An island for the dead
Florence, April 1880. In the studio of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, the widow Marie Berna saw an unfinished picture: a small rocky island in a still sea, with dark cypresses and burial chambers in the rock. She ordered a version of her own, and at her request Böcklin added a boat carrying a figure shrouded in white beside a coffin. Böcklin himself called it “a dream picture”. The picture tells us nothing more.
By 1886 Böcklin had painted five versions of the Isle of the Dead; a sixth followed in 1901, painted together with his son Carlo. It became one of the most popular pictures of its time, hanging as a reproduction in countless middle-class living rooms. Sergei Rachmaninoff composed a symphonic poem after it in 1909. The third version of 1883 was later owned by Adolf Hitler; today it hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
A manifesto in the newspaper
The term comes from literature. On 18 September 1886 the poet Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto in the newspaper Le Figaro. Art, he argued, should not describe, but clothe ideas in sensuous form. The models were Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote that to name an object is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment of a poem.
Painters carried this attitude into images. They turned against Realism, which showed only what one sees, and against Impressionism, which stopped at the impression of light.
Paris: Moreau, Puvis and Redon
Gustave Moreau painted biblical and mythological scenes full of jewels, ornament and shimmering colour. His pictures of Salome made the seductive and deadly woman a leitmotif of the era. He bequeathed his Paris house, with hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings, to the state; it is now a museum.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted quiet, flat pictures in pale colours that look like faded frescoes. His Poor Fisherman of 1881 was admired by younger painters such as Gauguin. Odilon Redon at first drew floating eyes, heads and fantastic creatures in black charcoal, which he called his “noirs”. Later he turned to glowing colour and flower pictures.
Brussels, Munich, Vienna
Symbolism was particularly strong in Belgium. The artists’ group Les XX, founded in Brussels in 1883, showed the international avant-garde. Fernand Khnopff painted still, cool images of women and enigmatic sphinxes. In Munich, Franz von Stuck became famous with his picture Sin, a woman with a serpent against a dark ground; his artist’s villa is now a museum. The Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler painted rhythmically arranged figures embodying the ages of life, sleep and death. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt and his allies founded the Secession in 1897, and its early art was deeply shaped by Symbolism.
Woman as enigma
A central motif of Symbolism is the “femme fatale”, the seductive, dangerous woman: Salome, the Sphinx, Medusa, Eve. Art historians today also read these pictures as an expression of male anxieties at a time when women were increasingly demanding education, professions and rights.
Why it still matters
Symbolism restored the inner, unconscious and enigmatic to painting. Art Nouveau and Expressionism took up its themes, and the Surrealists revered Gustave Moreau as a forerunner. Its images of death, dream and longing for another world resonate in film, fantasy and popular culture.
Further reading
- Hans H. Hofstätter: Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (1965, in German).
- Michael Gibson: Symbolism (1995).