Music composition · Musical Impressionism and Symbolism
Clair de lune
Debussy’s most famous piano piece turns moonlight into an experience of suspended rhythm, changing register, resonance and return rather than a literal musical picture.
Symbolism
Gustave Moreau's mythological visions, Odilon Redon's closed eyes, Stéphane Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings on the rue de Rome — how a group of French writers and painters decided that suggesting something mattered more than describing it.
What Symbolism Was
Symbolism was a movement in poetry and painting that took hold in France in the 1880s and spread across Europe and North America by the end of the century. Its central belief was that art should express an idea or an emotion rather than describe the natural world accurately.[1] A Symbolist painter was not trying to show you what a field looked like at four in the afternoon. He was trying to put a feeling into your head using colour, line and composition.
This put the Symbolists directly at odds with the two movements that dominated French painting before them. Realism and Impressionism both took the visible world as their subject, and the Impressionists in particular prided themselves on recording what the eye actually received. The Symbolists thought that was the wrong job. They returned to the personal, inward approach the Romantics had taken earlier in the nineteenth century, and they filled their pictures with figures from mythology, the Bible and their own imaginations.[2]
The subjects they returned to again and again were love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening and unrequited desire.[2][1] Women appear constantly in Symbolist painting, usually at one of two extremes: the innocent dreamer or the dangerous seductress. Salome, who asked for the head of John the Baptist, and the sphinx, who killed travellers who could not answer her riddle, both became standard subjects.
Where the Name Comes From
The word was applied to the movement by Jean Moréas, a Greek-born poet living in Paris, who published a manifesto in the newspaper Le Figaro in 1886.[2][3] Moréas was writing about poetry, not painting. He argued against the rationalism and materialism he believed had taken over European culture, and he claimed the right of a writer to be purely subjective — to express an idea rather than describe a thing.[2]
He used the term first to describe the work of two poets, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.[1] Within a few years it had been transferred to painters who seemed to be doing something comparable, and by the 1890s it covered writers, painters, printmakers and composers across half a dozen countries.
Suggestion Instead of Description
The clearest statement of what the Symbolists wanted came from Mallarmé, and it is about poetry rather than painting. “To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem… suggestion, that is the dream.”[2][4] Naming a thing outright, in his view, finished it off. Circling it, hinting at it, leaving the reader to arrive at it — that was where the pleasure lived.
Painters took the same principle and applied it to pictures. If a painting stated its subject plainly, it had closed the matter. If it suggested one, the viewer had to complete it. This is why so much Symbolist painting is hard to summarise: a great deal of it is deliberately unresolved, and several of its best-known works refuse to explain themselves.
The Poets
Symbolism began in poetry, and for its first few years that is all it was. Four French poets account for most of it.
Charles Baudelaire, 1821–1867
Baudelaire died before the movement had a name, and the Symbolists claimed him afterwards. The Academy of American Poets states it plainly: Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the three poets who led the next movement in French verse, claimed Baudelaire as their predecessor.[5]
His one great book, Les Fleurs du mal, was published in Paris in 1857 by Poulet-Malassis et de Broise and held a hundred poems; a second edition in February 1861 brought the number to a hundred and twenty-six.[6] In August 1857 Baudelaire was prosecuted for offending religion and public morals. Six poems were condemned and the ban on them was not lifted in France until 1949.[5]
The poem the Symbolists took most from is Correspondances, which argues that the real world and the spiritual world answer each other, and that colours, sounds and scents do the same.[3] The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the printing proofs, corrected in Baudelaire's own hand. On the third proof he took out a capital letter he had earlier added to the word symboles, which is a small thing to watch a poet worry about and a fair sign of how much weight the word was being asked to carry.[6]
Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842–1898
Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18 March 1842 and became the figure the younger Symbolists gathered around, a role he declined to accept. He was voted Prince of Poets in 1896 and denied being the head of any school.[7]
His principle was that a poem should evoke rather than name. He put it in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure, which lies in guessing little by little, and to suggest it is the dream. He told Edgar Degas, who had been struggling with a sonnet, that poems are not made with ideas but with words.[7]
L'Après-midi d'un faune, the poem behind Debussy's orchestral piece, was written in 1865 and not published until April 1876, after one publisher turned it down. Édouard Manet, Mallarmé's closest friend, made four wood-engraved illustrations for that edition and hand-tinted them pink himself to keep the cost down.[8]
Paul Verlaine, 1844–1896
Verlaine was born in Metz on 30 March 1844 and died in Paris on 8 January 1896. He began as a Parnassian, a school committed to formal polish, and ended as the poet the young Symbolists and Decadents venerated.[9] Like Mallarmé, he refused the job of leading them.
His Art poétique, written between 1872 and 1874 and published in the collection Jadis et naguère in 1884, opens by demanding music before everything else, and a preference for the odd-numbered line as vaguer and more soluble in air. Its second stanza is sometimes read as the manifesto of Symbolist style, which is a heavy load for four lines that were written before the movement existed.
He also gave the language a phrase. Les Poètes maudits, a series of short essays begun in 1883 and collected in 1888, introduced Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine himself under the anagram Pauvre Lelian, and the term poète maudit, the cursed poet, is his.[10]
His life with Rimbaud ended in Brussels on 10 July 1873, when Verlaine shot him and wounded him. Verlaine went to prison for two years.[9]
Arthur Rimbaud, 1854–1891
Rimbaud was born at Charleville on 20 October 1854 and met Verlaine at the end of September 1871, when he was sixteen. Almost all of his poetry was written between 1870 and 1875.
Une saison en enfer he dated himself, April to August 1873. It was printed in Brussels and went entirely unnoticed, partly because he could not pay the printer and never collected most of the copies. It was reprinted in 1886 in the review La Vogue.[11] Illuminations was written between 1873 and 1875; he handed the manuscripts to Verlaine at their last meeting in February 1875, and they were published eleven years later, at Félix Fénéon's initiative.[12]
Then he stopped. He was twenty-one. He soldiered, went to Java, and ended as an arms trader in the Horn of Africa, writing letters and documents and no more poems. A tumour in his leg brought him back to Marseille, where the leg was amputated and where he died on 10 November 1891, aged thirty-seven.[13][14]
The Painters Who Came First
Symbolism got its name in 1886, but the painting had started well before that. An older generation had been working in this direction since the 1870s, and in some cases since the 1860s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art names five of them as the groundwork: Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Eugène Carrière and the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, alongside the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones.[2]
None of them called himself a Symbolist at the time, because the word did not yet exist in this sense. They were simply painters who had decided against the subjects their contemporaries were choosing. When the younger generation arrived in the late 1880s looking for an alternative to Impressionism, these were the artists already standing there.
