disease, and the degrading aspects of the industrial present, symbolists shared many concerns with naturalists, although their treatment of them was less literal. A number of symbolists were consciously inspired by the science of their time; for them it confirmed the essential importance of the vital energies of the invisible. Impressionism, which was related to naturalism and concurrent with symbolism although peaking slightly earlier (c. 1875), was a form of naturalism that also emphasized the individual's response to subject matter: the optical and psychological sensation produced by a given scene upon one's vision and temperament. Impressionism and the neo-impressionist technique of Georges Seurat, with its exploration of physiological responses to line and color advocated by the aesthetician Charles Henri, were considered symbolist by critics of the movement. Further, the static form and quasi-geometric shapes found in neo-impressionist painting can be linked to a Platonic current within symbolism: the notion that the world that lies beyond appearances is one of ideals.

from decadence to symbolism

In the 1880s, naturalism began to be superseded by Decadence; an approach that is considered part of symbolism in the visual arts although treated as a separate manifestation in literature. Decadent work, such as the writing of Joris-Karl Huysmans, was fatalistic and morbid, filled with images of decay and dreadful sexuality, personified by the

femme fatale (fatal woman). Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857; Flowers of Evil) and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe were precursors of these tendencies. The symbolist artists Gustav Klimt in Austria, Franz von Stuck in Germany, and Felicien Rops in Belgium and the graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley in Belgium all depicted the divisive and powerful women. The nascent feminist movement and fear of contracting syphilis from prostitutes were behind the iconic presence of such women in the art of the late nineteenth century. The antithesis of this symbol of division between the sexes was another symbolist trope: the androgyne represented the resolution of male and female into a harmonious entity.

Among the symbolist artists rooted in Decadence were the French artist Odilon Redon, who created morbid and fantastic works as early as the late 1870s, and the Norwegian Edward Munch. Munch had originally been a naturalist, concerned with themes of illness and death. In 1889 he visited Paris and discovered Decadent and symbolist poetry. His symbolist subject matter became intensely personal as he explored the dark human emotions of jealousy and despair, along with various neuroses. Like many symbolists, he believed his imagery to be informed by recent developments in science and, therefore, although not literal, to have a basis in truth. Like the German scientist Ernst Haeckel who advocated this doctrine, Munch was a monist, believing in a life force that pervaded all matter; death was but part of the transformation of energy that unified all of nature. He was also fascinated by the psychology of sexuality. Munch used these ideas to develop a series of twenty-two paintings between 1892 and 1902, originally titled Love and later called The Frieze of Life. In 1902, as the result of the termination of a traumatic relationship, Munch was shot but survived and experienced a series of breakdowns. What Munch identified as a "nerve crisis" exemplifies a kind of Romantic suffering shared by many of the symbolists. Whereas artists and writers of the Romantic generation were identified as melancholics, supposedly afflicted by a disordered temperament, those of the late nineteenth century were often thought of as neurasthenics, a pseudo-scientific disease of the time believed to be caused by stress to the nervous system, in their case through the hyperactivity of creative thought.

symbolism in literature and art

Symbolism as a literary movement was first defined in 1886 in a manifesto, "Le Symbolisme," published by the symbolist writer Jean Moréas in Le Figaro. "Symbolist poetry," Moréas wrote, "attempts to clothe the Idea in a perceptible form." Among the symbolists who expressed the intangible and otherworldly through their imagery were Francis Vielé-Griffin, Stuart Merrill, Laurent Tailhade, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Henri de Régnier, and René Ghil. In that same year, Mallarmé published his definition of symbolist poetry. Symbolism in the visual arts was defined by Albert Aurier in 1892 as "the painting of ideas." One year earlier, Aurier had already identified the painters Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh as symbolists. In the early twenty-first century Van Gogh is more commonly identified as an expressive naturalist, but Gauguin is still recognized as a leading symbolist. Gauguin began painting religious folk scenes in 1888, using what he termed a synthetist style. Synthetism refers both to the notion of combining memory and imagination in the selection of imagery and to formal issues, namely the use of flat planes of expressive non-naturalistic color and simplified form. In that same year, Mallarmé translated James Abbott McNeill Whistler's lecture, "Ten O'Clock," into French. Whistler was part of a movement in English art called aestheticism, which advocated artistic freedom over the reality of nature; it emphasized the importance of color and line as abstract arrangements or patterns that could stir the emotions in the way music could, and it may have influenced Gauguin and the synthetists; Whistler became identified by many in the circle of writers and artists around Mallarmé as a symbolist. Like Whistler, Gauguin and other symbolists found affinities for their explorations in music.

