Symbolism (arts) - Wikipedia





	
	

	
	

	Symbolism (arts)

	
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		Late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin

  
Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration "anywhere, out of the world".



Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through metaphorical images and language mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.

In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. 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 term "symbolist" 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.

Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism and Impressionism.


Contents


	1 Etymology
	2 Precursors and origins
	3 Movement
	3.1 The Symbolist Manifesto
	3.2 Techniques
	3.3 Paul Verlaine and the poètes maudits
	3.4 Philosophy
	3.5 Symbolists and decadents
	3.6 Periodical literature



	4 In other media
	4.1 Visual arts
	4.2 Music
	4.3 Prose fiction
	4.4 Theatre



	5 Effect
	6 Symbolists
	6.1 Precursors
	6.2 Authors
	6.3 Influence in English literature
	6.4 Symbolist visual artists
	6.5 Symbolist playwrights
	6.6 Composers affected by symbolist ideas



	7 Gallery
	8 See also
	9 References
	10 Further reading
	11 External links





Etymology[edit]

The term symbolism is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek σύμβολον symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance.


Precursors and origins[edit]

Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams.[1] Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists; for Huysmans, this change represented his increasing interest in religion and spirituality.  Certain of the characteristic subjects of the Decadents represent naturalist interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case this was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the world-weariness characteristic of the fin de siècle period.

The Symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French literary style that immediately preceded it.  While being influenced by hermeticism, allowing freer versification, and rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained Parnassianism's love of word play and concern for the musical qualities of verse. The Symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier's motto of "art for art's sake", and retained – and modified – Parnassianism's mood of ironic detachment.[2]  Many Symbolist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, published early works in Le Parnasse contemporain, the poetry anthologies that gave Parnassianism its name. But Arthur Rimbaud publicly mocked prominent Parnassians and published scatological parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée – misattributed to Coppée himself – in L'Album zutique.[3]

One of Symbolism's most colourful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic (and occultist) Joséphin Péladan, who established the Salon de la Rose + Croix. The Salon hosted a series of six presentations of avant-garde art, writing and music during the 1890s, to give a presentation space for artists embracing spiritualism, mysticism, and idealism in their work. A number of Symbolists were associated with the Salon.


Movement[edit]

The Symbolist Manifesto[edit]

  
Henri Fantin-Latour, By the Table, 1872, depicting: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud,  Léon Valade,  Ernest d'Hervilly and Camille Pelletan (seated); Pierre Elzéar,  Emile Blémont, and Jean Aicard (standing)



Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto ("Le Symbolisme") in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886 (see 1886 in poetry).[4] The Symbolist Manifesto names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine as the three leading poets of the movement. Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description", and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal."


	Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales.


	(Thus, in this art movement, representations of nature, human activities and all real life events don't stand on their own; they are rather veiled reflections of the senses pointing to archetypal meanings through their esoteric connections.)[4][5]


In a nutshell, as Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, 'to depict not the thing but the effect it produces'.[6]


Techniques[edit]

  
Portrait of Charles Baudelaire (c. 1862), whose writing was a precursor of the symbolist style



The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were sympathetic with the trend toward free verse, as evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn and Ezra Pound. Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather than primarily to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. T. S. Eliot was influenced by the poets Jules Laforgue, Paul Valéry and Arthur Rimbaud who used the techniques of the Symbolist school,[7] though it has also been said[by whom?]  that 'Imagism' was the style to which both Pound and Eliot subscribed (see Pound's Des Imagistes). Synesthesia was a prized experience[citation needed]; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences (which mentions forêts de symboles ("forests of symbols") and is considered the touchstone of French Symbolism):[8] 


	Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
– Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.


		(There are smells that are fresh like children's skin,
 calm like oboes, green like meadows
– And others, rotten, heady, and triumphant,

having the expansiveness of infinite things,
 like amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
which sing of the raptures of the soul and senses.)




and Rimbaud's poem Voyelles:


	A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles…
	(A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels…)




– both poets seek to identify one sense experience with another. The earlier Romanticism of poetry used symbols, but these symbols were unique and privileged objects.  The symbolists were more extreme, investing all things, even vowels and perfumes, with potential symbolic value. "The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much as a superior network of associations."[9]  Symbolist symbols are not allegories, intended to represent; they are instead intended to evoke particular states of mind.  The nominal subject of Mallarmé's "Le cygne" ("The Swan") is of a swan trapped in a frozen lake.  Significantly, in French, cygne is a homophone of signe, a sign. The overall effect is of overwhelming whiteness; and the presentation of the narrative elements of the description is quite indirect:


	Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre…
	(The virgin, lively, and beautiful today – will it tear us up with a drunken wingbeat this hard forgotten lake that lurks beneath the frost, the transparent glacier of flights not taken with a blow from a drunken wing? A swan of long ago remembers that it is he, magnificent but without hope, who breaks free…)




Paul Verlaine and the poètes maudits[edit]

Of the several attempts at defining the essence of symbolism, perhaps none was more influential than Paul Verlaine's 1884 publication of a series of essays on Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gérard de Nerval, and "Pauvre Lelian" ("Poor Lelian", an anagram of Paul Verlaine's own name), each of whom Verlaine numbered among the poètes maudits, "accursed poets."


  
Eugen Bracht, The Shore of Oblivion, 1889



Verlaine argued that in their individual and very different ways, each of these hitherto neglected poets found genius a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned to avoid hermeticism and idiosyncratic writing styles.[10] They were also portrayed as at odds with society, having tragic lives, and often given to self-destructive tendencies. These traits were not hindrances but consequences of their literary gifts. Verlaine's concept of the poète maudit in turn borrows from Baudelaire, who opened his collection Les fleurs du mal with the poem Bénédiction, which describes a poet whose internal serenity remains undisturbed by the contempt of the people surrounding him.[11]

In this conception of genius and the role of the poet, Verlaine referred indirectly to the aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who maintained that the purpose of art was to provide a temporary refuge from the world of strife of the will.[12]


Philosophy[edit]

Schopenhauer's aesthetics represented shared concerns with the symbolist programme; they both tended to consider Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and will. As a result of this desire for an artistic refuge, the symbolists used characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality, which Albert Samain termed a "fruit of death upon the tree of life."[13]  Mallarmé's poem Les fenêtres[14] expresses all of these themes clearly.  A dying man in a hospital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of his physical surroundings, turns toward his window but then turns away in disgust from


  
Pornocrates, by Félicien Rops, etching and aquatint, 1878



	… l'homme à l'âme dure
Vautré dans le bonheur, où ses seuls appétits
Mangent, et qui s'entête à chercher cette ordure
Pour l'offrir à la femme allaitant ses petits, …


		(… the hard-souled man,
Wallowing in happiness, where only his appetites
Feed, and who insists on seeking out this filth
To offer to the wife suckling his children, …)




and in contrast, he "turns his back on life" (tourne l’épaule à la vie) and he exclaims:


	Je me mire et me vois ange! Et je meurs, et j'aime
– Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité –
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!


		(I look at myself and I seem like an angel! and I die, and I love
– Whether the mirror might be art, or mysticism –
To be reborn, bearing my dream as a crown,
Under that former sky where Beauty flourishes!)




