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Symbolism: Arts
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Symbolism is the systematic use of symbols to represent or allude to something. In the most literal sense, all language is symbolic. In a narrower sense, symbolism is the use of iconic figures with particular conventional meanings. Symbolism is an important element of most religions and the arts. Many cultures have complex symbolic systems which assign certain attributes to specific things, such as types of animals, plants or weather. Reading symbols ... plays an important role in psychoanalysis, especially as envisioned by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
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In the English speaking world, the closest counterpart to Symbolism was Aestheticism; the Pre-Raphaelites... were contemporaries of the earlier Symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on Modernism and its traces can be seen in a number of modernist artists, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, and William Butler Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in Hispanic letters. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire have strong affinities with Symbolism.
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Symbolism originated as a literary movement. Its beginnings are often ascribed to the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of evil) in France in 1857. As suggested by Baudelaire’s title, Symbolism explored the darker, more introspective aspect of human emotions through mythical or religious themes and reveled in dreamlike or allusive imagery. Subsequent theoretical developments in the nascent field of psychology fed the movement’s obsession with erotic, turbulent, or suffocating content and heightened its fixation on the femme fatale, an iconic fin-de-siècle image of the “destructive” woman, which many artists took as their subject. Among those credited for influencing the Symbolist idiom are the French painters Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, both recognized for their intentionally ambiguous yet evocative images. While these artists’ styles differ, each was reacting to Naturalism and the concomitant beliefs in positivism and materialism, pursuing instead what art historian Robert Goldwater has called a “philosophical idealism.” They in turn inspired a younger generation of artists to make work that was more spiritual and mysterious, and which is usually characterized by flattened forms, nonrepresentational color, and undulating lines.
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Symbolism as an artistic movement arises in France in the second half of the 1800s. The movement proper can be dated to Jean Moréas' "Symbolist Manifesto" in 1884, but most scholars trace its origin back to 1857 and the publication of Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, who is often considered the father of Symbolism.
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This books strength lies in its combination of approaches: Symbolism is viewed as a set of concepts and as an artistic climate. Its structure allows for the inclusion of artists not normally found in most Symbolist anthologies.
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Symbolism in literature is distinct from Symbolism in art although the two overlapped on a number of points. In painting, Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private Decadent Movement.
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