Symbolism in Art: Dreams, Myths and Inner Images

Symbolism is an art movement and literary current of the 1880s and 1890s that turns against realism and naturalism. The artists wanted to paint ideas, dreams and moods by means of symbols and suggestion, and the pictures are often mysterious, melancholy or bizarre.

Facts

A reaction against reality

Symbolism was born out of poetry. The French poet Charles Baudelaire had spoken in the poem Correspondances of nature as a temple where scents, colours and sounds answer one another, and Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine took up the tone. In 1886 Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro. That same year the Impressionists held their last joint exhibition, and a new generation wanted to do something other than reproduce light.

The Symbolists thought the superficial reality of Naturalism and Impressionism was insufficient. They wanted to capture the idea behind the visible, such as death, desire, anxiety and longing. They did so through symbols that could be interpreted in several ways: a flower, a lone figure, a gaze, a lake. That is why Symbolist pictures are often hard to put into words, and that is intentional.

The French and the Belgians

Gustave Moreau painted biblical and mythological scenes, such as Salome, in a glowing, jewel-like richness of detail that is more like a dream than history. Odilon Redon made black charcoal drawings and lithographs with an eye floating like a balloon and other strange creatures, and later, in old age, pastels in clear colours. Paul Gauguin, who had withdrawn to Tahiti, painted flat, symbolic fields of colour with the question Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

In Belgium James Ensor painted carnival masks and skeletons, and in Switzerland Ferdinand Hodler gave figures rhythm and repetition. Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, in several versions from 1880 onwards, with a rowing boat approaching a rocky island of cypresses, became Symbolism’s best-known image and hung in many homes in Europe.

Symbolism in the North and in Vienna

In Sweden Symbolism coincides with National Romanticism. Ernst Josephson painted The Water Sprite in 1884, a naked, uncanny river spirit playing the fiddle in a waterfall, and it aroused both admiration and indignation. Prince Eugen gave the landscape a soul in The Cloud, where a lone cloud hangs over a dark forest. In the early years of the twentieth century Hilma af Klint went further still with abstract, spiritual compositions such as The Ten Largest.

In Finland Akseli Gallen-Kallela took pictures from the epic Kalevala, and in Denmark Vilhelm Hammershøi made quiet, grey rooms where time seems to stand still. Edvard Munch belongs both here and in Expressionism, and in Vienna Gustav Klimt took Symbolism towards gold, pattern and eroticism in the Vienna Secession with The Kiss.

The legacy

Symbolism laid the foundation for much of what followed. Munch and others carried it on to Expressionism, and dream images and the unconscious returned with the Surrealists. Its sense of ornament and curves also influenced Art Nouveau in art, architecture and design; read about Art Nouveau in architecture.

Symbolism often coincides with the period called Post-Impressionism, and in Sweden with the successors of the Opponents. Read also about the differences in the guide to Post-Impressionism. Symbolism is good to recognise when a picture seems to say more than it shows.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What did the Symbolists above all want to depict?