Symbolists and decadents[edit]

The symbolist style has frequently been confused with the Decadent movement, the name derived from French literary critics in the 1880s, suggesting the writers were self indulgent and obsessed with taboo subjects.[15] A few writers embraced the term while most avoided it. Jean Moréas' manifesto was largely a response to this polemic. By the late 1880s, the terms "symbolism" and "decadence" were understood to be almost synonymous.[16] Though the aesthetics of the styles can be considered similar in some ways, the two remain distinct. The symbolists were those artists who emphasized dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated précieux, ornamented, or hermetic styles, and morbid subject matters.[17]  The subject of the decadence of the Roman Empire was a frequent source of literary images and appears in the works of many poets of the period, regardless of which name they chose for their style, as in Verlaine's "Langueur":[18]


	Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la Décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse.
	(I am the Empire at the endgame of decadence, watching the great pale barbarians passing by, all the while composing lazy acrostic poems in a gilded style filled with a languishing dancing sun.)




Periodical literature[edit]

  
Victor Vasnetsov, The Knight at the Crossroads, 1878



A number of important literary publications were founded by symbolists or became associated with the style. The first was La Vogue initiated in April 1886. In October of that same year, Jean Moréas, Gustave Kahn, and Paul Adam began the periodical Le Symboliste. One of the most important symbolist journals was Mercure de France, edited by Alfred Vallette, which succeeded La Pléiade; founded in 1890, this periodical endured until 1965. Pierre Louÿs initiated La conque, a periodical whose symbolist influences were alluded to by Jorge Luis Borges in his story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Other symbolist literary magazines included La Revue blanche, La Revue wagnérienne, La Plume and La Wallonie.

Rémy de Gourmont and Félix Fénéon were literary critics associated with symbolism. The symbolist and decadent literary styles were satirized by a book of poetry, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, published in 1885 by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire.[19]


In other media[edit]

Visual arts[edit]

  
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes Filles au Bord de la Mer ("Young Girls on the Edge of the Sea"), 1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris



Symbolism in literature is distinct from symbolism in art although the two were similar in many aspects. In painting, symbolism can be seen as a revival of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, and was close to the self-consciously morbid and private decadent movement.

There were several rather dissimilar groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, which included Paul Gauguin, Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Jacek Malczewski, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Gaston Bussière, Edvard Munch, Fernand Khnopff, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop. Symbolism in painting was even more widespread geographically than symbolism in poetry, affecting Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Léon Bakst, Elena Gorokhova in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico[citation needed], Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo, Morris Graves and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.

The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.[12]


Music[edit]

Symbolism had some influence on music as well. Many symbolist writers and critics were early enthusiasts of the music of Richard Wagner,[20] an avid reader of Schopenhauer.


  
John William Waterhouse, Saint Cecilia, 1895



The symbolist aesthetic affected the works of Claude Debussy. His choices of libretti, texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the symbolist canon.  Compositions such as his settings of Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera Pelléas et Mélisande with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, and his unfinished sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, The Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher, all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by symbolist themes and tastes.  His best known work, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, was inspired by Mallarmé's poem, L'après-midi d'un faune.[21]

The symbolist aesthetic also influenced Aleksandr Scriabin's compositions. Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire takes its text from German translations of the symbolist poems by Albert Giraud, showing an association between German expressionism and symbolism. Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salomé, based on the play by Oscar Wilde, uses a subject frequently depicted by symbolist artists.


Prose fiction[edit]

Symbolism's style of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours (English title: Against Nature or Against the Grain) explored many themes that became associated with the symbolist aesthetic.  This novel, in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. Oscar Wilde was influenced by the novel as he wrote Salome, and Huysman's book appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray: the titular character becomes corrupted after reading the book.[22]

Paul Adam was the most prolific and representative author of symbolist novels.[citation needed] Les Demoiselles Goubert (1886), co-written with Jean Moréas, is an important transitional work between naturalism and symbolism. Few symbolists used this form.  One exception was Gustave Kahn, who published Le Roi fou in 1896.  In 1892, Georges Rodenbach wrote the short novel Bruges-la-morte, set in the Flemish town of Bruges, which Rodenbach described as a dying, medieval city of mourning and quiet contemplation: in a typically symbolist juxtaposition, the dead city contrasts with the diabolical re-awakening of sexual desire.[23] The cynical, misanthropic, misogynistic fiction of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is sometimes considered symbolist, as well. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the symbolist manner.


Theatre[edit]

  
Alexandre Benois' set for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911



The characteristic emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies have made symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent trends. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama Axël (rev. ed. 1890) is a definitive symbolist play.  In it, two Rosicrucian aristocrats become enamored of each other while trying to kill each other, only to agree to commit suicide mutually because nothing in life could equal their fantasies.  From this play, Edmund Wilson adopted the title Axel's Castle for his influential study of the symbolist literary aftermath.

Maurice Maeterlinck, also a symbolist playwright, wrote The Blind (1890), The Intruder (1890), Interior (1891), Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), and The Blue Bird (1908).
Eugénio de Castro is considered one of the introducers of Symbolism in the Iberian Peninsula. He wrote Belkiss, "dramatic prose-poem" as he called it, about the doomed passion of Belkiss, The Queen of Sheba, to Solomon, depicting in an avant-garde and violent style the psychological tension and recreating very accurately the tenth century BC Israel. He also wrote King Galaor and Polycrates' Ring, being one the most prolific Symbolist theoriticians.[24]

Lugné-Poe (1869–1940) was an actor, director, and theatre producer of the late nineteenth century. Lugné-Poe "sought to create a unified nonrealistic theatre of poetry and dreams through atmospheric staging and stylized acting".[25] Upon learning about symbolist theatre, he never wanted to practice any other form. After beginning as an actor in the Théâtre Libre and Théâtre d'Art, Lugné-Poe grasped on to the symbolist movement and founded the Théâtre de l'Œuvre where he was manager from 1892 until 1929. Some of his greatest successes include opening his own symbolist theatre, producing the first staging of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), and introducing French theatregoers to playwrights such as Ibsen and Strindberg.[25]

The later works of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov have been identified by essayist Paul Schmidt as being much influenced by symbolist pessimism.[26] Both Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with symbolist modes of staging in their theatrical endeavors.

Drama by symbolist authors formed an important part of the repertoire of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre and the Théâtre d'Art.


Effect[edit]



Black night.

White snow.

The wind, the wind!

It will not let you go. The wind, the wind!

Through God's whole world it blows



The wind is weaving

The white snow.

Brother ice peeps from below

Stumbling and tumbling

Folk slip and fall.

God pity all!





From "The Twelve" (1918) 

Trans.  Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky[27]







Night, street and streetlight, drug store,

The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.

For all the use live on a quarter century –

Nothing will change.  There's no way out.



You'll die – and start all over, live twice,

Everything repeats itself, just as it was:

Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,

The drug store, the street, and streetlight.





"Night, street and streetlight, drugstore..." (1912)
Trans. by Alex Cigale




Among English-speaking artists, the closest counterpart to symbolism was aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelites were contemporaries of the earlier symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism (Remy de Gourmont considered the Imagists were its descendants)[28] and its traces can also be detected in the work of many modernist poets, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, and W. B. Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in Hispanic literature. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire have strong affinities with symbolism. Early Portuguese Modernism was heavily influenced by Symbolist poets, especially Camilo Pessanha; Fernando Pessoa had many affinities to Symbolism, such as mysticism, musical versification, subjectivism and transcendentalism.

