Symbolism

Symbolism is an art movement dating from 1857. The gallery holds 404 works in this movement, including works by Arnold Böcklin, Paul Gauguin and Gustave Moreau. Browse Symbolism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Symbolism emerged in France in the 1880s as a reaction against the materialism of the age and the literal-mindedness of Realism and Naturalism. Though it began as a literary current, it acquired a name and a creed when the Greek-born poet Jean Moréas published his "Symbolist Manifesto" in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. Symbolists held that art should not describe the visible world but suggest absolute truths through metaphor, allusion, and the charged image. Rooted in French, Russian, and Belgian milieus and steeped in mysticism, dream, and Decadent literature, the movement prized suggestion and nuance over direct statement.

In painting this translated into dreamlike, often deliberately ambiguous imagery drawn from myth, legend, religion, and the inner life. Symbolist canvases favour the morbid and the erotic, the spiritual and the macabre, rendered through evocative colour and atmospheric, anti-naturalistic space rather than careful observation. Three painters are usually held to embody the aesthetic: Gustave Moreau, whose jewel-like Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) caused a sensation at the Salon; Odilon Redon, who conjured floating heads, eyes, and fantastical creatures in works such as Pandora and The Chariot of Apollo; and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose pale, flatly modelled murals — among them Inter artes et naturam — pointed toward decorative abstraction.

The tendency was international. In central Europe its leading figure was the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, whose haunting Isle of the Dead (first version 1880) he repeated in several variants. Across Europe artists endowed objects and figures with private, symbolic meaning, turning away from the everyday toward vision and reverie.

Symbolism proved enormously fertile. Puvis and Gauguin shaped Les Nabis, the circle of Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier who carried flat colour and decorative form toward modernism. Böcklin and Redon, with their oneiric imagery, were claimed as forerunners by the Surrealists, including Dalí, Ernst, and de Chirico. Standing between Romanticism, which it extended, and Realism, against which it rebelled, Symbolism helped open the path from nineteenth-century academic painting to twentieth-century abstraction and the unconscious.