1826–1898
Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau made his name at the Paris Salon of 1864 with Oedipus and the Sphinx, which now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.[15] The painting shows the moment the Greek prince Oedipus faces the sphinx, a creature who asks travellers a riddle and kills those who answer wrongly: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The bones of the people who got it wrong are scattered across the foreground. The answer is a human being, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and uses a stick in old age.[15]
The following year Moreau painted Orphée, which the French state bought from him in 1866 and which is now at the Musée d'Orsay.[16] In the Greek myth, the poet and musician Orpheus is torn apart by the Maenads, who are punishing him for refusing them. Moreau added something the myth does not contain. A young woman in Eastern dress has recovered the poet's head and holds it on his lyre, looking down at it. Her face and his are strangely alike, both with the eyes shut.[16]
Moreau painted biblical, mythological and invented subjects at a moment when French painting was moving hard in the opposite direction, towards scenes of ordinary life. That refusal is what attracted a younger generation to him, Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde among them.[15]
He spent nearly his whole life in the house at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, he used his last years to convert it into a museum, rebuilding whole floors as galleries and hanging thousands of works, and left it to the French state in his will. He died in 1898 and the museum opened in 1903, with his former student Georges Rouault as its first curator.[17][18]
Moreau the Teacher
Moreau trained at the École des Beaux-Arts himself, and the painters who shaped him were Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Chassériau, who admired Delacroix and was Moreau's friend. He travelled in Italy between 1857 and 1859 and came back interested in Byzantine art and the early Italian painters.[19] Criticism of his work was hostile enough that he showed at the Salon only intermittently, though he was elected to the Academy later in life.[19]
In 1892 he became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, and this is where his influence runs furthest. His students included Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, and he taught by drawing out what each of them already had rather than imposing a manner on them.[19] Rouault went on to become the first curator of the museum in Moreau's house.
Fauvism, the movement that broke out in Paris in 1905 around Matisse and his bright, unmixed colour, came partly out of a Symbolist painter's teaching studio. Moreau himself painted sphinxes and Salomes, and he taught the men who would abandon the subject altogether.
1840–1916
Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon worked for years almost entirely in black. He called these works his noirs: charcoal drawings and lithographs of floating eyes, spiders with human faces and heads adrift in empty space. Guardian Spirit of the Waters, made in 1878 and now at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of them, a vast melancholy head hanging in the sky above a few tiny boats.[20]
The Art Institute lists what went into that drawing: various charcoals, with touches of black chalk, stumping, erasing, incising, subtractive sponge work and traces of white chalk, on cream paper he had toned to gold. Redon built these images partly by taking material away rather than laying it down, which is one reason the light in them seems to come from behind the paper.[20]
In the 1890s he began going back to some of those drawings and remaking them in colour.
Les Yeux clos, painted in 1890 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, came out of that process. It is a head with the eyes closed, tilted slightly back, and it is most likely a portrait of his wife, Camille Falte. The museum bought it directly from Redon in 1904.[21] Closed eyes recur throughout his work, and they carry more than one meaning at once — sleep, death, an inner world, something absent, something appearing. Redon set out his thinking in a diary, À soi-même, published in 1922, six years after his death.[21]
1824–1898
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon on 14 December 1824 and died in Paris on 24 October 1898. The Centre des monuments nationaux, which runs the Panthéon, calls him one of the founders of Symbolism.[22] He is the odd one out among the Symbolist painters, because his major works are not in museums at all. They are on walls.
His importance to the movement was technical as much as anything. He simplified forms drastically in order to state an idea clearly, and his muted colours and flat, decorative surfaces gave younger painters a model for getting away from realistic description. Paul Gauguin took a great deal from him, and so did the young Pablo Picasso.[2]
The Panthéon
He painted the life of Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, in two separate campaigns twenty years apart. The Musée d'Orsay records that the first was commissioned in 1874 and finished in 1877, and covers her childhood and her meeting with Saint Germain.[23][22] The second was commissioned in 1893 and finished in 1898, the year he died, and shows her bringing food to a besieged Paris and watching over the sleeping city.[24][22]
One part was never finished by him. A frieze commissioned in 1893 was still only a sketch when he died; the version installed in the building was completed in 1922 by Victor Koos, working from Puvis's drawing and adding the colour.[25] The Musée d'Orsay holds Puvis's own unfinished frieze, in charcoal and sepia on canvas.
The other walls
He finished a mural for the great lecture hall of the new Sorbonne in 1889.[26] The City of Paris commissioned him on 29 January 1889 to decorate a room at the Hôtel de Ville; the final panels, Summer and Winter, were shown at the Salons of 1891 and 1892.[26]
His last major commission went to America. The Boston Public Library holds the only Puvis mural in the United States, installed in 1895 and 1896 across the grand staircase and the entrance to Bates Hall. He was seventy-two and unwilling to make the journey, so he painted the canvases in his studio in France to measurements the architect Charles Follen McKim sent him. McKim also posted him a sample of the yellow Siena marble used in the building so that he could pitch his colours to match it.[27]
How he got the fresco look
The pale, chalky surface that everyone recognises was engineered. The Getty Conservation Institute, which has worked on the Boston murals, lists what he did: a coarse plain-weave linen, a size of animal glue, an extremely thin and absorbent chalk ground, oils drained on blotting paper, paint thinned with turpentine, a great deal of white lead mixed into his colours, and no varnish at the end.[28]
The canvases were then fixed to the wall by marouflage, a paste of white lead in linseed oil spread on both the wall and the back of the canvas, the canvas pressed down with rollers.[28][27] He was painting in oil on cloth in a Paris studio and producing something that reads, from the floor of a public building, as fresco.
