Symbolist painting

Symbolist painting was one of the main artistic manifestations of symbolism, a cultural movement that emerged at the end of the 19th century in France and developed in several European countries. The beginning of this current was in poetry, especially thanks to the impact of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (1868), which powerfully influenced a generation of young poets including Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. The term "symbolism" was coined by Jean Moréas in a literary manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1886. The aesthetic premises of Symbolism moved from poetry to other arts, especially painting, sculpture, music and theater. The chronology of this style is difficult to establish: the peak is between 1885 and 1905, but already in the 1860s there were works pointing to symbolism, while its culmination can be established at the beginning of the First World War.

In painting, symbolism was a fantastic and dreamlike style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of the realist painting and Impressionist trends, whose objectivity and detailed description of reality were opposed by subjectivity and the depiction of the occult and the irrational, as opposed to representation, evocation, or suggestion. Just as in poetry the rhythm of words served to express a transcendent meaning, in painting they sought ways for color and line to express ideas. In this movement, all the arts were related and thus the painting of Redon was often compared to the poetry of Baudelaire or the music of Debussy.^[1]

This style placed a special emphasis on the world of dreams and mysticism, as well as on various aspects of counterculture and marginality, such as esotericism, Satanism, terror, death, sin, sex and perversion—symptomatic in this sense is the fascination of these artists with the figure of the femme fatale. All this was manifested in line with decadentism, a fin-de-siecle cultural current that stressed the most existential aspects of life and pessimism as a vital attitude, as well as the evasion and exaltation of the unconscious. Another current linked to symbolism was aestheticism, a reaction to the prevailing utilitarianism of the time and to the ugliness and materialism of the industrial era. Against this, art and beauty were granted their own autonomy, synthesized in Théophile Gautier's formula "art for art's sake" (L'art pour l'art). Some Symbolist artists were also linked to theosophy and esoteric organizations such as the Rosicrucians.^[2] Stylistically there was great diversity within Symbolist painting, as is denoted by comparing the sumptuous exoticism of Gustave Moreau with the melancholic serenity of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.^[3]

Pictorial symbolism was related to other earlier and later movements: Pre-Raphaelitism is usually considered an antecedent of this movement, while at the beginning of the 20th century it was linked to Expressionism, especially thanks to figures such as Edvard Munch and James Ensor. On the other hand, some schools or artistic associations such as the Pont-Aven School or the group of the Nabis are considered symbolist or directly related to symbolism.^[4] They were also heirs to some extent of Neo-Impressionism, whose puntillist technique was the first to break with Impressionist naturalism. On the other hand, Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin exerted a powerful influence on the beginnings of Symbolism, thanks to his links with the Pont-Aven School and Cloisonnism.^[2] This current was also linked to modernism, known as art nouveau in France, Modern Style in United Kingdom, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezession in Austria or Liberty in Italy.^[5]