Edmund Wilson's 1931 study Axel's Castle focuses on the continuity with symbolism and several important writers of the early twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.  Wilson concluded that the symbolists represented a dreaming retreat into


things that are dying–the whole belle-lettristic tradition of Renaissance culture perhaps, compelled to specialize more and more, more and more driven in on itself, as industrialism and democratic education have come to press it closer and closer.[29]


	
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Mikhail Nesterov's The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew, 1890



After the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism had a major effect on Russian poetry even as it became less popular in France. Russian symbolism, steeped in the Eastern Orthodoxy and the religious doctrines of Vladimir Solovyov, had little in common with the French style of the same name. It began the careers of several major poets such as Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Bely's novel Petersburg (1912) is considered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.

Primary influences on the style of Russian Symbolism were the irrationalistic and mystical poetry and philosophy of Fyodor Tyutchev and Solovyov, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the operas of Richard Wagner,[30] the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer[citation needed] and Friedrich Nietzsche,[31] French symbolist and decadent poets (such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire), and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen.

The style was largely inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article The Ancient Debate (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism and the act of creation. Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on god-men, among whom he counted Christ, Joan of Arc, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and (later) Hitler. His wife, Zinaida Gippius, also a major poet of early symbolism, opened a salon in St Petersburg, which came to be known as the "headquarters of Russian decadence". Andrei Bely's Petersburg (novel) a portrait of the social strata of the Russian capital,  is frequently cited as a late example of Symbolism in 20th century Russian literature.

In Romania, symbolists directly influenced by French poetry first gained influence during the 1880s, when Alexandru Macedonski reunited a group of young poets associated with his magazine Literatorul. Polemicizing with the established Junimea and overshadowed by the influence of Mihai Eminescu, Romanian symbolism was recovered as an inspiration during and after the 1910s, when it was exampled by the works of Tudor Arghezi, Ion Minulescu, George Bacovia, Mateiu Caragiale, Tristan Tzara and Tudor Vianu, and praised by the modernist magazine Sburătorul.

The symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism and surrealism in painting, two movements which descend directly from symbolism proper.  The harlequins, paupers, and clowns of Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" show the influence of symbolism, and especially of Puvis de Chavannes.  In Belgium, symbolism became so popular that it came to be known as a national style, particularly in landscape painting:[32] the static strangeness of painters like René Magritte can be considered as a direct continuation of symbolism. The work of some symbolist visual artists, such as Jan Toorop, directly affected the curvilinear forms of art nouveau.

Many early motion pictures also employ symbolist visual imagery and themes in their staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German expressionism owe a great deal to symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the cinema of D. W. Griffith, and the silent film "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara, both show the continuing influence of symbolism, as do the Babylonian scenes from Griffith's Intolerance. Symbolist imagery lived on longest in horror film: as late as 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr showed the obvious influence of symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble tableau vivant re-creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch.[33]


Symbolists[edit]

  
Salammbô (1907) by Gaston Bussière



Precursors[edit]

	William Blake (1757–1827) English writer (Songs of Innocence)
	Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) German painter (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog)
	Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet and writer (Eugene Onegin)
	Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) French novelist
	Đorđe Marković Koder (1806–1891) Serbian poet (Romoranka)
	Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) French poet
	Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889) French writer
	Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American poet and writer (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket)
	Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) Russian poet and writer (A Hero of Our Time)
	Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet (Les Fleurs du mal)
	Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (Madame Bovary)
	Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet and painter (Beata Beatrix)
	Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet


Authors[edit]


French


	Paul Adam (1862–1920)
	Albert Aurier (1865–1892)
	Léon Bloy (1846–1917)
	Early Henri Barbusse (1873–1935)
	Henri Cazalis (1840–1909)
	Georges Duhamel (1884–1966)
	Paul Fort (1872–1960)
	Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915)
	Nicolette Hennique (born 1886)
	Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838–1889)
	Alfred Jarry (1873–1907)
	Gustave Kahn (1859–1936)
	Jean Lorrain (1855–1906)
	Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
	Alexandre Mercereau (1884–1945)
	Saint-Pol-Roux (1861–1940)
	Germain Nouveau (1851—1920)
	Rachilde (1860–1953)
	Henri de Régnier (1864–1936)
	Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)
	Jules Romains (1885–1972)
	Albert Samain (1858–1900)
	Marcel Schwob (1867–1905)
	Paul Valéry (1871–1945)
	Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)
	Francis Vielé-Griffin (1863–1937)
	Charles Vildrac (1882–1971)


French Uruguayan


	Jules Laforgue (1860–1887)
	Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870)


Belgian


	Albert Giraud (1860–1929)
	Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)
	Albert Mockel (1866–1945)
	Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898)
	Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916)


German and Austrian


	Stefan George (1868–1933) German
	Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) Austrian
	Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) Austrian
	Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) Austrian
	Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austro-Bohemian
	Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) Austrian


Portuguese


	Raul Brandão (1867–1930)
	Alberto Osório de Castro [pt; de] (1868–1946)
	Eugénio de Castro (1869–1944)
	Manuel da Silva Gaio [pt; ca] (1861–1934)
	Augusto Gil (1873–1929)
	António Nobre (1867–1900)
	Camilo Pessanha (1867–1926)
	Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916)


Russian


	Innokenty Annensky (1855–1909)
	Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942)
	Andrei Bely (1880–1934)
	Alexander Blok (1880–1921)
	Valery Bryusov (1873–1924)
	Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945)
	Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949)
	Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927)
	Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941)
	Teffi (1872—1952)
	Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932)


Serbian


	Svetozar Ćorović (1875–1919)
	Jovan Dučić (1871–1943)
	Petar Kočić (1877–1916)
	Veljko Petrović (poet) (1884–1967)
	Vladislav Petković Dis (1880–1917)
	Sima Pandurović (1883–1960)
	Milan Rakić (1876–1938)
	Isidora Sekulić (1877–1958)
	Jovan Skerlić (1877–1914)
	Borisav Stanković (1876–1927)
	Aleksa Šantić (1868–1924)


Armenian


	Misak Metsarents (1886–1908)
	Levon Shant (1869–1951)
	Siamanto (1878–1915)
	Daniel Varujan (1884–1915)
	Gostan Zarian ( 1885–1969)




Georgian


	Valerian Gaprindashvili (1888–1941)
	Paolo Iashvili (1894–1937)
	Sergo Kldiashvili (1893–1986)
	Giorgi Leonidze (1899–1966)
	Kolau Nadiradze (1895–1991)
	Grigol Robakidze (1880–1962)
	Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937)
	Sandro Tsirekidze (1894–1923)


Polish
See Also: Young Poland movement


	Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski (1876–1901)
	Antoni Lange (1861–1929)
	Tadeusz Miciński (1873–1918)


English


	Edmund Gosse (1849—1928)
	William Ernest Henley (1849—1903)
	Arthur Symons (1865—1945)
	Renée Vivien (1877–1909)