1849–1906
Eugène Carrière
Carrière is the least famous of the painters the Metropolitan Museum names among the founders of Symbolism, and the Met illustrates its claim with one of his pictures: The First Communion, painted around 1896 and in its collection. He was born at Gournay on 17 January 1849, studied under Alexandre Cabanel, first showed at the Salon in 1879, and helped found the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Henri Matisse and André Derain both spent time in his studio.[29]
His pictures look as though they are forming out of the canvas or dissolving back into it. The Met describes hazy brushwork and nuanced umber tones producing exactly that effect, and notes that contemporaries who were tired of highly finished realistic painting prized the mistiness. Britannica describes the same quality but calls the tones predominantly grey rather than brown, so the pictures are best described by their softness rather than by a single colour.[29][30]
A critic of the day compared him to his friend Auguste Rodin: Rodin paints in marble, he wrote, and Carrière sculpts with shadow.[31]
Tuesday Evenings at 89 rue de Rome
Stéphane Mallarmé held gatherings at his flat at 89 rue de Rome, in the Batignolles district of the 17th arrondissement, on Tuesday evenings.[32][33] They ran from the 1880s until his death in 1898, and the people who came became known as les Mardistes, from mardi, the French word for Tuesday.[34][32]
The flat was small and the evenings mattered enormously. Writers, painters and musicians came, and for a stretch of the 1880s and 1890s those Tuesday evenings were one of the places where the movement actually happened — where poets met painters and where ideas moved between poetry and painting. Nothing of the gatherings survives at the address, which is a private residence today.
One of the things that came out of it was a piece of music. Claude Debussy attended, and his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of 1894 takes its starting point from Mallarmé's poem L'après-midi d'un faune.[33][35]
The Novel That Made Moreau Famous
In 1884 Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours, a novel about a wealthy recluse named Des Esseintes who withdraws from the world and surrounds himself with art, books and objects chosen entirely for their effect on him. The book became the defining statement of the Decadent movement.[36]
Two paintings by Gustave Moreau sit at the centre of it. Des Esseintes owns Moreau's Salome pictures and spends long passages looking at them.[37] The effect on Moreau's reputation was immediate and enormous. A painter who had been admired by a small circle became notorious, and he became notorious through a novel rather than through an exhibition.
Gauguin Becomes the Leader
The first proper definition of Symbolism as a way of painting, rather than of writing, came in March 1891, when the critic Albert Aurier published an article called Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin in the Mercure de France. Aurier, who was twenty-six and had four years to live, named Gauguin the leader of the Symbolist painters and described his work as ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective and decorative.[38][39][40] The National Galleries of Scotland record that the painting Aurier used to define Symbolism in painting was Gauguin's Vision of the Sermon.[40]
Gauguin's version of Symbolism differed from the older painters'. Where Moreau and Redon escaped into imagined worlds, Gauguin escaped geographically, first to Brittany and eventually to the South Seas, looking for places he believed industrial Europe had not reached.
Pont-Aven
Painters had been going to Pont-Aven in Brittany since about 1850, following a trail opened by American artists. The Musée de Pont-Aven gives the practical reasons alongside the romantic ones: the light on the Breton coast, and sites like the Bois d'Amour, the Trémalo chapel, the harbour and the mills — but also that rooms, studios and models were easy to find and the welcome was warm.[41] Gauguin first went in the summer of 1886 and met Émile Bernard there that year.[39][42]
The museum is careful about what the group actually was. The name Pont-Aven School was applied afterwards, and the circle around Gauguin from 1888 was not a master with his students but a set of artists sharing ideas.[41]
Vision of the Sermon
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), painted at Pont-Aven in 1888, is at the National Galleries of Scotland, which bought it in 1925.[43] Breton women in regional dress have just heard a sermon on the passage in Genesis where Jacob spends a night wrestling an angel, and the wrestling match is happening in front of them against a flat red ground. Gauguin explained it to Vincent van Gogh in a letter: for him the landscape and the fight existed only in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon.[43][44]
He tried to give the painting away and was turned down, and there are two accounts of it. In the same letter, written from Pont-Aven around 26 September 1888, Gauguin says he wanted to give it to the church at Pont-Aven and that of course they did not want it.[44] Sixteen years later Émile Bernard told a different version, in which Gauguin offered it to the priest at Névez, a village nearby, and the priest objected that it was not religious — the enormous bonnets and the peasants' backs filled the canvas while the actual subject was pushed into the distance.[44]
Synthetism, Cloisonnism, and who thought of it first
Two words get used for what Gauguin and his circle were doing, and they are not synonyms. Cloisonnism is the narrower and more technical of the two: flat areas of pure colour bounded by heavy dark outlines, named by analogy with cloisonné enamel. Britannica credits the term to Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, and says Bernard theorised the style at Pont-Aven in 1886.[45][46] Synthetism is the broader idea and the word is Gauguin's: form synthesised with the central idea or feeling of a subject, worked from memory rather than from the thing in front of you.[45][47]
Who got there first is genuinely unsettled, and the institutions do not agree. Britannica says Bernard's Le Pardon predated Vision of the Sermon by a few weeks and that accusations of plagiarism followed, while also saying Gauguin and Bernard reached a similar way of painting at about the same time. The Metropolitan Museum credits the meeting rather than either man, saying Gauguin's encounter with Bernard in 1888 produced the painting. The Musée de Pont-Aven names both as the creators of the school. The National Galleries of Scotland, which owns the picture, does not mention Bernard at all.[48][49][42]
Where Do We Come From?
Gauguin's largest Symbolist work was painted in Tahiti in 1897 and 1898 and is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is nearly four metres wide, painted on coarse burlap, and made during a winter in which Gauguin was quarrelling with the French colonial authorities, running out of money and in severe physical and mental decline. He meant it to be read from right to left, beginning with a sleeping infant and ending with an old woman close to death.[50]
He wanted it to look like a mural. He asked for a plain white frame and painted the corners yellow so the canvas would seem like a fresco decaying at the edges on a golden wall. It was shown in Paris in 1898 at Ambroise Vollard's gallery. Thadée Natanson, who edited La Revue Blanche, called it obscure and hard to grasp and said it invited the viewer to think about the mystery of our destiny.[50]
Describing it, Gauguin echoed Mallarmé. Explaining the picture with known symbols, he said, would freeze the canvas into a melancholy reality, and the question it raised would no longer be a poem.
