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Symbolism
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Though it began in France, Symbolism was an international avant-garde movement that spread across Europe and North America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was closely associated with Symbolist circles, spending time in Paris before settling in Germany in the early 1890s. Munch's intensely personal style is often referred to as Symbolic Naturalism as his subjects are not exotic or fantastical but based on the real anxieties of modern existence. Virtually all of the canvases he produced between 1893 and 1902 belong to a series called the "Frieze of Life." These paintings explore themes of illness, loneliness, despair, and mental suffering associated with love, conditions that Munch deemed emblematic of "modern psychic life." The Scream of 1893 (Munch-Museet, Oslo) best exemplifies fin-de-siècle feelings of isolation, disillusionment, and psychological anguish conveyed through distorted forms, expressive colors, and fluid brushwork.
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Symbolism was an art movement that began in 1885 and reigned through to 1910. The Symbolist movement was a reaction against the literal representation of objects and subjects, where instead there was an attempt to create more suggestive, metaphorical and evocative works. Symbolic artists based their ideas on literature, where poets such as Baudelaire believed that ideas and emotions could be portrayed through sound and rhythm and not just through the meaning of words. Symbolist painter styles varied greatly but common themes included the mystical and the visionary. Symbolists ... explored themes of death, debauchery, perversion and eroticism. Symbolism moved away from the naturalism of the impressionists and demonstrated a preference for emotions over intellect.
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The Russian variety of Symbolism, which extended into the first years of the 20th century, has a much stronger philosophical and religious emphasis. Major Russian Symbolists include Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Valery Bryusov, Fyodor Sologub, Aleksandr Blok, and Andrei Belyi. As one can see in the following quotations from Belyi, the Russian Symbolists were making some tremendous claims for the power of art and of language in particular:
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Symbolism began as a literary movement that developed from Romanticism in France in the second half of the 19th century, taking its themes of decadence, dandyism and mysticism from the novels of J.K. Huysmans. The poet Jean Moreas gave the term general currency in his manifesto in Le Figaro in 1886, though the poet Stephane Mallarme developed its ideas of suggestion, ambiguity and symbolism rather than direct conveyance of meaning: 'Suggestion, that is the dream', he declared. Like Romanticism, Symbolism favoured feelings over reason, but was more intellectual in its conception. Huysmans in his novels A Rebours and La bas was significant in promoting the painters Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon and drawing the visual arts into the movement.
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Wanting to imbue their works with spiritual value, these progenitors of Symbolism produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from biblical stories and Greek mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures. Their suggestive imagery established what would become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening, and unrequited desire. Woman became the favored symbol for the expression of these universal emotions, appearing alternately as wistful virgins (06.177; 63.138.5; 47.26) and menacing femmes fatales. In this latter category, Gustave Moreau popularized the motifs of Salome brandishing the head of John the Baptist and the man-eating sphinx through paintings such as Oedipus and the Sphinx (21.134.1) in the Salons of the mid-1860s and 1870s. These two mythical female types—the virgin and the femme fatale—would become staples of Symbolist imagery, appearing frequently in both visual and literary sources from the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century.
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Symbolism was first identified as a literary movement by Jean Moréas (1856-1910) in the Symbolist manifesto (‘Le Symbolisme', Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886). Symbolism in the visual arts was further defined by Albert Aurier as the ‘painting of ideas' (‘Les Symbolistes', Rev. Enc., 1 April 1892). Its complex aesthetic was a mix of Platonic-inspired philosophy, mystical and occult doctrines, psychology, linguistics, science, political theory and such aesthetic issues as the relationship between abstraction and representation. While many Symbolists reacted against the materialism of 19th-century science and its implications (positivist philosophy, social Darwinism, artistic Realism), others sought to reconcile modern science with spiritual traditions. Ideas based on the rise of scientific psychology with its emphasis on individual freedom and the great interest in the occult, together with such practices as hypnosis, opened up a realm of psychic experience, which promised access to important realms of knowledge. Symbolism stressed feeling and evocation over definition and fact and emphasized the power of suggestion.
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Symbolism