Symbolism
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement that emphasized symbolic or metaphorical representations over realistic depictions. Symbolist artists aimed to evoke intuition and suggest mystical ideas through images and subjects meant to function as symbols. They rejected materialism and realism in favor of spirituality, imagination, and dreams.
Key artists include Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Gustav Klimt. Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876) conveyed mysterious sensuality and decadence. Redon’s floral still lifes represented spiritual themes and the unconscious. Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-08) portrayed an intimate erotic connection through pattern, line, and gold.
Symbolism was influenced by Romanticism’s interest in emotion and poetry as well as new psychological theories of the unconscious mind. Symbolist art often featured androgynous figures, draped fabrics, and magical or dreamlike settings meant to suggest spiritual realities beyond surface appearances.
Symbolism shaped modern art’s turn toward subjects meant to evoke a personal feeling, intuition, or metaphysical ideas — representing through visual metaphor alone deep currents of inner experience which lay beneath or gave rise to the external world available to reason and the physical senses.
At its best, Symbolism produced striking works aimed at revealing through artistic vision alone dimensions of being inaccessible to language or logic alone. The Symbolist project endures whenever art turns from outward subjects or mimesis to capture through color, line, rhythm — the plastic elements themselves — fleeting yet resonant traces of those vast realities so long sensed yet never fully seized by thought’s light grasp alone.
Though now a historical movement, Symbolism demonstrated art’s power to make evident profound and elusive truths through metaphoric images that stand as ciphers of ideas for which no other means of conveyance suffice. The Symbolist spirit lives on whenever the work of art becomes a portal through surface planes of seeing into realms where the eye meets inward light — and some primeval pact is glimpsed between the worlds we make and those that make us.
Artists Names
Famous Artists
> Alfred Sisley
> Camille Pissarro
> Caravaggio
> Claude Monet
> Diego Velázquez
> Edgar Degas
> Édouard Manet
> Eugène Delacroix
> Francisco de Goya
> Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
> Isaac Levitan
> Ivan Shishkin
> Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
> Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
> John Singer Sargent
> John William Waterhouse
> Joseph Mallord William Turner
> Lawrence Alma-Tadema
> Leonardo da Vinci
> Michelangelo
> Paul Cézanne
> Paul Gauguin
> Peter Paul Rubens
> Pierre-Auguste Renoir
> Raphael Sanzio
> Rembrandt Van Rijn
> Vincent van Gogh
> William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Art Subjects
>Abstract Oil Painting
>African Oil Painting
>Angel Oil Painting
>Animal Oil Painting
>Architecture Oil Painting
>Beach Oil Painting
>Bird Oil Painting
>Black and White Oil Painting
>Boat Oil Painting
>Buddha Oil Painting
>Bunny Oil Painting
>Cartoon Oil Painting
>Cat Oil Painting
>Cityscape Oil Painting
>Coastal Oil Painting
>Contemporary Oil Painting
>Daisy Oil Painting
>Dog Oil Painting
>Eagle Oil Painting
>Fantasy Oil Painting
>Figure Oil Painting
>Floral Oil Painting
>Forest Oil Painting
>Fruit Oil Painting
>Genre Works
>Horse Oil Painting
>Hunting Scenes Oil Painting
>Impressionist Oil Painting
>Jesus Oil Painting
>Landscape Oil Painting
>Modern Oil Paintings
>Mountain Oil Painting
>Music Oil Painting
>Nature Oil Painting
>Nude Oil Painting
>Pet Portrait Oil Painting
>Realistic Oil Painting
>Religious Oil Painting
>Scenery Oil Painting
>Seascape Oil Painting
>Season Oil Painting
>Sport Oil Painting
>Still Life Oil Painting
>Sunset Oil Painting
>Textured Oil Painting
>Tree Oil Painting
>War Oil Painting
>Wildlife Oil Painting
Art Movment
>Abstract Expressionism
>Academic Classicism
>Aestheticsm
>Art Deco
>Art Nouveau
>Barbizon School
>Baroque Art
>Byzantine Art
>Cubism
>Expressionism
>Fauvism
>Hudson River School
>Impressionism
>Mannerism
>Gothic Art
>Modernism
>Nabis
>Neoclassicism
>Neo-Impressionism
>Orientalism
>Pointillism
>Pop Art
>Post Impressionism
>Pre-Raphaelites
>Primitivism
>Realism
>Renaissance
>Rococo
>Romanticism
>Suprematism
>Surrealism
>Symbolism
>Tonalism
>Victorian Classicism
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