The Talisman and the Nabis
Paul Sérusier spent the summer of 1888 at Pont-Aven in Brittany, where Gauguin advised him. Maurice Denis later recorded what Gauguin told him while he painted: “How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.”
The result is a small panel, 27 centimetres by 21.5, of a wood, a path, a row of beech trees and a mill, each reduced to a patch of colour. The Metropolitan Museum notes what he painted it on: the lid of a cigar box.[51] Sérusier wrote on the back, “Fait en Octobre 1888, sous la direction de Gauguin par P. Serusier Pont-Aven.” When he returned to Paris that October he showed it to his fellow students at the Académie Julian, who gave it mystical properties and called it Le Talisman. It is now at the Musée d'Orsay, which bought it in 1985 with help from the collector Philippe Meyer.[52]
Those students formed a brotherhood and called themselves the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for prophets; Tate credits the name to the poet Henri Cazalis, who compared them to the prophets who renewed Israel.[53] Institutions do not agree on the year. The Metropolitan Museum says the autumn of 1888, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art say 1889, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France treats the group as running from 1890 to 1900.[51][54][55][56] What is not in dispute is the cause: they had grown frustrated with the strictly representational teaching at the Académie Julian, and Sérusier's small panel gave them a licence they had been looking for. Denis said that in front of it he and his friends felt freed from the idea that painting meant copying.[52]
The sentence that outlived the group
In 1890, aged twenty, Maurice Denis published an article called Définition du néo-traditionnisme in the journal Art et critique, signing it with the pseudonym Pierre Louis. It opens with the line that has been quoted ever since: remember that a painting, before it is a battle horse, a nude woman or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.[57][58]
The date matters, because the sentence is often treated as the Nabis' founding statement and is sometimes dated to the collection Théories, which reprinted it more than twenty years later. Denis wrote it in 1890, two years after Sérusier came back from Brittany with the cigar-box lid.[57]
Who they were
Paul Sérusier, 1864 to 1927, trained as a philosopher before he painted, made very few prints, and wrote a treatise of his own, the ABC of Painting, published in 1921. Maurice Denis, 1870 to 1943, was the group's theorist and its most energetic promoter, and the first of them to illustrate a book, André Gide's Le Voyage d'Urien in 1893.[56]
Pierre Bonnard, 1867 to 1947, was nicknamed the Japanese Nabi for what he took from Japanese prints. His France-Champagne poster was his first print and his first colour lithograph, a technique that had until then been left to commercial work.[56] Édouard Vuillard, 1868 to 1940, worked increasingly in distemper, dry pigment dissolved in hot glue, which became his preferred medium.[54]
Félix Vallotton, 1865 to 1925, arrived in Paris at sixteen and made his name with black-and-white woodcuts that carried his anarchist politics.[59] Aristide Maillol, 1861 to 1944, was the group's sculptor. The two of them were the only Nabis who chose woodcut while the rest worked in colour lithography.[56]
Paul Ranson designed wallpaper and theatre material. Henri-Gabriel Ibels drew the programmes for André Antoine's Théâtre Libre for the 1892 and 1893 season, and was the only one of them to make cabaret posters and song-sheet illustrations. Ker-Xavier Roussel, 1867 to 1944, married Vuillard's sister Marie in 1893 and painted mythological pastorals after 1900.[55][54]
Painters who worked for a living
The Nabis are unusual among the Symbolists because so much of their work was commissioned, printed and used. They made sets, costumes and lithographed programmes for the Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, designs for stained glass, ceramics and wallpaper, posters, book illustrations and decorative panels for private rooms.[56][60]
When the Théâtre de l'Œuvre staged Ubu Roi again in 1898, this time with marionettes, Bonnard made the puppets and Vuillard made the sets.[61]
The group held together for about a decade. The Metropolitan Museum has them exhibiting together until 1899; the Bibliothèque nationale de France reads Denis's group portrait Hommage à Cézanne, which shows the Nabis gathered in Ambroise Vollard's gallery, as marking the end of the brotherhood's decade. Why it broke up is not recorded. Bonnard and Vuillard went on to develop the intimate domestic painting they are now best known for.[51]
The Salon de la Rose+Croix
Joséphin Péladan, who lived from 1858 to 1918, was a writer and critic who founded a Rosicrucian order in 1889, broke with it in 1890, and set up a rival one. After publishing a book called Istar he took the title Sâr, which he said had come down to him from an ancestor who was a Babylonian king, added the forename Mérodack, and dressed in oriental robes for the rest of his life.[62]
From 1892 he ran an annual exhibition in Paris for artists whose work leaned towards the mystical and the visionary. The first Salon de la Rose+Croix opened at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, the dealer better known for the Impressionists, and ran from 10 March to 10 April 1892.[63][64] Sixty French and foreign artists showed, and twenty-two thousand people came to see it, with the prelude to Wagner's Parsifal playing.[62]
There were six salons, one a year until 1897, and they moved around: the second was at the Palais du Champ de Mars and the last at the Galerie Georges Petit.[65] They worked as a crossroads for a style spread across a continent, drawing artists from Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. Fernand Khnopff, Jean Delville, Ferdinand Hodler, Jan Toorop, Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Filiger, Félix Vallotton and Georges Rouault all exhibited — Rouault being Gustave Moreau's student, who would later run his teacher's museum.[66][63]
What Péladan would and would not hang
Péladan published rules, and they describe the movement's taste more exactly than any critic managed. The Order, he wrote, favours first the Catholic Ideal and Mysticism, then Legend, Myth, Allegory, the Dream, the paraphrase of great poetry and all Lyricism, and prefers work with a mural-like character as being of superior essence.[67]
The list of what he refused is longer and much stranger. Out went history painting, patriotic and military painting, all representations of contemporary life whether private or public, and the portrait unless it could not be dated by its costume. Out went all rustic scenes, all landscape except landscape composed in the manner of Poussin, all seascapes and sailors, anything humorous, merely picturesque orientalism, all domestic animals and anything to do with sport. And out went flowers, still life and fruit, which he called exercises that painters ordinarily have the effrontery to exhibit.[67]
A separate rule barred works by women from the Salon. Women were permitted to take part in the musical and theatrical performances that accompanied it.[67]
The Guggenheim, which mounted an exhibition on the salons in 2017, notes that the art shown did not always obey these rules.[67]
How it ended
Péladan closed the series himself after the sixth salon in 1897, and did it with some grace. He laid down his arms, he wrote, because the formula of art he had defended was now accepted everywhere.[62]
Symbolism on the Stage
Symbolism reached the theatre through one company. The Théâtre de l'Œuvre was founded in Paris in 1893 by Aurélien Lugné, who called himself Lugné-Poe in homage to the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, together with the critic Camille Mauclair and the painter Édouard Vuillard.[68]
Having a painter among the founders mattered. The company used the Symbolist painters to make its sets, posters and programmes. Much of what survives from those productions is therefore in museum print collections rather than theatre archives.