Others


	Josip Murn Aleksandrov (1879–1901) Slovene
	George Bacovia (1881–1957) Romanian
	Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873–1944) Lithuanian
	Otokar Březina (1868–1929) Czech
	Mateiu Caragiale (1885–1936) Romanian
	Louis Couperus (1863–1923) Dutch
	Dimcho Debelyanov (1887–1916) Bulgarian
	Viktors Eglītis (1877–1945) Latvian
	Ady Endre (1877–1919) Hungarian
	Alphonsus de Guimaraens (1870–1921) Brazilian
	Dumitru Karnabatt (1877–1949) Romanian
	Ivan Krasko (1876–1958) Slovak
	Stuart Merrill (1863–1915) American
	Oscar Milosz (1877–1939) Lithuanian (wrote in French)
	Jean Moréas (1856–1910) Greek (wrote in French)
	Émile Nelligan (1879–1941) Canadian
	Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) Italian
	João da Cruz e Sousa (1861–1898) Brazilian




Influence in English literature[edit]

English language authors who influenced or were influenced by symbolism include:




	Conrad Aiken (1889–1973)
	Max Beerbohm (1872–1956)
	Hart Crane (1899–1932)
	Olive Custance (1874–1944)
	Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)
	T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
	James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915)
	John Gray (1866–1934)
	George MacDonald (1824–1905)
	Arthur Machen (1863–1947)
	Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
	Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)
	Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961)
	George Sterling (1869–1926)
	Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
	Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
	Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
	Rosamund Marriott Watson (1860–1911)
	Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
	W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)




Symbolist visual artists[edit]

See also: Category:Symbolist painters and Category:Symbolist sculptors



French


	Edmond Aman-Jean (1858—1936)
	Émile Bernard (1868–1941)
	Gaston Bussière (painter) (1862–1929)
	Eugène Carrière (1849—1906)
	Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898)
	Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904)
	Charles Filiger (1863–1928)
	Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
	Charles Guilloux (1866—1946)
	Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865–1953)
	Edgar Maxence (1871—1954)
	Gustave Moreau (1826–1898)
	Gustav-Adolf Mossa (1883–1971)
	Alphonse Osbert (1857—1939)
	Armand Point (1861—1932)
	Ary Renan (1857—1900)
	Odilon Redon (1840–1916)
	Alexandre Séon (1855—1917)




Russian
See Also: Russian Symbolism and the Blue Rose group.


	Léon Bakst (1866–1924)
	Alexandre Benois (1870–1960)
	Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942)
	Victor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905)
	Konstantin Bogaevsky (1872–1943)
	Wassily Kandinsky (early works) (1866–1944)
	Mikhail Nesterov (1862–1942)
	Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947)
	Konstantin Somov (1869–1939)
	Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926)
	Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910)


Belgian


	Félicien Rops (1855–1898)
	Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921)
	James Ensor (1860–1949)
	Égide Rombaux (1865–1942)
	Léon Frédéric (1865–1940)
	William Degouve de Nuncques(1867–1935)
	Jean Delville (1867–1953)
	Léon Spilliaert (1882–1946)


Romanian


See also: Symbolist Movement in Romania

	Octavian Smigelschi (1866–1912) Austro-Hungarian born, culturally Romanian
	Mihail Simonidi (1870–1933)
	Lascăr Vorel (1879–1918)
	Apcar Baltazar (1880–1909)
	Ion Theodorescu-Sion (1882–1939)


German


	Eugen Bracht (1842–1921)
	Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851–1913)
	Max Klinger (1857 – July 1920)
	Franz von Stuck (1863–1928)
	Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867–1952)
	Emil Nolde (1867–1953)
	Sascha Schneider (1870–1927)


Swiss


	Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901)
	Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918)
	Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926)


Austrian


	Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
	Karl Mediz (1868–1945)
	Rudolf Jettmar (1869–1939)
	Richard Müller (1874–1954)
	Alfred Kubin (1877–1959)


Others


	George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) English
	James A. McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American
	Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) American
	John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) English
	Luis Ricardo Falero (1851–1896) Spanish
	Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929) Polish
	Jan Toorop (1858–1928) Dutch
	Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) Italian
	Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian
	Arthur Bowen Davies (1863–1928) American
	Eliseu Visconti (1866–1944) Brazilian
	John Duncan (1866–1945) Scottish
	Early František Kupka (1871–1957) Czech
	Hugo Simberg (1873–1917) Finnish
	Frances MacDonald (1873–1921) Scottish
	Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) Lithuanian
	Stevan Aleksić (1876–1923) Serbian
	Felice Casorati (1883–1963) Italian
	Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955)
	Ze'ev Raban (1890–1970) Polish/Israeli




Symbolist playwrights[edit]

	Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) German
	Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish
	Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian
	Lugné-Poe (1869–1940) French


Composers affected by symbolist ideas[edit]



 
	
	Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German
	Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) Russian
	Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) French
	Charles Loeffler (1861–1935) American
	Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French
	Richard Strauss (1864—1949) German
	Erik Satie (1866–1925) French


 


	
	Alexander Scriabin (1872–1912) Russian
	Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) French
	Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) Lithuanian
	Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876–1909) Polish
	Cyril Scott (1879–1970) English
	Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) Polish
	Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) French


 






Gallery[edit]

	
			


			
Gustav Klimt, Allegory of Skulptur, 1889


			

		

	
			


			
Jan Toorop, The Three Brides, 1893


			

		

	
			


			
Fernand Khnopff, Incense, 1898


			

		

	
			


			
Mikhail Vrubel, The Swan Princess, 1900


			

		

	
			


			
Franz von Stuck, Susanna und die beiden Alten, 1913


			

		

	
			


			
The cover to Aleksander Blok's 1909 book Theatre. Konstantin Somov's illustrations for the Russian symbolist poet display the continuity between symbolism and Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Beardsley.


			

		

	
			


			
Alfred Kubin, The Last King, 1902


			

		

	
			


			
Franz von Stuck, Die Sünde, 1893


			

		

	
			


			
Sascha Schneider The Feeling of Dependence, 1920


			

		

	
			


			
Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele, 1894-85


			

		

	
			


			
Ferdinand Hodler, The Night, 1889–90


			

		

	
			


			
Arnold Böcklin - Die Toteninsel I, 1880


			

		

	
			


			
Jacek Malczewski, Poisoned Well with Chimera, 1905


			

		

	
			


			
Faragó Géza [hu], The Symbolist, 1908, satirical piece in Art Nouveau style


			

		



See also[edit]

	Abbaye de Créteil
	Belle Époque
	Sigmund Freud
	Synthetism
	The Yellow Book
	Visionary art


References[edit]


	^ Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. Random House, 1967, ch. 2.

	^ Balakian, see above; see also Houston, introduction.

	^ "Album zutique - Wikisource". fr.wikisource.org.

	^ a b Jean Moréas, Un Manifeste littéraire, Le Symbolisme, Le Figaro. Supplément Littéraire, No. 38, Saturday 18 September 1886, p. 150, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica

	^ Jean Moréas, Le Manifeste du Symbolisme, Le Figaro, 1886.

	^ Conway Morris, Roderick "The Elusive Symbolist movement" – International Herald Tribune, March 17, 2007.

	^ Untermeyer, Louis, Preface to Modern American Poetry Harcourt Brace & Co New York 1950

	^ Pratt, William. The Imagist Poem, Modern Poetry in Miniature (Story Line Press, 1963, expanded 2001). 
ISBN 1-58654-009-2

	^ Olds, Marshal C. "Literary Symbolism", originally published (as Chapter 14) in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pages 155–162.

