Symbolism originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolists artists sought to express induvidual emotional experience through the subtle.
The term symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an importent element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus the symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. Not so much a style of art, symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be accessed indirectly. Thus, they painted scene from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. They provided particular images or objects with esoteric attractions.
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| LA MORT DU FOSSOYEUR (THE DEATH OF THE GRAVEDIGGER) by CARLOS SCHWABE |
In literature, the symbolists style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil,1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art.
Symbolism in painting took its direction from the poets and literary theorists of the movement, but it also represented a reaction against the objectivist aims of realism and the increasingly influential movement of impressionism. In contrast to relatively concrete representation these movement sought, symbolists painters favoured works based on fantasy and the imagination. The symbolist position in painting authoritatively defined by the young critic Albert Aurier, an enthusiastic admirer of Paul Gauguin, in an article in the Mercure de France (1891). He elaborated on Moreas's contetion that the purpose of art "is to clothe the idea in sensuous form" and stress the subjective, symbolical and decorative functions of an art that would give visual expression to the inner life. Symbolist painters turned to the mystical and even the occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual forms.
Main represantatives of this movement: Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Mareau, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, James Ensor, Edward Munch, Koloman Moser.