Its most notorious night was 10 December 1896, when the company staged Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi at the Nouveau-Théâtre. Jarry designed the programme himself, a lithograph printed on orange-pink paper; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds a copy.[69] The play opens with an obscenity and proceeds through a grotesque parody of Macbeth performed in the manner of a puppet show. It ran for a single public performance.[69]
Where Symbolism Was Printed
Much of the movement lived in small magazines rather than on gallery walls. Two Paris reviews, La Plume and above all La Revue Blanche, launched the careers of the Nabis. They did more than praise the painters in articles: they published the artists' own work in their pages, and in some cases exhibited it on their premises.[70]
La Revue Blanche took its visual identity from Nabi work. Its pages carried portraits, tailpieces and advertisements drawn by Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Ranson, and later by young Fauves including Kees van Dongen. In 1892, having just started its own publishing house, the magazine asked Vuillard and Maurice Denis for frontispieces, Vuillard for Maurice Beaubourg's Les Nouvelles passionnées and Denis for Édouard Dujardin's La Réponse de la bergère au berger.[70]
La Plume ran an exhibition of its own called the Salon des Cent, the only series of its kind on the Left Bank, and Bonnard, Denis and Henri-Gabriel Ibels showed there between 1894 and 1896.[70] For a painter in Paris in the 1890s, a commission from a literary magazine was an ordinary part of the job.
Symbolism in Music
Composers were part of this from early on. The Palazzetto Bru Zane, which specialises in French Romantic music, notes that Schönberg, Bartók, Fauré, Dukas and above all Claude Debussy all went through a Symbolist phase.[71]
Debussy and Mallarmé
Debussy started attending Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings around 1887, when he was twenty-five. The Musée départemental Stéphane Mallarmé, which owns the dining table those evenings happened around, lists him among the best-known guests alongside Paul Claudel, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Jarry, Paul Valéry and James Whistler.[33]
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune came out of that connection. Debussy worked on it between 1892 and 1894 and finished it in October 1894; it was first performed in Paris on 22 December 1894 at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique, conducted by Gustave Doret.[72][73][74] Mallarmé had suggested that Debussy write incidental music for the poem, and what survives is the prelude to a larger piece that was never completed. Debussy called it a free illustration of Mallarmé's poem.[35]
The audience demanded an encore. The critics were cooler, one of them writing that the piece was amusing to compose but not at all to listen to.[73]
Mallarmé's own response is often described as a letter. It was not. He gave Debussy a copy of the poem inscribed with a four-line verse, telling the composer to listen to all the light Debussy would breathe into the faun's flute.[74] He is also recorded saying that he had expected nothing like it, and that the music carried his poem further into nostalgia and light than his own words had.[72][73]
Pelléas et Mélisande, and a furious playwright
Debussy's only completed opera sets a Symbolist play, Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. He got Maeterlinck's permission at the end of the summer of 1893 and finished the score in August 1895. It was first staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 30 April 1902, conducted by André Messager, with Jean Périer as Pelléas and Mary Garden as Mélisande.[75][76]
Maeterlinck wanted his partner, the singer Georgette Leblanc, in the title role, and she was passed over. Two days before the opening he published a violent article about it, and wrote that the Pelléas in question had become a stranger to him, almost an enemy, and that stripped of any control over his own work he was reduced to hoping its failure would be prompt and resounding. He was not persuaded otherwise until 1920, two years after Debussy was dead.[75]
The first-night audience did not help. Mary Garden remembered afterwards that they were performing a poetic drama while the house tittered as though it were at the Folies-Bergère.[75]
Erik Satie and the Rose+Croix
Erik Satie played piano at the Chat Noir cabaret, where he met Debussy and became his friend.[77] He also joined Joséphin Péladan's Rose+Croix order and wrote music for it. Péladan asked him for music to accompany a recited text, and Satie's three preludes for Le Fils des étoiles were first performed at the Rose+Croix salon on 19 March 1892; the programme described them as admirably oriental.[78] His Première Pensée Rose+Croix dates from 1891.
He broke with the Salon soon after. The Guggenheim notes that he composed Vexations in 1893 immediately after that break, and that nobody knows whether he meant it to be played at all or intended it as a joke at the expense of Péladan's mysticism.[66]
Is this Symbolist or Impressionist music?
Both labels get used and institutions do not agree. The Bru Zane's position is the most useful: Symbolism and Impressionism overlap because both rely on suggestion rather than description, and the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune can be considered Symbolist in inspiration but already Impressionist in realisation.[71] The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonie de Paris avoid labelling Debussy at all.