	^ Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits

	^ Charles Baudelaire, Bénédiction

	^ a b Delvaille, Bernard, La poésie symboliste: anthologie, introduction. 
ISBN 2-221-50161-6

	^ Luxure, fruit de mort à l'arbre de la vie... , Albert Samain, "Luxure", in the publication Au jardin de l'infante (1889)

	^ Stéphane Mallarmé, Les fenêtres Archived 9 December 2004 at the Wayback Machine

	^ 
"What Was the Decadent Movement in Literature? (with pictures)". wiseGEEK.

	^ David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration, New Haven: Yale UP, 2010, p. 211 (online).

	^ Olds, see above, p. 160.

	^ Langueur, from Jadis et Naguère, 1884

	^ Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette (1885)
Les Déliquescences – poèmes décadents d'Adoré Floupette, avec sa vie par Marius Tapora by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire (in French)

	^ Jullian Phillipe, The Symbolists, 1977, p.8

	^ 
"Symbolism - Symbolism And Music". science.jrank.org.

	^ Joris–Karl Huysmans, Decadent novel À rebours, or, Against Nature, Paris, 1891

	^ Alan Hollinghurst, "Bruges of sighs" (The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2005, accessed 26 Apr 2009

	^ 
Saraiva, Lopes, António José, Óscar (2017). História da Literatura Portuguesa (17th ed.). Lisboa: Porto Editora. ISBN 978-972-0-30170-3.

	^ a b 
"Symbolist Movement". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 3 April 2012.

	^ The Plays of Anton Chekhov, trans. Paul Schmidt (1997)

	^ 
Blok, Alexander; Yarmolinsky, Avrahm; Deutsch, Babette (1929). "The Twelve". The Slavonic and East European Review. 8 (22): 188–198. JSTOR 4202372.

	^ de Gourmont, Remy. La France (1915)

	^ Quoted in 
Brooker, Joseph (2004). Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-0299196042.

	^ 
"Symbolist Visions; The role of music in the paintings of M. K. Ciurlionis - Nathalie Lorand". www.lituanus.org.

	^ Boris Christa, 'Andrey Bely and the Symbolist Movement in Russia' in The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984, p. 389

	^ Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists, 1977, p.55

	^ Jullian, Philippe, The Symbolists. (Dutton, 1977) 
ISBN 0-7148-1739-2




Further reading[edit]

	Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. New York: Random House, 1967
	Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context. London: Routledge, 2011
	Bernard Delvaille, La poésie symboliste: anthologie. Paris: Seghers, 1971. 
ISBN 2-221-50161-6
	John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin Houston, French Symbolist Poetry: An Anthology. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1980. 
ISBN 0-253-20250-7
	Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists. Oxford: Phaidon; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973. 
ISBN 0-7148-1739-2
	Andrew George Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885–1895. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, 1968
	The Oxford Companion to French Literature, Sir Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. 
ISBN 0-19-866104-5
	Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. 
ISBN 0-19-281061-8
	Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. (A Dutton Paperback), 1958
	Edmund Wilson,  Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931 (online version). 
ISBN 978-1-59853-013-1 (Library of America)
	Michael Gibson, Symbolism London: Taschen, 1995 
ISBN 3822893242


External links[edit]

		Wikimedia Commons has media related to Symbolism (arts).

		Wikiquote has quotations related to: Symbolism (arts)


	Collection of German Symbolist art The Jack Daulton Collection
	Les Poètes maudits by Paul Verlaine (in French)
	ArtMagick The Symbolist Gallery
	What is Symbolism in Art Ten Dreams Galleries – extensive article on Symbolism
	Symbolism Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon
	Literary Symbolism Published in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006)


		v
	t
	e


Post-Impressionism

	19th-century 
 movements	
	Neo-Impressionism
	Divisionism
	Pointillism
	Cloisonnism
	Les Nabis
	Synthetism
	Symbolism
	Art Nouveau




	Artists	
	Cuno Amiet
	Charles Angrand
	Émile Bernard
	Edvard Munch
	Pierre Bonnard
	Marius Borgeaud
	Paul Cézanne
	Henri-Edmond Cross
	Maurice Denis
	Georges Dufrénoy
	Paul Gauguin
	Hippolyte Petitjean
	Paul Ranson
	Odilon Redon
	Henri Rousseau
	René Schützenberger
	Paul Sérusier
	Georges Seurat
	Paul Signac
	Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
	Charles Laval
	Georges Lemmen
	Maximilien Luce
	Vincent van Gogh
	Théo van Rysselberghe
	Félix Vallotton
	Édouard Vuillard




	20th-century 
 movements	
	Fauvism
	Die Brücke
	Der Blaue Reiter
	Expressionism
	Cubism




	Artists	
	Georges Braque
	Charles Camoin
	André Derain
	Raoul Dufy
	Henri Matisse
	Albert Gleizes
	Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
	Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
	Wassily Kandinsky
	Sonia Lewitska
	Franz Marc
	Jean Metzinger
	Henry Ottmann
	Francis Picabia
	Pablo Picasso
	Robert Antoine Pinchon
	Henriette Tirman
	Jean Marchand
	Othon Friesz




	Exhibitions	
	Artistes Indépendants
	Les XX
	Volpini Exhibition
	Le Barc de Boutteville
	La Libre Esthétique
	Ambroise Vollard
	Salon d'Automne
	Salon des Indépendants
	Salon des Cent
	Salon des Tuileries




	Critics	
	Félix Fénéon
	Albert Aurier




	Related	
	Impressionism
	Modernism
	Modern art
	Secessionism







	
	v
	t
	e


Modernism

	Milestones	
	Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–1863)
	Olympia (1863)
	A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886)
	Mont Sainte-Victoir (1887)
	Don Juan (1888)
	The Starry Night (1889)
	Ubu Roi (1896)
	Verklärte Nacht (1899)
	Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906)
	Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
	The Dance (1909–1910)
	The Firebird (1910)
	Afternoon of a Faun (1912)
	Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
	The Rite of Spring (1913)
	In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927)
	The Metamorphosis (1915) 
	Black Square (1915) 
	Fountain (1917)
	The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
	Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
	Ulysses (1922)
	The Waste Land (1922)
	The Magic Mountain (1924)
	Battleship Potemkin (1925)
	The Sun Also Rises (1926)
	The Threepenny Opera (1928)
	The Sound and the Fury (1929)
	Un Chien Andalou (1929)
	Villa Savoye (1931)
	The Blue Lotus (1936)
	Fallingwater (1936)
	Waiting for Godot (1953)




	Literature	
	Guillaume Apollinaire
	Djuna Barnes
	Tadeusz Borowski
	André Breton
	Mikhail Bulgakov
	Anton Chekhov
	Joseph Conrad
	Alfred Döblin
	E. M. Forster
	William Faulkner
	Gustave Flaubert
	Ford Madox Ford
	André Gide
	Knut Hamsun
	Jaroslav Hašek
	Ernest Hemingway
	Hermann Hesse
	James Joyce
	Franz Kafka
	Arthur Koestler
	D. H. Lawrence
	Wyndham Lewis
	Thomas Mann
	Katherine Mansfield
	Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
	Guy de Maupassant
	Robert Musil
	Katherine Anne Porter
	Marcel Proust
	Gertrude Stein
	Italo Svevo
	Virginia Woolf