A virtual cult formed around the late Romantic composer Richard Wagner; many symbolist poets contributed to the journal Revue Wagnérienne, founded in 1885. Wagner emphasized sensation, emotion, and thought experienced as a totality. He established the influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal of unifying all the arts—music, poetry, painting, and architecture—into one synaesthetic experience. In 1889, Paul Sérusier inscribed Wagner's credo on the walls of an in ninsouth western France, which had just been decorated from ceiling to floor with paintings done in synthetist style by Gauguinand his followers. In the 1890s, a group of French symbolists called the nabis (prophets) appropriated synthetism in their depiction of religious or urban bourgeois subject matter, often with disturbing overtones related to contemporary psychology. They too would use this style in unified decorative schemes, including theatrical set designs. In 1890, the nabi theorist Maurice Denis defined a painting as "a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" (Denis, p. 540). Gauguin believed that the directness of synthetist style could be linked to similarities in the visual cultures of folk, tribal, and non-Western populations. He spent ten years in Tahiti and the Marquesas cultivating his self-identification as a "primitive" painter. The abstract tendencies inherent within synthetism would open the way to the early-twentieth-century abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, František Kupka, and Kazimir Malevich, all of whom were symbolists in their early years.

irrational aspects of the mind

By the 1890s, the ideational realm of mysticism, religion, and the occult increasingly came to the fore among symbolists, reflecting a virtual religious revival in European culture. As divorced from material reality as such tendencies seem to be, many sought to reconcile scientific truths with the spiritual realm. The practice of hypnosis by psychologists seemed to validate psychic experience. Scientific confirmation of other irrational aspects of the mind, such as dreams or visions, also inspired the symbolists. The most influential occult doctrine, theosophy, made use of ideas that combined Eastern and Western religions with Darwinian evolution.

France led in the development of symbolism, but Belgium was another important early center. Many Belgian artists were represented at the Salons of the Rose + Cross, organized in Paris by Joséphin Péladan between 1892 and 1897. The artists who exhibited there painted in a traditional illusionistic style that emphasized the spiritual. Péladan requested submissions that evoked "the Catholic Ideal and Mysticism… Legend, Myth, Allegory, the Dream, the Paraphrase of great poetry" (Péladan, pp. 33–34). Myth and legend were appreciated by the symbolists for their evocative potential. Péladan's example was followed in Brussels in the Salon d'Art Idéaliste. Belgium was also an important early center for symbolist poetry: both Émile Verhaeren and Albrecht Rodenbach worked here.

Avant-garde exhibiting societies were central to the spread of symbolism. Among them was the influential Brussels art society Les XX (1883–1893), which included many symbolists. In 1897 the Vienna Secession society built its own exhibition building and held twenty-three exhibitions between 1898 and 1905. The most famous of these was the Beethoven exhibition of 1902, which included decorative murals by Gustave Klimt. Other avant-garde secession movements, many of which favored the symbolists, quickly followed in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Prague, and Krakow. Symbolist drama spread internationally as well and included productions at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in France and the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck in Belgium and Henrik Ibsen in Norway.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, symbolism was already on the wane, to be replaced in art by experimental abstraction and a renewed emphasis on expressive figuration just before World War I. This late period was an eclectic one in literature; André Gide is an example of a former symbolist who turned toward sensual, lush, life-affirming themes that were part of the naturist movement. Yet symbolist tendencies were not yet over. The surrealist movement, which emerged after World War I, borrowed many ideas from the symbolists regarding the importance of dreams, the unconscious, and the evocative potential of imprecise or unexpected imagery.

See alsoFin de Siècle; Painting.

bibliography

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Barbara Larson