Outside France
Symbolism began in France but did not stay there. Tate describes it as an international phenomenon with three especially prominent centres: France, where it names Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin; Belgium, where it names Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville; and Britain, where it names Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, George Frederic Watts and Aubrey Beardsley.[1]
Norway: Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch spent time in Paris in Symbolist circles before settling in Germany in the early 1890s. His subjects were not mythological or exotic. They were the anxieties of ordinary modern life, and his work is sometimes described as Symbolic Naturalism rather than Symbolism.[2]
Almost every canvas Munch painted between 1893 and 1902 belongs to a series he called the Frieze of Life, dealing with illness, loneliness, despair and the suffering that comes with love. The Scream, painted in 1893 and held by the Munch Museum in Oslo, is the best-known single image of that state of mind.[2]
Belgium: Les XX, Khnopff and Ensor
Brussels had its own avant-garde society. Les XX, meaning the Twenty, ran from 1883 to 1893 and set out to promote new art across Europe. Octave Maus was its secretary, and between Les XX and its successor La Libre Esthétique he helped shape the Belgian and international avant-garde from 1884 to 1914.[79] Critics treated the group harshly and it disbanded after a decade.
Paris and Brussels traded work in both directions. Georges Seurat showed A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at the Les XX exhibition of 1887.[79]
Fernand Khnopff, born at Grembergen in 1858 and died in Brussels in 1921, is the Belgian painter Tate names first. The Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique hold his Des caresses of 1896, a long horizontal panel just over a metre and a half wide.[80]
James Ensor, 1860 to 1949, built his pictures out of masks and carnival crowds. His largest is Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, painted in 1888 and now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, a canvas over four metres wide showing Christ entering the modern city in the middle of a Mardi Gras parade, surrounded by what the Getty describes as a sea of masks, frauds, clowns and caricatures.[81] The haloed figure of Christ is partly a self-portrait. Les XX, the society Ensor had helped found, rejected the painting, and it was not shown in public until 1929.[81]
Britain: Burne-Jones and Beardsley
Edward Burne-Jones, 1833 to 1898, painted King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid in 1884; it is at Tate Britain.[82] What matters about the picture is where it travelled. Tate records that when it was shown at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1889, Burne-Jones became known across Europe, and it went on to inspire Symbolist artists from Fernand Khnopff to Pablo Picasso.[83]
Aubrey Beardsley, 1872 to 1898, drew the illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé. The Victoria and Albert Museum dates the first version of The Toilette of Salome to 1893.[84] Tate files Beardsley under Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Fin de Siècle and Decadence at once, which is a fair description of how closely those categories sat together in the 1890s.[85]
Austria: Gustav Klimt
In Vienna, Symbolism arrived late and flourished in the work of Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession. Klimt's heavily ornamented surfaces show how close Symbolism had come to Art Nouveau by the turn of the century, and the two movements overlap considerably in the decorative arts.[2]
Symbolism and Art Nouveau
The two movements overlap so much that the same artist often belongs to both. The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it directly: Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, the Nabis in particular, had close ties to Art Nouveau, and the same designers carried those painting styles into furniture, interiors, architecture and pattern.[86]
Art Nouveau got its name from a shop. In December 1895 Siegfried Bing, a German-born dealer working in Paris, opened a gallery called L'Art Nouveau to sell contemporary decoration, and the gallery is credited with popularising both the style and the term. The style then travelled through magazines rather than galleries — The Studio, The Yellow Book and The Savoy in Britain, La Plume in France, Die Jugend and Dekorative Kunst in Germany.[86]
One subject travelled a long way. Moreau painted Salome repeatedly from the 1860s. Oscar Wilde, who was among the younger admirers Moreau attracted, wrote a play called Salomé. Aubrey Beardsley drew the illustrations for it, and the Victoria and Albert Museum dates the first version of The Toilette of Salome to 1893. The Metropolitan Museum describes Beardsley's drawings for The Studio as Symbolist-inspired.[86] The same subject passes from a Paris studio to an English play to a black-and-white print, and ends up as one of the earliest signs of Art Nouveau taste in England.
What Symbolism Led To
Pablo Picasso first saw Gauguin's work on a visit to Paris in 1901 and took up Symbolism during his early years in Barcelona. The Blue Period paintings, with their downcast figures and drastically simplified shapes, belong to it: The Blind Man's Meal of 1903, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a clear example.[2]
The larger consequence was structural. Once painters accepted that a picture could express an idea instead of recording an appearance, the requirement to depict anything at all became negotiable. That shift fed directly into German Expressionism and into abstraction, and it is the main reason a movement full of sphinxes and severed heads matters to the history of modern art.[2]
Who Showed It and Who Sold It
A movement needs somewhere to hang. For the Symbolists and the Nabis in Paris that meant two dealers in particular, neither of them grand.
Le Barc de Boutteville held exhibitions twice a year from 1891 to 1897. The first, in 1891, was called the Exhibition of Impressionist and Symbolist Painters, and Pierre Bonnard showed there.[87] Maurice Denis and Émile Bernard both made prints for its catalogues.
Ambroise Vollard rented a small shop at 37 rue Laffitte in September 1893 and became the most consequential dealer of the period.[88] He gave Paul Cézanne his first solo exhibition in November 1895, bought more than a hundred works by Odilon Redon between 1894 and 1909, and became Paul Gauguin's principal dealer in 1900. Maurice Denis started writing to him in 1893 and introduced him to the Nabis; Vollard gave them large exhibitions in 1897 and again in 1898, and commissioned colour lithograph albums from them.[88][89]
Vollard's first artist's book, published in 1900, was a volume of Paul Verlaine's poems, Parallèlement, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard. A Symbolist poet's verse and a Nabi painter's lithographs, bound together and sold by the dealer who showed them both.[88]
Where to See Symbolist Art in Paris
The Musée d'Orsay holds the core of the French material. Redon's Les Yeux clos and Sérusier's Le Talisman hang in the Galerie Françoise Cachin on the upper level. Moreau's Orphée and Galatée and Puvis de Chavannes's Panthéon frieze belong to the museum but are not always on display, so check the collection pages before making the trip for one particular picture.
The Musée Gustave Moreau is the best single room of it in the city. It is the painter's own house at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement, holding some fourteen thousand works arranged much as he left them, with drawings stored in the swinging cabinet panels he designed for them. André Breton later called it the place he loved most in Paris.
Puvis de Chavannes's murals on the life of Saint Geneviève are in the Panthéon, in the 5th arrondissement, and can be seen with ordinary admission. Mallarmé's flat at 89 rue de Rome is a private residence and there is nothing to see beyond the front of the building.
