Symbolism

In September 1886, the poet Jean Moréas published a manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro announcing the arrival of a new literary movement: Symbolism. The argument, against the dominant Naturalism of Zola and the photographic realism of academic painting, was that literature's job was not to describe the world but to suggest what lay behind it. Things, Moréas wrote, are the manifestation of something deeper — and the writer's task was to find the symbol that could carry the reader into that interior territory. Within a few years, painters had taken up the same argument.

Symbolism was less a coherent visual style than a shared rejection of the dominant artistic culture of the 1880s. The Impressionists had won the argument about modern life and surface appearance; the Symbolists looked at that victory and decided it was hollow. Painting the visible world, however brilliantly, was still painting the surface. What about dream? What about myth? What about the half-glimpsed images that rise from the unconscious, the spiritual exhaustion of late-century European culture, the things one cannot say in plain speech? The Symbolists wanted to depict these. The visible world was a thin skin; their job was to paint through it.

The painters who attached themselves to the movement — Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Fernand Khnopff in Belgium, Edvard Munch in Norway, Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin in the German-speaking world, the early Mondrian (yes, that Mondrian) — produced wildly different work. There was no shared technique, no shared palette, no shared subject matter. What they shared was a turn inward. Where the Impressionists had painted the railway station and the dance hall, the Symbolists painted sphinxes, dying knights, sleeping princesses, monsters of the deep, isolated figures contemplating skulls, the female personifications of Death, Night, Silence, and Sleep.

The work is uneven. Some of it — Moreau's elaborate mythological scenes, much of Puvis de Chavannes's flat allegorical murals — looks, to contemporary eyes, like exactly the kind of overworked academic painting the Impressionists had revolted against. But the best of it is something genuinely new in European painting. Redon's lithographs of single floating eyes and severed heads in dreamlike darkness are precursors of Surrealism. Munch's The Scream (1893), with its dissolving sky and its single howling figure on a bridge, is one of the most reproduced images in modern art and a direct ancestor of Expressionism. Klimt's golden, decorative, sexually charged paintings of women in Vienna are Symbolist in spirit and Art Nouveau in execution, and they bridge the two movements.

Symbolism's importance for the history of design is that it kept open a channel that mainstream nineteenth-century painting had been closing — the channel of the irrational, the dream-image, the symbol as carrier of psychic content. The Impressionists and academic painters had agreed (despite their disagreements) that painting was about the visible world. The Symbolists insisted that it could be about the invisible world. When the Surrealists arrived in 1924, with their manifestos about the unconscious and the dream, they were not inventing the territory. They were reclaiming it from Symbolism, with the addition of Freud and the techniques of automatism. Without the Symbolist generation, the Surrealist generation would have had nowhere to land.

The movement also matters for what it taught about atmosphere in image-making. Symbolist painting was the first European painting to argue, systematically, that the image's primary work could be mood — not narrative, not depiction, not formal experimentation, but mood. This is now so embedded in visual culture that we no longer think of it as a position. Every cinematic image that depends on atmosphere over plot, every music video that builds a world from suggestion, every contemporary illustration that traffics in dream-logic — all of this is downstream of Moreau and Redon and Munch.