CategoriesStyles and Movements
Symbolism
Late 19th-century European art and poetry that turned from observed reality to dreams, myth, the spiritual and the hidden meanings of form.
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About
Odilon Redon drew in charcoal an eye rising like a balloon and a spider with a human grin, images meant to suggest what lies beneath the visible world. Across Europe in the 1880s and 1890s painters shared that aim with poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, whose circle Jean Moréas named in a manifesto of 1886. Against academic realism and Impressionism alike, they turned to myth, dream, religion, desire and death, treating form and colour as carriers of mood.
Gustave Moreau set Salome before the floating head of John the Baptist in jewel-like detail in The Apparition (1876). Paul Gauguin and the Nabis, including Maurice Denis, flattened colour into expressive patterns. In Belgium Fernand Khnopff painted still, enigmatic women; in Switzerland Ferdinand Hodler arranged figures in solemn rhythms; in Britain George Frederic Watts seated his blindfolded Hope (1886) on a globe. The movement shaped Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt and early abstraction.