Symbolist painting

[1] This style placed a special emphasis on the world of dreams and mysticism, as well as on various aspects of counterculture and marginality, such as esotericism, Satanism, terror, death, sin, sex and perversion—symptomatic in this sense is the fascination of these artists with the figure of the femme fatale.

To this end, they used the symbol as a vehicle for the expression of their emotions, which took the form of images of strong subjective and irrational content, in which dreams, visions, fantastic worlds recreated by the artist predominate, with a certain tendency towards the morbid and perverse, tormented eroticism, loneliness and existential anguish.

[23] The immediate predecessor of Symbolism was Pre-Raphaelitism, a group of British artists who were inspired—as their name suggests—by Italian painters before Raphael, as well as by the newly emerging photography, with exponents such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones.

[2] A literary antecedent of this movement was the book Against the Grain (À rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), a hymn to aestheticism and eccentricity as a vital attitude, in which he relates the work of certain artists such as Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon to decadentism.

[2] In this novel the protagonist, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, withdraws from the world to live in an environment created by him in which he devotes himself to enjoying literature, music, art, flowers, jewels, perfumes, liquors and all those things that stimulate an idealized existence, removed from the mundane noise.

Helping in that field were some articles by the critic and poet Arthur Symons in the magazine Savoy, author of the essay The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), where he advocated symbolism as an attempt to spiritualize art and turn it into a religion that would substitute nature for fantasy.

[38] Subsequently, authors such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Stéphane Mallarmé developed this tendency to a high degree of refinement based solely on the artist's sensibility.

On the theoretical level, it drew on the work of thinkers and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who pointed to the symbol as the basis of art; Henri Bergson, who opposed objective reality and defended its subjective perception; and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose book The World as Will and Representation (1819) powerfully influenced fin-de-siècle pessimism.

The new art relied on a variety of propagandistic media such as magazines, exhibitions, galleries, advertising posters, illustrated books, production workshops and artists' societies, private schools and academies and other types of promotion and sales channels.

[52] Moreau was still trained in Romanticism under the influence of his teacher, Théodore Chassériau, but evolved to a personal style in both subject matter and technique, with images of mystical cut with a strong component of sensuality,[53] a resplendent chromaticism with an enamel-like finish and the use of a chiaroscuro of golden shadows.

[58] In his youth he briefly passed through the workshops of Delacroix, Coutoure and Chassériau and made two trips to Italy, but perhaps most transcendent for the formation of his serene and restful style was his relationship with the Greek princess Maria Cantacuzeno, who transmitted her intense spirituality to him.

[84] In the Breton town of Pont-Aven, a series of artists led by Paul Gauguin gathered between 1888 and 1894,[85] who developed a style heir to post-impressionism with a tendency towards primitivism and a taste for the exotic, with varied influences ranging from medieval art—especially tapestries, stained glass and enamels—to Japanese art.

[86] The founder of the group was Paul Gauguin, a restless artist who felt a yearning to move away from Western society and return to primitive life, more original and spontaneous, and to an art freed from academic rules and stereotyped concepts.

[100] Influenced by Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes, as well as Gauguin, Bernard and the Pont-Aven group, and with certain reminiscences of Blake and Pre-Raphaelite painting, developed a work of marked sentimentalism that denotes a conception of naturalistic and pious life, almost naive in its approach of blissful purity, which highlights the decorative, fine color contrasts and harmony of pure lines, with a serene and monumental air.

In addition to his pictorial production he illustrated books such as Reply of the shepherdess to the shepherd by Édouard Dujardin, Sanity by Paul Verlaine, Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis or Journey of Urien by André Gide.

"[103] Together with Vuillard, he developed a subject matter centered on a type of images of social atmosphere that reflected daily life in generally interior scenes, with a strong charge of psychological introspection, a style defined by critics as "intimism.

Super-spiritualized drawing, soul-filled line, full form, you embody our dreams.Symbolism exerted at the end of the century a certain influence on institutional art, academicism, a style anchored in the past both in the choice of themes and in the techniques and resources made available to the artist.

[113] Some of these authors were seduced by the symbolist imagery and its subjective and spiritual evocation, but they translated it with a decorativist tone closer to modernism than to symbolism itself, a contrived style in which the figures of languid women with hair waved by the wind, the arabesques and the exuberant vegetation of rolled flowers stand out.

[161] Alfred Kubin was above all a draftsman: he expressed in his drawings a terrifying world of loneliness and despair, populated by monsters, skeletons, insects and hideous animals, with explicit references to sex, where the female presence plays an evil and disturbing role.

[177] Also noteworthy is the work of the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald, members of the so-called Glasgow School, a modernist circle devoted primarily to architecture and the decorative arts led by the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh—Margaret's husband.

[194] Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, trained in the divisionist environment, evolved to a personal style marked by an intense and vibrant light, whose starting point is his work Lost Hopes (1894, Ponti-Grün collection, Rome).

[201] Russolo was also trained in divisionism, but under the influence of Previati and Boccioni he developed a series of works focused on the urban environment and the industrial era interpreted in a symbolist key: Lightning, 1909–1910, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome.

[204] Despite everything, some artists maintained contacts with European art—especially through France—so they were able to develop a more modern style, linked above all to Impressionism, as denoted in the work of Aureliano de Beruete and Agustín Riancho, or to the so-called Valencian Luminism, represented by Joaquín Sorolla.

[220] Joan Llimona, founder of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, leaned towards a mysticism of strong religiosity, as denoted in his paintings for the dome of the camarín of the church of the Monastery of Montserrat (1898) or the murals of the dining room of the Recolons house in Barcelona (1905).

[224] Sebastià Junyent was a restless artist, initiated in Parisian impressionism at the same time as Casas and Rusiñol but who was developing a personal work in which his most symbolist phase is found between 1899, year of his Clorosis of Whistlerian influence, and 1903, date in which he made an Annunciation that already indicated a more archaizing style.

[66] In the artistic-literary environment of the Barcelona brewery Els Quatre Gats, Picasso came into contact with impressionism, the Nabis, the English symbolists (Burne-Jones, Whistler, Beardsley), the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the literature of Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, and the music of Wagner.

[247] János Vaszary was influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, which is denoted in his taste for mural painting, especially in landscapes of stylized composition with fine black line contours, with naturalistic figures of correct anatomical drawing.

[261] The American artistic scene was rather hostile to symbolism, since by its idiosyncrasy it was more inclined to realism: there still predominated the scientistic positivism and had a vivid idea of progress, especially in the economic field, since not in vain this country is along with the United Kingdom the cradle of capitalism.

[68] Settled in Rome from 1867, from where he occasionally returned to his homeland, Vedder was influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Odilon Redon, and although he often chose historical and religious subjects—as well as landscapes—he reinterpreted them in the Symbolist mode, in fantastic and allegorical images in which detailist figuration is subordinated to symbolic content, as in The Cup of Death (1885, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond).

[267] It is worth mentioning lastly James Abbott McNeill Whistler, an American painter based in the United Kingdom who, although linked above all to Impressionism, is sometimes associated with Symbolism because of his idealistic conception of art, which he considered "a divinity of delicate essence".