Symbolism

The name came from poetry. On 18 September 1886, the poet Jean Moréas published a manifesto in Le Figaro that gave the Symbolists theirs: art should clothe an idea in a form the senses can feel, never state it plainly. The poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine were its heroes, and painters had been working toward the same thing for twenty years.

Gustave Moreau made his name at the Salon of 1864 with Oedipus and the Sphinx, the monster clinging to the hero's chest. In 1884 the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans gave the movement its bible, Against Nature, whose hero gazes for hours at Moreau's Salome and at Odilon Redon's drawings. By the 1890s Symbolist painters were showing in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Munich, Kraków and Helsinki, and the movement faded only when the Expressionists and Cubists swept in after 1905.

In Paris, Moreau painted jeweled scenes from myth, among them The Apparition, where the head of John the Baptist hangs glowing in the air before Salome. Odilon Redon drew in charcoal for twenty years, eyes and spiders and floating heads he called his blacks, then turned in the 1890s to color, as in Les Yeux clos, a face with its eyes closed rising over the sea. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted calm, pale murals, and Paul Gauguin and the young Nabis called their own flat color Synthetism.

In Switzerland, Arnold Böcklin painted Isle of the Dead five times between 1880 and 1886: a boat carrying a figure in white toward a rocky island of cypresses. Rachmaninoff wrote a tone poem on it in 1909. In Brussels, Fernand Khnopff painted his sister Marguerite as all seven women of Memories, and James Ensor filled Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 with a crowd in masks.

Further north, Edvard Munch painted love, anxiety and death in his Frieze of Life, with The Scream of 1893 at its heart. In Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted the legends of the Kalevala, as in Lemminkäinen's Mother, and Hugo Simberg painted skeletons tending flowers in The Garden of Death. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt and the Secession, founded in 1897, carried Symbolism into gold leaf and pattern.

Its inner world went on in two directions. Munch's anxiety and Ensor's masks led straight to Expressionism, feeling painted from the inside out. Its dreams went underground and came back after the First World War as Surrealism: Giorgio de Chirico admired Böcklin, and the Surrealists claimed Moreau and Redon as their ancestors. Its long, curving lines and stylized women live on in Art Nouveau, its twin in the decorative arts.