Major Works of Symbolism
Music composition · Musical Impressionism and Symbolism
Suite bergamasque
A four-movement piano suite in which Debussy looks back to dances and courtly elegance while quietly remaking harmony, rhythm and atmosphere for the twentieth century.
Music composition · Symbolism and musical modernism
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Debussy’s languorous orchestral prelude begins with a flute phrase that weakens ordinary tonal certainty and turns Mallarmé’s suggestive poem into a landmark of musical modernism.
Music composition · Symbolism and musical modernism
Pelléas et Mélisande
Debussy’s only completed opera turns Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist drama into an inward musical world where speech, silence and orchestral color reveal what the characters cannot explain directly.
Music composition · Symbolism and musical Impressionism
Nocturnes
Three orchestral studies in changing perception: clouds crossing an unmoving sky, the pulse and procession of a festival, and moonlit sea heard through a wordless women’s chorus.
Music composition · Modernism, Musical Impressionism and Symbolism
La Mer
Debussy’s three symphonic sketches turn the sea into an orchestral study of emergence, motion, light, force and instability rather than a literal sequence of painted waves.
Symbolism connections
Writers and artists
Painter · Educator
Gustave Moreau
Painter · Printer
Odilon Redon
Poet
Stéphane Mallarmé
Poet · Critic
Paul Verlaine
Poet · Critic
Charles Baudelaire
Poet
Arthur Rimbaud
Painter · Sculptor
Paul Gauguin
Painter · Author
Maurice Denis
Painter · Illustrator
Pierre Bonnard
Painter · Printmaker
Édouard Vuillard
Painter · Printmaker
Edvard Munch
Musician · Critic
Claude Debussy
Author · Playwright
Oscar Wilde
Timeline
1857
Charles Baudelaire publishes Les Fleurs du mal in Paris. He is prosecuted in August for offending religion and public morals, and six poems are condemned.
1864
Gustave Moreau shows Oedipus and the Sphinx at the Paris Salon and establishes his reputation.
1865
Moreau paints Orphée; the French state buys it from him the following year. Stéphane Mallarmé writes L'Après-midi d'un faune.
1874
Puvis de Chavannes is commissioned to paint the life of Saint Geneviève in the Panthéon; he finishes the first campaign in 1877.
1875
Mallarmé moves to 89 rue de Rome, where he holds his Tuesday evenings for the next twenty years.
1876
L'Après-midi d'un faune is published in April with four illustrations by Édouard Manet, hand-tinted pink by Manet himself.
1878
Odilon Redon draws Guardian Spirit of the Waters, one of the charcoal noirs.
1884
Joris-Karl Huysmans publishes À rebours, whose central character is obsessed with Moreau's Salome paintings.
1886
Jean Moréas publishes his Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September, describing the poetry of Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.
1888
Paul Sérusier paints Le Talisman at Pont-Aven under Gauguin's direction in October, on the lid of a cigar box, and shows it at the Académie Julian in Paris.
1888
Gauguin paints Vision of the Sermon and offers it to a Breton church, which refuses it; the Nabis form in Paris.
1890
Maurice Denis, aged twenty, publishes Définition du néo-traditionnisme in Art et critique under the pseudonym Pierre Louis. Redon paints Les Yeux clos.
1891
Albert Aurier defines Symbolism as a way of painting in the Mercure de France in March and names Gauguin its leader. Le Barc de Boutteville begins twice-yearly exhibitions.
1892
The first Salon de la Rose+Croix runs at the Galerie Durand-Ruel from 10 March to 10 April; sixty artists show and twenty-two thousand people come.
1892
Moreau becomes a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, where his students include Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault.
1893
Lugné-Poe founds the Théâtre de l'Œuvre with Camille Mauclair and Édouard Vuillard. Ambroise Vollard opens his shop on the rue Laffitte.
1893
Edvard Munch paints The Scream, part of the Frieze of Life series he worked on until 1902.
1894
Debussy completes Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune; it is first performed in Paris on 22 December, conducted by Gustave Doret.
1895
Siegfried Bing opens a gallery in Paris called L'Art Nouveau in December, giving that movement its name.
1896
The Théâtre de l'Œuvre stages Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi at the Nouveau-Théâtre on 10 December, for a single public performance.
1897
Péladan closes the Rose+Croix salons after the sixth. Moreau leaves his house on the rue de La Rochefoucauld to the French state.
1898
Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes and Mallarmé all die. Gauguin finishes Where Do We Come From? in Tahiti.
1902
Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, after Maeterlinck's Symbolist play, opens at the Opéra-Comique on 30 April.
1903
The Musée Gustave Moreau opens to the public in January, with Georges Rouault as its first curator.
Symbolism: frequently asked questions
What is Symbolism in art?
Symbolism is a movement that began in France in the 1880s and held that a work of art should express an idea or an emotion rather than accurately describe the visible world. Symbolist painters used colour, line and composition to produce a feeling in the viewer, and took their subjects from mythology, the Bible and their own imaginations rather than from everyday life.
Who started Symbolism?
The poet Jean Moréas named the movement in a manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1886, writing about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. In painting there was no single founder: Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon had been working in this direction since the 1860s and 1870s, and the critic Albert Aurier named Paul Gauguin the leader of Symbolist painting in 1891.
What is the difference between Symbolism and Impressionism?
The Impressionists painted what they saw and tried to record visual sensation accurately. The Symbolists rejected that aim and painted what they imagined or felt. The two movements overlapped in time in Paris and several artists knew each other, but their goals were opposed: an Impressionist painting is about appearance, a Symbolist painting is about an idea.
Who were the main Symbolist painters?
In France, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Eugène Carrière and Paul Gauguin. Outside France, Edvard Munch in Norway, Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor in Belgium, Jan Toorop in the Netherlands, Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, Arnold Böcklin in Switzerland, Gustav Klimt in Austria, and Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley in Britain.
Where can I see Symbolist art in Paris?
The Musée d'Orsay holds Moreau's Orphée, Redon's Les Yeux clos and Sérusier's Le Talisman. The Musée Gustave Moreau at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement is the painter's own house, which he left to the state in 1897 and which opened as a museum in 1903. Puvis de Chavannes's murals on the life of Saint Geneviève are in the Panthéon.
