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.