	Poetry	
	Anna Akhmatova
	Richard Aldington
	W. H. Auden
	Charles Baudelaire
	Luca Caragiale
	Constantine P. Cavafy
	Blaise Cendrars
	Hart Crane
	H.D.
	Robert Desnos
	T. S. Eliot
	Paul Éluard
	Odysseas Elytis
	F. S. Flint
	Stefan George
	Max Jacob
	Federico García Lorca
	Amy Lowell
	Robert Lowell
	Mina Loy
	Stéphane Mallarmé
	Marianne Moore
	Wilfred Owen
	Octavio Paz
	Fernando Pessoa
	Ezra Pound
	Lionel Richard
	Rainer Maria Rilke
	Arthur Rimbaud
	Giorgos Seferis
	Wallace Stevens
	Dylan Thomas
	Tristan Tzara
	Paul Valéry
	William Carlos Williams
	W. B. Yeats




	Visual art	
	Josef Albers
	Jean Arp
	Balthus
	George Bellows
	Umberto Boccioni
	Pierre Bonnard
	Georges Braque
	Constantin Brâncuși
	Alexander Calder
	Mary Cassatt
	Paul Cézanne
	Marc Chagall
	Giorgio de Chirico
	Camille Claudel
	Joseph Cornell
	Joseph Csaky
	Salvador Dalí
	Edgar Degas
	Raoul Dufy
	Willem de Kooning
	Robert Delaunay
	Charles Demuth
	Otto Dix
	Theo van Doesburg
	Marcel Duchamp
	James Ensor
	Max Ernst
	Jacob Epstein
	Paul Gauguin
	Alberto Giacometti
	Vincent van Gogh
	Natalia Goncharova
	Julio González
	Juan Gris
	George Grosz
	Raoul Hausmann
	Jacques Hérold
	Hannah Höch
	Edward Hopper
	Frida Kahlo
	Wassily Kandinsky
	Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
	Paul Klee
	Oskar Kokoschka
	Pyotr Konchalovsky
	André Lhote
	Fernand Léger
	Franz Marc
	Albert Marque
	Jean Marchand
	René Magritte
	Kazimir Malevich
	Édouard Manet
	Henri Matisse
	Colin McCahon
	Jean Metzinger
	Joan Miró
	Amedeo Modigliani
	Piet Mondrian
	Claude Monet
	Henry Moore
	Edvard Munch
	Emil Nolde
	Georgia O'Keeffe
	Méret Oppenheim
	Francis Picabia
	Pablo Picasso
	Camille Pissarro
	Man Ray
	Odilon Redon
	Pierre-Auguste Renoir
	Auguste Rodin
	Henri Rousseau
	Egon Schiele
	Georges Seurat
	Paul Signac
	Alfred Sisley
	Edward Steichen
	Alfred Stieglitz
	Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
	Édouard Vuillard
	Grant Wood
	Lin Fengmian




	Music	
	George Antheil
	Milton Babbitt
	Jean Barraqué
	Béla Bartók
	Alban Berg
	Luciano Berio
	Nadia Boulanger
	Pierre Boulez
	John Cage
	Elliott Carter
	Aaron Copland
	Heitor Villa-Lobos
	Henry Cowell
	Henri Dutilleux
	Morton Feldman
	Henryk Górecki
	Josef Matthias Hauer
	Paul Hindemith
	Arthur Honegger
	Charles Ives
	Leoš Janáček
	György Ligeti
	Witold Lutosławski
	Olivier Messiaen
	Luigi Nono
	Harry Partch
	Krzysztof Penderecki
	Sergei Prokofiev
	Luigi Russolo
	Erik Satie
	Pierre Schaeffer
	Arnold Schoenberg
	Dmitri Shostakovich
	Richard Strauss
	Igor Stravinsky
	Karol Szymanowski
	Edgard Varèse
	Anton Webern
	Kurt Weill
	Iannis Xenakis




	Theatre	
	Edward Albee
	Maxwell Anderson
	Jean Anouilh
	Antonin Artaud
	Samuel Beckett
	Bertolt Brecht
	Anton Chekhov
	Friedrich Dürrenmatt
	Jean Genet
	Maxim Gorky
	Walter Hasenclever
	Henrik Ibsen
	William Inge
	Eugène Ionesco
	Alfred Jarry
	Georg Kaiser
	Maurice Maeterlinck
	Vladimir Mayakovsky
	Arthur Miller
	Seán O'Casey
	Eugene O'Neill
	John Osborne
	Luigi Pirandello
	Erwin Piscator
	George Bernard Shaw
	August Strindberg
	John Millington Synge
	Ernst Toller
	Frank Wedekind
	Thornton Wilder
	Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz




	Film	
	Robert Aldrich
	Michelangelo Antonioni
	Ingmar Bergman
	Anton Giulio Bragaglia
	Robert Bresson
	Luis Buñuel
	Marcel Carné
	Charlie Chaplin
	René Clair
	Jean Cocteau
	Maya Deren
	Alexander Dovzhenko
	Carl Theodor Dreyer
	Viking Eggeling
	Sergei Eisenstein
	Jean Epstein
	Federico Fellini
	Robert J. Flaherty
	Sam Fuller
	Abel Gance
	Isidore Isou
	Buster Keaton
	Lev Kuleshov
	Fritz Lang
	Ida Lupino
	Marcel L'Herbier
	Georges Méliès
	F. W. Murnau
	Georg Wilhelm Pabst
	Vsevolod Pudovkin
	Nicholas Ray
	Jean Renoir
	Walter Ruttmann
	Victor Sjöström
	Josef von Sternberg
	Dziga Vertov
	Jean Vigo
	Orson Welles
	Robert Wiene




	Dance	
	George Balanchine
	Merce Cunningham
	Clotilde von Derp
	Sergei Diaghilev
	Isadora Duncan
	Michel Fokine
	Loie Fuller
	Martha Graham
	Hanya Holm
	Doris Humphrey
	Léonide Massine
	Vaslav Nijinsky
	Alwin Nikolais
	Alexander Sakharoff
	Ted Shawn
	Anna Sokolow
	Ruth St. Denis
	Helen Tamiris
	Charles Weidman
	Grete Wiesenthal
	Mary Wigman




	Architecture	
	Marcel Breuer
	Gordon Bunshaft
	Jack Allen Charney
	Walter Gropius
	Hector Guimard
	Raymond Hood
	Victor Horta
	Friedensreich Hundertwasser
	Philip Johnson
	Louis Kahn
	Le Corbusier
	Adolf Loos
	Konstantin Melnikov
	Erich Mendelsohn
	Pier Luigi Nervi
	Richard Neutra
	Oscar Niemeyer
	Hans Poelzig
	Antonin Raymond
	Gerrit Rietveld
	Eero Saarinen
	Rudolf Steiner
	Edward Durell Stone
	Louis Sullivan
	Vladimir Tatlin
	Paul Troost
	Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
	Frank Lloyd Wright