What is the difference between Symbolism and Art Nouveau?
Symbolism is about subject matter and Art Nouveau is about design, and the same artists often worked in both. The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that Symbolism, the Nabis in particular, had close ties to Art Nouveau, and the same designers carried those painting styles into furniture, interiors and pattern. Art Nouveau took its name from a Paris gallery called L'Art Nouveau, opened by the dealer Siegfried Bing in December 1895.
Was Symbolism only painting?
No. It began in poetry with Jean Moréas's 1886 manifesto, and it ran through the theatre and music as well. The Théâtre de l'Œuvre, founded in Paris in 1893, staged Symbolist plays with sets by the painters. Claude Debussy set Mallarmé's poem as the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune in 1894 and Maurice Maeterlinck's play as the opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, and Erik Satie wrote music for Joséphin Péladan's Rose+Croix salons.
What was the Salon de la Rose+Croix?
An annual Paris exhibition for mystical and visionary art, run by the writer Joséphin Péladan from 1892 to 1897. The first opened at the Galerie Durand-Ruel on 10 March 1892, showed sixty artists and drew twenty-two thousand visitors. Péladan published rules banning history painting, military subjects, scenes of contemporary life, landscape other than in the manner of Poussin, humour, domestic animals, flowers and still life. A separate rule barred works by women, though women took part in the accompanying concerts and performances.
Why is Symbolism important?
It broke the assumption that painting had to describe something visible. Once artists accepted that a picture could carry an idea instead of recording an appearance, the step to painting that depicts nothing at all became possible. Symbolism fed directly into German Expressionism and into abstraction, and Pablo Picasso's Blue Period came out of it.
References
References
The sources below include histories, manifestos, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document Symbolism, its development, and the artists and works associated with it.
4↑La poesie symboliste
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
8↑Stephane Mallarme and Edouard Manet, L'apres-midi d'un faune
WebsitePrinceton University Library (Graphic Arts)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
10↑Les Poetes maudits
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
11↑Une saison en enfer
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
12↑Les Illuminations
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
13↑Rimbaud, le poete aux semelles de vent
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
14↑Arthur Rimbaud
WebsiteAcademy of American PoetsUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
17↑Musée Gustave Moreau — official site
WebsiteMusée Gustave Moreau, ParisUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
18↑Biography of Gustave Moreau — Musée Gustave Moreau
WebsiteMusée Gustave Moreau, ParisUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
23↑La Foi, l'Esperance, la Charite veillant sur sainte Genevieve au berceau
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
24↑Sainte Genevieve ravitaillant Paris
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
25↑Frise destinee a la decoration du Pantheon
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
30↑Eugene Carriere
WebsiteEncyclopaedia BritannicaUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
31↑Eugene Carriere, Self-Portrait
WebsiteThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
34↑Stephane Mallarme
WebsiteAcademy of American PoetsUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
36↑Decadence
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
37↑Gustave Moreau, The Apparition
WebsiteMusee national Gustave MoreauUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
38↑Gauguin Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago
WebsiteArt Institute of ChicagoUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
46↑Emile Bernard
WebsiteEncyclopaedia BritannicaUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
47↑Synthetism
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
48↑Vision of the Sermon
WebsiteEncyclopaedia BritannicaUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
49↑Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
WebsiteThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
53↑Nabis (art term)
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
58↑Denis, Maurice
WebsiteMuseo Nacional Thyssen-BornemiszaUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
59↑Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet
WebsiteThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
60↑Nabi (glossary)
WebsiteThe National Gallery, LondonUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
61↑Affiches de theatres et de cafes-concerts
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
64↑Catalogue du Salon de la Rose + Croix: Geste esthetique, 1892
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (Gallica)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
65↑Repertoire des catalogues de Salons
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
68↑The Theatre de l'Oeuvre (1893-1900): The Birth of Modern Theatre
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
76↑Pelleas et Melisande
WebsitePalazzetto Bru Zane (Bru Zane Mediabase)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
77↑Erik Satie
WebsitePalazzetto Bru Zane (Bru Zane Mediabase)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
78↑Journee Erik Satie, programme booklet
WebsiteCite de la musique / Philharmonie de ParisUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
80↑Fernand Khnopff, Des caresses, 1896
WebsiteMusees royaux des Beaux-Arts de BelgiqueUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
82↑Edward Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
83↑Edward Burne-Jones: Exhibition Guide
WebsiteTate BritainUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
84↑The Toilette of Salome I, print by Aubrey Beardsley
WebsiteVictoria and Albert MuseumUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
85↑Aubrey Beardsley, 1872-1898
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
87↑Pierre Bonnard, Femmes au jardin : femme a la pelerine
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
89↑Ambroise Vollard, Modern Art Index Project
WebsiteThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonard A. Lauder Research CenterUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
90Galatee
WebsiteMusee d'OrsayUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
91Gustave Moreau — biographical record
Official recordThe British MuseumUsed forOfficial record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
92Gustave Moreau
BiographyFlammarion, 1994Used forBiographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Symbolism.
93À rebours
NovelCharpentier, 1884Used forPrimary text included as part of the documented record for Symbolism.
94Odilon Redon
WebsiteEncyclopaedia BritannicaUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
95Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916 — exhibition catalogue
Exhibition catalogueThe Art Institute of Chicago / Harry N. Abrams, 1994Used forCatalogue scholarship used to verify attribution, provenance, chronology, and interpretive context for Symbolism.
96Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon — MoMA exhibition press release
WebsiteThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
97Odilon Redon — artist record
Official recordMusée d’OrsayUsed forOfficial record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
98Symbolism — Debussy in Context
EssaysCambridge University Press, 2024Used forPublished analysis and historical context used in preparing the Symbolism page.
99Paul Verlaine
WebsiteAcademy of American PoetsUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
100Le Manifeste du symbolisme
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
101Chez Mallarme : le cenacle de la rue de Rome
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (BnF Essentiels)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Symbolism page.
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Why these sources are here
These references provide the documented foundation for this movement's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
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