Symbolism for beginners: art of the inner world

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In the 1880s some artists grew tired of painting what they could see. Impressionism had captured light, Realism had captured work, and photography could record anything. Symbolist painters and poets wanted something else: dreams, myths, the soul, the invisible. Of all the art movements, this is the one that feels most like a séance, and it is the one in which occultists and painters worked most closely together.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The myths of the circle. Modern How witches use Symbolist images now.

A manifesto for dreams

Historical On 18 September 1886 the poet Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro. The idea was that art should clothe ideas in visible form, not copy nature. Painters across Europe answered: Arnold Böcklin with his Isle of the Dead, Fernand Khnopff with sphinxes and silent women, Jean Delville with visions of souls. Böcklin painted his Isle of the Dead in five versions between 1880 and 1886: a rowing boat carries a white-shrouded figure toward a rocky island of cypresses. Copies hung in middle-class homes across Germany, and Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a tone poem after it in 1909. Khnopff’s I Lock My Door upon Myself (1891), in Munich, takes its title from a poem by Christina Rossetti, the sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, and shows a woman lost in thought among symbols of sleep.

Moreau’s jewels

Gustave Moreau, Saint Cecilia, about 1890 to 1895. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004.475.3). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Gustave Moreau (1826 to 1898) painted saints, sphinxes and Salome in a glitter of jeweled detail. In this late picture, Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music, stands barefoot by a lake at dusk and plays a jeweled lyre, with a thin crescent moon above her and a white lily at her feet. Moreau taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, where his students included Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, and he left his house in Paris to the nation as a museum.

Redon from black to color

Odilon Redon, Bouquet of Flowers, about 1900 to 1905. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (56.50). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Odilon Redon (1840 to 1916) spent his first decades drawing in charcoal: his “noirs”, with floating eyes, spiders with human faces and balloons rising into darkness. Around 1890 he turned to color, and his late pastels and oils of flowers glow as if lit from inside.

Finland and the Kalevala

Historical In Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela turned in the 1890s to the national epic, the Kalevala, painting its heroes and magic with Symbolist intensity and national feeling. Hugo Simberg painted The Wounded Angel (1903), now in the Ateneum in Helsinki: two solemn boys carry a girl angel with a bandaged eye on a stretcher through a bleak landscape. Finns voted it their national painting in 2006. Simberg never explained it, and I love that.

The esoteric angle

Historical From 1892 to 1897 the writer Joséphin Péladan, who called himself “Sâr”, organized six Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris, exhibitions of idealist and mystical art with strict rules against realistic subjects. His Rosicrucianism was his own invention. Delville and Khnopff showed there, and the young composer Erik Satie wrote music for the order in 1892. In London, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 and shaped modern tarot.

Later tradition Symbolist femmes fatales, Salome, the Sphinx, Lilith, became fixed images of dangerous female power. I discuss how that happened to Lilith in the Lilith course.

Modern Symbolist art fills witchy social media today. See Esoteric art for more.

Try it yourself

Find Redon’s charcoal noirs in an online collection, then his late flowers. Write one sentence for each about how it makes you feel. Then write a third: what changed in him, do you think, between the two?

Before and after

Before this: Post-Impressionism.

After this: Art Nouveau.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.