	Related	
	American modernism
	Armory Show
	Art Deco
	Art Nouveau
	Ashcan School
	Avant-garde
	Ballets Russes
	Bauhaus
	Buddhist modernism
	Constructivism
	Cubism
	Dada
	Degenerate art
	De Stijl
	Der Blaue Reiter
	Die Brücke
	Ecomodernism
	Expressionism
	Expressionist music
	Fauvism
	Fourth dimension in art
	Fourth dimension in literature
	Futurism
	Grosvenor School of Modern Art
	Hanshinkan Modernism
	High modernism
	Imagism
	Impressionism
	Incoherents
	International Style
	Late modernism
	Late modernity
	Lettrism
	List of art movements
	List of avant-garde artists
	List of modernist poets
	Lyrical abstraction
	Maximalism
	Minimalism
	Modern art
	Modernity
	Neo-Dada
	Neo-primitivism
	New Objectivity
	Orphism
	Post-Impressionism
	Postminimalism
	Postmodernism
	Postmodernist film
	Reactionary modernism
	Metamodernism
	Remodernism
	Romanticism
	Second Viennese School
	Structural film
	Surrealism
	Symbolism
	Synchromism
	Tonalism
	Warsaw Autumn







	
	v
	t
	e


Avant-garde movements

	Visual art	
	Abstract expressionism
	Art Nouveau
	Art & Language
	Conceptual art
	Constructivism
	Cubism
	Grosvenor School
	Proto-Cubism
	Cubo-Futurism
	De Stijl
	Devětsil
	Divisionism
	Fauvism
	Impressionism
	Neo-Impressionism
	Post-Impressionism
	Color Field
	Incoherents
	Lyrical Abstraction
	Mail art
	Minimalism
	Mir iskusstva
	Multidimensional art
	Neue Slowenische Kunst
	Nonconformism
	Performance art
	Pop art
	Process art
	Rayonism
	Suprematism
	Vorticism
	Nouveau réalisme




	Literature
and poetry	
	Acmeism
	Angry Penguins
	Asemic writing
	Conceptual poetry
	Cyberpunk
	Ego-Futurism
	Experimental literature
	Flarf poetry
	Hungry generation
	Imaginism
	Language poets
	Neoavanguardia
	Neoteric
	Nouveau roman
	Oberiu
	Oulipo
	Slam poetry
	Ultraísmo
	Visual poetry
	Zaum




	Music	
	By style	
	Funk
	Jazz
	Yass


	Metal
	Pop
	Rock
	Prog
	Punk






	Others	
	Aleatoric music
	Ars nova
	Ars subtilior
	Atonal music
	Electroacoustic music
	Electronic music
	Industrial music


	Experimental pop
	Free jazz
	Free improvisation


	Futurism
	Microtonal music
	Minimal music
	Drone music


	Music theatre
	Musique concrète
	New Complexity
	No wave
	Noise music
	Post-rock
	Rock in Opposition
	Second Viennese School
	Serialism
	Spectral music
	Stochastic music
	Textural music
	Totalism
	Twelve-tone technique







	Cinema
and theatre	
	Cinéma pur
	Dogme 95
	Drop Art
	Epic theatre
	Experimental film
	Experimental theatre
	Postdramatic theatre
	Remodernist film
	Structural film
	Theatre of the Absurd
	Theatre of Cruelty




	General	
	Bauhaus
	Constructivism
	Dada
	Expressionism
	Fluxus
	Futurism
	Lettrism
	Modernism
	Minimalism
	Postminimalism
	Neo-minimalism
	Neo-Dada
	Neoism
	Postmodernism
	Late modernism
	Primitivism
	Russian Futurism
	Russian symbolism
	Situationist International
	Social realism
	Socialist realism
	Surrealism
	Symbolism




	 Book




	
	v
	t
	e


Western art movements

	List of art movements

	Ancient	
	Egyptian
	Greek
	Etruscan
	Roman




	Medieval	
	Early Christian
	Migration Period
	Anglo-Saxon
	Visigothic
	Pre-Romanesque
	Insular
	Viking
	Byzantine
	Merovingian
	Carolingian
	Ottonian
	Romanesque
	Norman-Sicilian
	Gothic  (International Gothic)




	Renaissance	
	Italian Renaissance
	Early Netherlandish
	German Renaissance
	Antwerp Mannerists
	Danube school
	High Renaissance
	Venetian painting
	Romanism
	Mannerism
	Fontainebleau
	Northern Mannerism




	17th century	
	Baroque
	Caravaggisti
	Classicism
	Dutch Golden Age
	Flemish Baroque




	18th century	
	Rocaille
	Rococo
	Neoclassicism
	Romanticism




	19th century	
	Naïve
	Nazarene
	Realism / Realism
	Historicism
	Biedermeier
	Barbizon school
	Pre-Raphaelites
	Academic
	Hudson River School
	Aestheticism
	Art pottery
	Macchiaioli
	Peredvizhniki
	Impressionism
	Heidelberg School
	Decadent
	Symbolism
	Art Nouveau
	Post-Impressionism
	Neo-Impressionism
	Pointillism
	Cloisonnism
	Les Nabis
	Synthetism
	Costumbrismo




	20th century	
	Arts and Crafts
	Incoherents
	Fauvism
	Die Brücke
	Cubism
	Expressionism
	Neue Künstlervereinigung München
	Futurism
	Metaphysical art
	Rayonism
	Der Blaue Reiter
	Orphism
	Synchromism
	Vorticism
	Suprematism
	Ashcan
	Dada
	De Stijl
	Australian tonalism
	Purism
	Bauhaus
	Kinetic art
	New Objectivity
	Grosvenor School
	Neues Sehen
	Surrealism
	Neo-Fauvism
	Precisionism
	Scuola Romana
	Art Deco
	International Typographic Style
	Social realism
	Abstract expressionism
	Vienna School of Fantastic Realism
	Color Field
	Lyrical abstraction
	Tachisme
	COBRA
	Action painting
	New media art
	Letterist International
	Pop art
	Situationist International
	Lettrism
	Neo-Dada
	Op art
	Nouveau réalisme
	Art & Language
	Conceptual art
	Land art
	Systems art
	Video art
	Minimalism
	Fluxus
	Photorealism
	Performance art
	Installation art
	Endurance art
	Outsider art
	Neo-expressionism
	Lowbrow
	Young British Artists
	Amazonian pop art




	21st century	
	Art intervention
	Hyperrealism
	Neo-futurism
	Stuckism
	Sound art
	Superstroke
	Superflat
	Relational art
	Walking art




	Related	
	History of art
	Avant-garde
	Contemporary art
	Feminist art movement (in the US)
	Modern art
	Modern sculpture
	Modernism
	Late modernism
	Postmodern art
	Western painting




	 Category




	
	v
	t
	e


Aesthetics topics

	Philosophers	
	Abhinavagupta
	Theodor W. Adorno
	Leon Battista Alberti
	Thomas Aquinas
	Hans Urs von Balthasar
	Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
	Clive Bell
	Bernard Bosanquet
	Edward Bullough
	R. G. Collingwood
	Ananda Coomaraswamy
	Arthur Danto
	John Dewey
	Denis Diderot
	Hubert Dreyfus
	Curt John Ducasse
	Thierry de Duve
	Roger Fry
	Nelson Goodman
	Clement Greenberg
	Georg Hegel
	Martin Heidegger
	David Hume
	Immanuel Kant
	Paul Klee
	Susanne Langer
	Theodor Lipps
	György Lukács
	Jean-François Lyotard
	Joseph Margolis
	Jacques Maritain
	Thomas Munro
	Friedrich Nietzsche
	José Ortega y Gasset
	Dewitt H. Parker
	Stephen Pepper
	David Prall
	Jacques Rancière
	Ayn Rand
	Louis Lavelle
	George Lansing Raymond
	I. A. Richards
	George Santayana
	Friedrich Schiller
	Arthur Schopenhauer
	Roger Scruton
	Irving Singer
	Rabindranath Tagore
	Giorgio Vasari
	Morris Weitz
	Johann Joachim Winckelmann
	Richard Wollheim
	more...




