Symbolism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 18 September 1886, the poet Jean Moreas published a manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro that gave a name, Symbolism, to a set of ideas that had already been visible in painting for at least a decade without one. Moreas wrote primarily about poetry, arguing against both Romanticism's direct emotional statement and Naturalism's documentary observation in favor of ideas clothed in sensuous form, images that suggested a private, often mystical meaning rather than describing an external scene. Painters read the manifesto as confirmation of a direction some of them had already been pursuing on their own terms. Gustave Moreau had been painting jewel toned, densely worked mythological and biblical scenes since the 1860s that treated ancient story as a vehicle for interior, almost hallucinatory states rather than historical illustration. Odilon Redon had spent the 1880s producing charcoal drawings and lithographs, his noirs, built from dream logic rather than observed reality. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, working in a completely different register, flattened space and simplified figures into mural-like allegories that painters as different as Gauguin and Seurat both separately cited as an influence. None of the three painters used the word Symbolism to describe their own work before 1886. All three were folded into the movement almost immediately afterward, which is part of why Symbolism's visual boundaries have always been argued rather than settled: the name arrived after the practice, describing a tendency several painters had reached independently rather than a program any of them had agreed to in advance.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No painter tests the line between Symbolism and Post-Impressionism harder than Paul Gauguin, and art historians have not settled which side of it he belongs on, because the honest answer may be that the question assumes a line more solid than the historical record supports. Gauguin's Post-Impressionist credentials are not in doubt: he worked alongside Cezanne and van Gogh, shared their reaction against Impressionism's dissolving of form into optical sensation, and pursued his own version of their shared project, using color and simplified form to construct rather than merely record. But paintings from his Pont-Aven and Tahiti periods, The Vision After the Sermon (1888) foremost among them, stage explicitly symbolic, non-naturalistic content, a congregation experiencing a Biblical vision as literal, shared reality inside the painting's own space, that reads far closer to Moreau's or Redon's interior mythologies than to Cezanne's still lifes or van Gogh's wheat fields. The Nabis, a younger group including Maurice Denis and Paul Serusier who took Gauguin's flattened, symbolic Pont-Aven manner as their own starting point, are read by most historians as Symbolists working in a Post-Impressionist formal vocabulary, which is itself a fair description of the overlap rather than a resolution of it. This atlas records Gauguin under both movements rather than forcing a single answer, on the view that a boundary genuinely disputed among specialists is better represented as a live disagreement than as a settled classification.