The Grapevine: Pick of the day: The Symbolists

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, gaining popular credence with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro. It was a reaction again the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture.

"To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem... suggestion, that is the dream."

The Buddha (1905), Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

Though it began as a literary concept, Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were similarly rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism.

Smiling Spider (1881), Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

Wanting to imbue their works with spiritual value, these progenitors of Symbolism produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from biblical stories and Greek mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures.

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)

Their suggestive imagery established what would become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening, and unrequited desire. Woman became favoured symbols as a means of expressing these emotions. They would mostly be depicted as wistful virgins or femmes fatale.

Salome (1876), Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)

Gauguin's Symbolism was unique in that he sought escape from civilization in less industrialized, so-called primitive cultures rather than in the imaginary dream world of his predecessors. Gauguin's search for a lost paradise led him to Tahiti.