Symbolism Essay
The beginning of the Symbolist movement in art is regarded as having begun in the late 1880’s, in the city and country, which had been for centuries the art and culture capital of the western world, Paris. Many young artists were striving to find ways of escape the ideas and fashions of their dominant Impressionist ‘predecessors’ and their objective naturalism. Artists in France such as Redon, Moreau, and Puvis de Chavannes, as well as those such as Khnopff, Hodler ,Segantini, Klimt, and Munch in the rest of Europe therefore turned to imagination and fantasy for inspiration. These Symbolists rejected objectivity in favour of the subjective, and turned away from the direct representation of reality in favour of a synthesis of many different aspects, aiming to suggest ideas by means of ambiguous yet powerful symbols. They combined religious mysticism with an interest in the perverse and the erotic, an interest in what seemed 'primitive', yet with a sophisticated cult of decadence.
Much earlier artists and writers of the Romantic period, such as Delacroix, Edgar Allan Poe, and later, Baudelaire were key in the development of the symbolist ideology of the late nineteenth century, as did the Pre-Raphaelites to some extent.
Delacroix, who was the court painter to the king, developed the concept that colour might have a directly expressive rather than a merely descriptive function.
The most official recognition of symbolism as a form of art was first identified by Jean Moréas in the Symbolist manifesto called “Le Symbolisme”, published in 1886 in Le Figaro, and also was very much made more popular and ‘à la mode’ by Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against Nature, that same year. Moréas rejected the work of the popular writer Emile Zola and his pseudoscientific theory of Naturalism, which held such statements as ‘Art is nature seen through a temperament’, and other writers who upheld such philosophies. Instead, Moreas favoured a totally new school, whose aim was “to clothe the idea in the sensual, perceptible form”.
The artist that inarguable bridged the gap for the transition into Symbolism, however, was Paul Gauguin, the ‘post-impressionist’ painter born in Paris. His painting of 1888 Vision after the Sermon) is one key to the symbolist concepts of the symbolic properties beyond the “retinal”, of colour and paint, as well as crucially developing the style called synthetism, or “cloissonisme”. Gauguin also worked closely with the artist Emile Bernard, who explicitly and intentionally rejected his former neo-Impressionist style of painting in1886, after visiting another fellow artist’s studio, in order to obtain the latest scientific theories and “chromatic researches of the theoreticians of optics”, and experienced a sudden change of heart, realising that all his former work was wrong, and destroyed it, later admitting that this “to allow ideas to dominate the technique of painting”. After moving from Paris to a remote rural village in Brittany, he set up the Pont-Aven school in the village of the same name. There, inspired by Gaugin’s painting Vision after the Sermon, the two artists developed this style of painting referred to as synthetism, sought to express an idea or emotion through formal correspondences of line and colour. It was also known as “cloisonnisme”, since its use of rich unmodulated colour contained within thick black contours resembled cloisonné enamelwork, as well as the Japanese prints that were so important to the modern artists of the time. They proposed that an image could combine, hence synthesise, thoughts with material appearances of objects, through colour theory, symbol, sensitivity and “dreaming before nature” . This style of painting greatly influenced many artists, such as the symbolist Nabis group, but also other post-impressionist artists such as the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, who refers to this effect of the accumulation of senses from the painting as smelling of “bacon smoke”, in regard to his The Potato Eaters of 1885.
