Symbolism should be regarded less as an art movement and more as a somewhat nebulous state of mind that enveloped the arts and letters throughout much of Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of World War I. (Such limits in time are never quite precise, of course.) It included painters and sculptors but also poets and writers—even Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential philosophers of the day, occasionally chose to write in a singularly symbolistic tone. Symbolism had its forerunners, to be sure: Gustave Moreau was exhibiting paintings evidencing this mood as early as 1867. We might look even further back to such figures as William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, or the American painter Thomas Cole. All these artists seem to foreshadow something of the Symbolist spirit. The Symbolists can be regarded as heirs of the Romantic movement, which was characterized by an interest in dreams (also to be found in Symbolism), and by a mystic belief in nature (generally replaced by an emphasis on artificiality).
One thing is certain: This nebulous spirit was a product of the industrial world. Most Symbolist art was largely created in Europe, in the cities of Glasgow, Stockholm, Gdansk, Lodz, Trieste, Florence, Barcelona, Paris, and London.
Over a century has passed since this movement made its appearance, first in France, then in other European countries. For nearly forty years, it was representative of the dominant mood in European art. Art historians in our own century, however, perplexed by its diversity and at times repelled by its content, have sidestepped the theoretical questions raised by this phenomenon. We must try to understand the faintly absurd aspect of Symbolist art. But to shed some light on this decadent, affected, and sometimes poignant world, we will have to forgo both self-indulgent sentiment and overly stern principles.
Symbolist art can offer some dazzling insights. Neither Ensor nor Munch nor Kubin nor Redon strikes us as laughable in any way, not because of what we know of their lives, but because of what their lives brought to their art: an inner tension rather than a pose, deeply experienced anguish rather than formal principles. It is these qualities that make their work the first fruit of modernity.
What characterizes the Symbolist period? What force generated that dense throng of artists we refer to as the Symbolists? And what caused it to appear quite suddenly on the stage of art around 1880 and remain there until at least 1914?
Symbolist art can be regarded as a reflection of the breakdown in the patterns of symbolic representation in industrial Europe, and predominantly in countries of Catholic tradition, a breakdown provoked by the rapid changes society was then undergoing. One fact is clear: The age was marked by unprecedented social, economic, and intellectual mutations whose rapidity and extent were often felt to be excessive. Since then, of course, even greater transformations have occurred, but even today, a full century later, we can perceive the effects of such changes in our own society's acute social and spiritual distress.
Symbolism, as I hope to show, was the expression of a genuine crisis of Western culture. This crisis is still with us today, in an even more exacerbated form, which is why, once we have set this movement into proper perspective, we may even come
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