Symbolism Art: Dreams, Death and the Femme Fatale

Symbolism art is the movement of roughly 1880 to 1910 in which painters across Europe rejected realism and painted ideas, dreams and emotions instead: death, desire, the soul, the occult and the darker side of the imagination. Its masterpieces include Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, Gustave Moreau's visions of Salome, Odilon Redon's charcoal dreams, Franz von Stuck's Lucifer, Gustav Klimt's golden women and Edvard Munch's The Scream.

The Symbolists believed that the visible world was only a surface, and that art's task was to suggest what lay behind it through mood, myth and image rather than description. Their pictures are often hard to "read" in a literal way, and they meant them to be. This page explains where Symbolism came from, its recurring themes, the key painters from Paris to Helsinki, how to recognize a Symbolist work, and where to see the paintings in the collection below.

What is Symbolism in art?

Symbolism began as a literary movement in France and became one of the most international art movements of the nineteenth century, stretching from Paris and Brussels to Munich, Vienna, Oslo, Helsinki and Moscow. It was not a style so much as a shared conviction: that art should express inner truths rather than record appearances.

The Symbolists were reacting against two dominant trends. Realism, led by Gustave Courbet, insisted on painting the ordinary world as it is. Impressionism, at its height in the 1870s and 1880s, painted the fleeting effects of light on the surface of things. The Symbolists found both too materialist. As the poet Jean Moréas wrote in the Symbolist manifesto published in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886, the aim was to "clothe the Idea in a sensitive form."

Literary roots

Painting followed poetry here. Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857), with its fusion of beauty, sin, decay and spiritual longing, was the movement's sacred text. His sonnet "Correspondences" described nature as a "forest of symbols" whose scents, colors and sounds answer one another, and that idea underlies much Symbolist painting. Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine were its living poets, and J.-K. Huysmans's novel À rebours (1884), whose decadent hero collects paintings by Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, made them famous among aesthetes.

The themes of Symbolism

Death and the beyond. Graves, islands of the dead, skeletal figures, and the soul's passage into another world.

The femme fatale. Salome, Medusa, the Sphinx, sirens and vampires: women as beautiful, dangerous and unknowable, a fixation that says more about the anxieties of male artists than about women.

Dreams and the unconscious. A decade before Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Symbolist painters were already mapping the night side of the mind.

Myth, religion and the occult. Classical and biblical stories, angels and demons, Rosicrucian mysticism and spiritualism, often mixed freely.

Melancholy and decadence. The sense that a civilization was ending, captured in the phrase fin de siècle.

Paris and Brussels

Gustave Moreau, working in near-isolation in Paris, painted encrusted, jewel-like visions of myth and scripture. His watercolor The Apparition (1876), in which the severed head of John the Baptist appears in a burst of light before a near-naked Salome, became an icon of the movement. Odilon Redon spent decades on his noirs, charcoal drawings and lithographs of floating eyes, spiders with human faces and heads on platters, before turning in later life to explosions of pastel color. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted calm, pale murals of a timeless Arcadia that influenced Gauguin and the young Picasso.

Paul Gauguin, too, was claimed by the movement. In 1891 the critic Albert Aurier published an essay in the Mercure de France hailing Gauguin as the leader of Symbolism in painting, praising his flat areas of unnatural color and simplified forms as a way of expressing ideas rather than copying nature. The young painters of the Nabis group, including Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis, followed his lead. Denis's famous remark of 1890, that a picture is "essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" before it is a horse or a nude, shows how Symbolism helped open the door to modern abstraction.

In Belgium, Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville gave the movement its cool, enigmatic women, while Félicien Rops supplied its erotic and satanic etchings. In 1892 the eccentric critic Joséphin Péladan launched the Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris, mystical exhibitions that welcomed Symbolist painters and banned landscapes and still lifes. Among the exhibitors was the Swiss-German Carlos Schwabe, whose illustrations for an edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1900) are among the finest of the period; his painting Spleen et Idéal takes its title from the first section of the poems.

Germany and Switzerland

Arnold Böcklin, Swiss-born and largely based in Italy, painted the movement's most haunting image. Isle of the Dead exists in five versions painted between 1880 and 1886: a small boat carrying a standing white-shrouded figure and a draped coffin approaches a rocky island of cypress trees and tomb doorways carved into the cliffs. Böcklin added the figure and coffin to the second version at the request of a recently widowed patron, Marie Berna, who wanted a picture to dream over. The title was given by his dealer. By the early twentieth century reproductions hung in homes all over Germany, and Rachmaninoff composed a symphonic poem after the image in 1909.

In Munich, Franz von Stuck co-founded the Munich Secession in 1892 and painted brooding mythological figures with dark, polished surfaces. Lucifer (1890, National Gallery, Sofia) shows the fallen angel crouched in darkness, chin in hand, his eyes glowing out at the viewer with an unnerving directness. His The Sin (1893) shows a nude woman wrapped in an enormous snake. For more angels cast out of heaven, see fallen angel paintings.

Vienna, Scandinavia and the North

In Vienna, Gustav Klimt led the Secession from 1897, combining Symbolist themes of love, death and the femme fatale with gold leaf and Byzantine pattern in works like The Kiss (1907–08) and Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901).

Edvard Munch, in Norway and Berlin, pushed Symbolism toward Expressionism. His Frieze of Life, a cycle on love, anxiety and death, includes The Scream (1893) and Melancholy, in which a man sits brooding on the shore at Åsgårdstrand while a couple walks toward a jetty in the distance; the model is usually identified as Munch's friend Jappe Nilssen, then suffering through an unhappy love affair. Vampire (1895) began life as Love and Pain; the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski called it a vampire, and the name stuck to a picture that may simply show a woman comforting a man with her lips against his neck.

In Finland, Hugo Simberg painted death as a gentle, almost comic presence. In The Garden of Death (1896, Ateneum, Helsinki), skeletons in black robes tend flowers in a walled garden, watering and potting them with tender care. Simberg later repainted the scene as a fresco in Tampere Cathedral, alongside his Wounded Angel. In Russia, Mikhail Vrubel painted the demon of Mikhail Lermontov's poem in a series of fractured, crystalline canvases, and Konstantin Makovsky took up the same poem in Tamara and the Demon. Polish-Russian painter Wilhelm Kotarbiński painted night scenes of graves and spirits.

How to recognize Symbolist art

• A subject that is an idea, not an event: Silence, Sin, Death, Melancholy, the Soul.
• Mythological, biblical or literary figures used as symbols rather than characters in a story.
• Dreamlike, ambiguous scenes with no clear narrative and an air of mystery.
• Flattened, decorative compositions, often with stylized line, gold or rich pattern.
• Muted, twilight palettes, or else jewel-like, unnatural color.
• Recurring motifs: closed eyes, flowers (especially lilies and poppies), water, swans, sphinxes, serpents, skulls and angels.

Symbolism's legacy

Symbolism fed directly into Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Surrealism. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and René Magritte admired Böcklin and Redon, and the movement's dark imagination lives on in film, fantasy illustration, album covers and online aesthetics. Its brooding angels and gardens of death have found new admirers among followers of dark academia.

Where to see Symbolist art

Paris has the Musée Gustave Moreau, in the painter's own house and studio, and fine Symbolist rooms at the Musée d'Orsay. Brussels's Royal Museums of Fine Arts, the Munch Museum and National Museum in Oslo, the Ateneum in Helsinki, the Belvedere in Vienna and Munich's Villa Stuck are essential. Böcklin's Isle of the Dead can be seen in Basel's Kunstmuseum, New York's Metropolitan Museum, Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie and Leipzig's Museum der bildenden Künste.