In the 1880's and 1890's, European artists experimented with work that had similarities with symbolist literature. When applied to visual arts, symbolism rejects direct representation of the material world in favour of allusion and suggestion. The aim of searching for more authentic ideas than those offered by material reality was in some sense similar to the traditional goal of idealisation long pursued by academic art. The symbolist artists imagined that their privileged subjective states were best expressed through allusive,non-natruallistic arrangements of line and colour.Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic movements which attempted to capture reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. These movements invited a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams; the path to symbolism began with that reaction.The notion that the artist was a seer or prophet who, in the words of the symbolist critic Camille Mauclair, "painfully saved our sickened souls from the excremental muck of materialism",was explicitly embraced by many artists in France who wished to be associated with symbolism.


The technical means by which symbolists pursued the idea was often quite innovative, however. In 1886, the symbolist critic Gustave Kahn offered a description of symbolism that lent itself to translation into visual media. Rather than portraying "the quotidian, the near at hand," as realist and Impressionist artists had done, symbolists "wish to be able to place the development of the symbol in any period whatsoever, and even in outright dreams (the dream being indistinguishable from life)." With this reference to Schopenhauer's theorization of the world as representation, Kahn proposed that symbolist artists or writers look inward for their subject matter: "The essential aim of our art is to objectify the subjective (the externalization of the Idea) instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen through a temperament)." (L'Evénément, 28 September 1886). Kahn negated the naturalist writer Émile Zola's championing of the expression of individual temperaments and called for the externalization of the transcendent Idea.




EXAMPLES OF SYMBOLIST ART WORKS