Introduction to Symbolism

The move toward abstraction can also be seen in Symbolism, an international movement in art and literature that comprised a loose affiliation of artists making works addressing the irrational fears, desires, and impulses of the human mind. A fascination with the dark recesses of the mind emerged over the last decades of the nineteenth century, encompassing photographic and scientific examinations of the nature of insanity, as well as a popular interest in the spirit world of mediums. Some Symbolist artists sought escape from modern life in irrational worlds of unrestrained emotion as described by authors such as Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), whose terrifying stories of the supernatural were popular across Europe. It is not coincidental that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who compared artistic creation to the process of dreaming, wrote his pioneering The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) during this period.

The Symbolists rejected the values of rationalism and material progress that dominated modern Western culture, choosing instead to explore the nonmaterial realms of emotion, imagination, and spirituality. Ultimately, the Symbolists sought a deeper and more mysterious reality than the one encountered in everyday life, which they conveyed through strange and ambiguous subject matter and stylized forms that suggest hidden and elusive meanings. They transformed appearances in order to give pictorial form to psychic experience, and they often compared their works to dreams.

A vision-like atmosphere pervades the later work of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), an older academic artist whom the Symbolists regarded as a precursor. The Symbolists particularly admired Moreau’s renditions of the biblical Salome, the young Judaean princess who, at the instigation of her mother, Herodias, performed an erotic dance before her stepfather, Herod, and demanded as reward the head of John the Baptist (Mark 6:21-28).

In The Apparition, exhibited at the Salon of 1876, the seductive Salome confronts a vision of the saint’s severed head, which hovers open-eyed in midair, dripping blood yet also radiating holy light. Moreau depicted this sensual and macabre scene and its exotic setting in linear detail, with touches of jewel-like color to create an atmosphere of voluptuous decadence that amplifies Salome’s role as femme fatale who uses her sensuality to destroy her male victim.^[1]