Symbolic Composition

Pictures built like puzzles, where objects and figures are chosen and placed to carry meanings beyond what they show.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Symbolic Composition are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Some pictures are built like puzzles, with every object chosen to carry meaning. Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) sets a couple among a single lit candle, a small dog, oranges on the sill and a convex mirror, details that scholars still read in different ways. George Frederic Watts's Hope (1886) seats a blindfolded woman on a globe, straining to hear the last string of a broken lyre, and Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead (1880) distils a final journey into a rowing boat, a white-shrouded figure and a dark cluster of cypresses.

The Surrealists and their contemporaries charged symbols with private, dreamlike meanings. Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) places two girls, a giant sunflower and a half-open door in a corridor, and the Japanese painter Koga Harue's The Sea (1929) assembles a submarine, a factory, a zeppelin and a woman in a bathing suit from magazine imagery.