	Theories	
	Classicism
	Evolutionary aesthetics
	Historicism
	Modernism
	New Classical
	Postmodernism
	Psychoanalytic theory
	Romanticism
	Symbolism
	more...




	Concepts	
	Aesthetic emotions
	Aesthetic interpretation
	Art manifesto
	Avant-garde
	Axiology
	Beauty
	Boredom
	Camp
	Comedy
	Creativity
	Cuteness
	Disgust
	Ecstasy
	Elegance
	Entertainment
	Eroticism
	Fun
	Gaze
	Harmony
	Judgement
	Kama
	Kitsch
	Life imitating art
	Magnificence
	Mimesis
	Perception
	Quality
	Rasa
	Recreation
	Reverence
	Style
	Sthayibhava
	Sublime
	Taste
	Work of art




	Related	
	Aesthetics of music
	Applied aesthetics
	Architecture
	Art
	Arts criticism
	Feminist aesthetics
	Gastronomy
	History of painting
	Humour
	Japanese aesthetics
	Literary merit
	Mathematical beauty
	Mathematics and architecture
	Mathematics and art
	Medieval aesthetics
	Music theory
	Neuroesthetics
	Painting
	Patterns in nature
	Philosophy of design
	Philosophy of film
	Philosophy of music
	Poetry
	Sculpture
	Theory of painting
	Theory of art
	Tragedy
	Visual arts




	
	Index
	Outline
	Category
	 Philosophy portal







	
	v
	t
	e


Schools of poetry

	
	Akhmatova's Orphans
	Angry Penguins
	Auden Group
	The Beats
	Black Arts Movement
	Black Mountain poets
	British Poetry Revival
	Cairo poets
	Castalian Band
	Cavalier poets
	Chhayavaad
	Churchyard poets
	Confessionalists
	Créolité
	Cyclic Poets
	Dada
	Deep image
	Della Cruscans
	Dolce Stil Novo
	Dymock poets
	Ecopoetry
	The poets of Elan
	Flarf
	Fugitives
	Garip
	Gay Saber
	Generation of '27
	Generation of the '30s
	Generation of '98
	Georgian poets
	Goliard
	The Group
	Harlem Renaissance
	Harvard Aesthetes
	Hungry generation
	Imagism
	Informationist poetry
	İkinci Yeni
	Jindyworobaks
	Lake Poets
	Language poets
	Martian poetry
	Metaphysical poets
	Misty Poets
	Modernist poetry
	The Movement
	Négritude
	Neotericism
	New American Poetry
	New Apocalyptics
	New Formalism
	New York School
	Objectivists
	Others
	Parnassian poets
	La Pléiade
	Rhymers' Club
	San Francisco Renaissance
	Scottish Renaissance
	Sicilian School
	Sons of Ben
	Southern Agrarians
	Spasmodic poets
	Sung poetry
	Surrealism
	Symbolism
	Uranian poetry
	Zutiste







	
	v
	t
	e


Narrative

	Character	
	Antagonist
	Antihero
	Archenemy
	Character arc
	Character flaw
	Characterization
	Deuteragonist
	False protagonist
	Focal character
	Foil
	Gothic double
	Narrator
	Protagonist
	Stock character
	Straight man
	Supporting character
	Title character
	Tragic hero
	Tritagonist




	Plot	
	Act
	Act structure
	Three-act structure


	Action
	Backstory
	Chekhov's gun
	Cliché
	Cliffhanger
	Conflict
	Deus ex machina
	Dialogue
	Dramatic structure
	Exposition/Protasis
	Rising action/Epitasis
	Climax/Peripeteia
	Falling action/Catastasis
	Denouement/Catastrophe


	Eucatastrophe
	Foreshadowing
	Flashback
	Flashforward
	Frame story
	In medias res
	Kishōtenketsu
	MacGuffin
	Occam's razor
	Pace
	Plot device
	Plot twist
	Poetic justice
	Red herring
	Reveal
	Self-fulfilling prophecy
	Shaggy dog story
	Story arc
	Subplot
	Suspense
	Trope




	Setting	
	Alternate history
	Backstory
	Crossover
	Dreamworld
	Dystopia
	Fictional location
	city
	country
	universe


	Utopia




	Theme	
	Irony
	Leitmotif
	Metaphor
	Moral
	Motif




	Style	
	Allegory
	Bathos
	Diction
	Figure of speech
	Imagery
	Narrative techniques
	Mode
	Mood
	Narration
	Stylistic device
	Suspension of disbelief
	Symbolism
	Tone




	Structure	
	Linear narrative
	Nonlinear narrative
	films
	television series


	Types of fiction with multiple endings




	Form	
	Cantastoria
	Comics
	Epic
	Fable
	Fabliau
	Fairy tale
	Flash fiction
	Folktale
	Kamishibai
	Gamebook
	Legend
	Novel
	Novella
	Parable
	Play
	Poem
	Screenplay
	Short story
	Vignette (literature)




	Genre	
	Action fiction
	Adventure
	Comic
	Crime
	Docufiction
	Epistolary
	Erotic
	Fantasy
	Fiction
	Gothic
	Historical
	Horror
	List of writing genres
	Magic realism
	Mystery
	Nautical
	Non-Fiction
	Paranoid
	Philosophical
	Picaresque
	Political
	Pop culture
	Psychological
	Religious
	Rogue
	Romance
	Saga
	Satire
	Science
	Speculative
	Superhero
	Theological
	Thriller
	Urban
	Western




	Narration	
	First-person
	Multiple narrators
	Stream of consciousness
	Stream of unconsciousness
	Unreliable
	Diegesis
	Self-insertion




	Tense	
	Past
	Present
	Future




	Related	
	Audience
	Author
	Creative nonfiction
	Fiction writing
	Literary science
	Literary theory
	Narratology
	Political narrative
	Rhetoric
	Screenwriting
	Storytelling
	Tellability










	Authority control 	
	LCCN: sh85131409
	NDL: 00572321














Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Symbolism_(arts)&oldid=1000809474"


		Categories: 	Symbolism (arts)
	Art movements
	Literary movements
	19th century in art
	19th-century theatre
	Fantastic art
	French poetry
	Modern art
	Modernism
	Symbolist artists
	Symbolist works


Hidden categories: 	Webarchive template wayback links
	Articles with French-language sources (fr)
	Articles with short description
	Short description is different from Wikidata
	Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from February 2013
	All articles with unsourced statements
	Articles with unsourced statements from December 2014
	Articles with unsourced statements from January 2017
	Articles with unsourced statements from January 2021
	Articles that may contain original research from February 2018
	All articles that may contain original research
	Articles with unsourced statements from April 2016
	Commons category link is on Wikidata
	Use dmy dates from May 2012
	Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers
	Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers




	




	





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		 This page was last edited on 16 January 2021, at 20:46 (UTC).
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