Symbolism (Late 19th Century)

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Description of Symbolism
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Symbolism
European cultural movement that was at its peak in the last two decades of the 19th century, profoundly affecting the visual arts and inextricably bound up with music and literature. Symbolism was first identified as a literary movement by Jean Moréas (1856–1910) in the Symbolist manifesto (‘Le Symbolisme’, Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886). Symbolism in the visual arts was further defined by Albert Aurier as the ‘painting of ideas’ (‘Les Symbolistes’, Rev. Enc., 1 April 1892). Its complex aesthetic was a mix of Platonic-inspired philosophy, mystical and occult doctrines, psychology, linguistics, science, political theory and such aesthetic issues as the relationship between abstraction and representation. While many Symbolists reacted against the materialism of 19th-century science and its implications (positivist philosophy, social Darwinism, artistic Realism), others sought to reconcile modern science with spiritual traditions. Ideas based on the rise of scientific psychology with its emphasis on individual freedom and the great interest in the occult, together with such practices as hypnosis, opened up a realm of psychic experience, which promised access to important realms of knowledge. Symbolism stressed feeling and evocation over definition and fact and emphasized the power of suggestion. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in 1891, ‘To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem that comes from the delight of divining little by little; to suggest it, there is the dream’ (J. Huret: ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’, Le Figaro, 1891). It was felt that empirical science left no room for the spirit; however, psychological theory and occult doctrines explained perception and cognition as symbolic processes and indicated a spiritual path to understanding. These spiritual insights were obtained via intuition, fantasy, imagination and such subjective and irrational experiences as dreams, visions, hypnotism and alchemy. The realm of the irrational was approached through a variety of means, including drugs and such popular synthetic religious and spiritualist movements as theosophy and anthroposophy and the esoteric ideas of Eliphas Lévi (1810–75). Baudelaire’s lines from his poem Correspondance (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) illustrate the belief in the connection between nature and the soul: ‘Nature is a temple of living pillars/where often words emerge, confused and dim;/and man goes through this forest, with/familiar eyes of symbols always watching him.’ All these notions were rooted in Romanticism and were revived later in Surrealism. (hide)

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