What Is Symbolism in Art?

Symbolism was a broad artistic tendency that placed the inner world of the artist and viewer above the objective appearance of nature.

Where Realism and Naturalism often emphasized observable reality, Symbolist artists were interested in what could not easily be seen: dreams, memories, fears, spiritual experiences, fantasies, desires and abstract ideas.

The movement therefore did not have one single visual style. Some Symbolist artists used highly detailed and elaborate imagery, while others preferred simplified forms, unusual colours, mysterious spaces or almost abstract compositions.

What united them was a shared interest in suggestion. A painting did not necessarily need to explain its meaning. It could create an emotional or psychological response and allow the viewer to make associations.

The Museum of Modern Art describes Symbolism as an international avant-garde movement that began in France and spread through Europe and North America during the final decades of the 19th century. Symbolist artists reacted against the rationalism and materialism of their culture by creating works concerned with emotions and ideas rather than objective naturalism.

When Did Symbolism Begin?

Symbolism emerged during the 1880s, although its artistic foundations had been developing for years.

The movement initially developed as a French literary movement. In 1886, poet Jean Moréas published a manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro that helped establish the term Symbolism as a recognized literary and aesthetic movement.

Writers and poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé played a particularly important role in the intellectual environment surrounding Symbolism. Their emphasis on suggestion, subjective experience and relationships between words, sensations and ideas strongly influenced visual artists.

Painting soon developed its own Symbolist vocabulary. The movement drew upon artists who were already working outside the dominant naturalistic tradition, including Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin and Edward Burne-Jones.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the 1870s as an important period in the groundwork for pictorial Symbolism, while describing the 1880s as the period when the Symbolist philosophy became increasingly defined.

Why Did Symbolism Develop?

Symbolism emerged partly as a reaction against the increasing emphasis on scientific observation, materialism and naturalistic representation in European culture.

Realism and Impressionism had expanded the possibilities of painting, but Symbolist artists wanted to explore a different territory.

Instead of asking, "What does the world look like?", they increasingly asked:

• What does a dream feel like?
• How can painting express fear or desire?
• Can an image communicate a spiritual idea?
• How can mythology represent psychological experience?
• Can colour suggest an emotion without describing a physical object?
• Can art reveal something that cannot be observed directly?

This shift turned the artwork into a meeting point between the external world and the artist's inner imagination.

Symbolism and the Rejection of Naturalism

One of the most important characteristics of Symbolism was its rejection of the idea that art should faithfully reproduce visible reality.

This did not mean that Symbolist artists could not draw realistically. Many were exceptionally skilled draftsmen and painters.

Gustave Moreau, for example, produced meticulously rendered mythological scenes. Yet the purpose of his detailed technique was not to document ordinary life. His elaborate figures, jewels, monsters and mythological settings were used to construct imaginative worlds filled with psychological and spiritual associations.

Similarly, Odilon Redon's technically sophisticated drawings and prints often depict creatures and situations that could not exist in ordinary physical reality.

Symbolism therefore challenged the assumption that technical realism and realistic subject matter were the same thing.

Characteristics of Symbolist Art

Symbolism and Suggestion

Suggestion is perhaps the most important principle for understanding Symbolist art.

A Symbolist painting may show a figure standing in an empty landscape, but the landscape might suggest loneliness. A woman might represent desire, danger or death rather than simply being a portrait. A mythological monster might represent psychological fear rather than an actual supernatural creature.

This means Symbolist art often works through associations rather than literal explanations.

Major Symbolist Artists

Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau was one of the foundational figures of Symbolist painting.

Born in Paris in 1826, Moreau developed a highly individual style based on mythology, biblical narratives, literary subjects and elaborate imaginative worlds.

His paintings are often filled with intricate details, unusual costumes, jewels, architectural fragments and mysterious figures. Rather than depicting contemporary life, Moreau repeatedly returned to subjects from antiquity and religion.

His Oedipus and the Sphinx, painted in 1864, became an important landmark. In the painting, Oedipus confronts the Sphinx in a tense encounter that combines mythology with psychological symbolism.

The Metropolitan Museum notes that Moreau's unusual treatment of biblical, mythological and imagined subjects attracted younger artists and writers, including Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon was another central Symbolist artist, particularly famous for his dreamlike drawings, prints and later colour paintings.

Redon's black-and-white works are filled with floating heads, strange creatures, eyes, plants, monsters and ambiguous figures.

His imagery often appears to emerge from the subconscious rather than from direct observation.

The Metropolitan Museum describes Redon's work as a journey away from the constraints of the physical world toward imagination and fantasy.

Redon's work demonstrates an important feature of Symbolism: an image can remain deliberately ambiguous. The exact meaning of a strange creature or figure may not be fixed, allowing the viewer's imagination to complete the work.

Arnold Böcklin

Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss-born painter whose mysterious landscapes and mythological imagery became closely associated with Symbolist sensibilities.

His most famous work is Island of the Dead, a haunting image of a small boat approaching a mysterious island filled with tall cypress trees and monumental architecture.

The painting became one of the defining images of late-19th-century Symbolist culture because it transforms a landscape into an image of death, mystery and the unknown.

Böcklin's work demonstrates how Symbolism could turn landscape itself into a psychological symbol.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes played an important role in the development of Symbolist painting through simplified forms, restrained colour and monumental compositions.

His figures and landscapes often appear removed from ordinary time. The resulting atmosphere is calm, distant and dreamlike.

His work influenced younger artists who were searching for alternatives to naturalistic painting.

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin became an important figure in the Symbolist aesthetic through his emphasis on subjective vision, simplified forms and expressive colour.

Gauguin's Symbolist approach became particularly important because he sought to construct images according to ideas and sensations rather than simply reproduce what he saw.

His work contributed to the movement away from naturalistic representation and toward the expressive simplification that would become important in later modern art.

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch occupied an important position between Symbolism and later Expressionism.

His paintings transformed personal emotions such as anxiety, jealousy, loneliness, love and death into simplified, emotionally charged visual forms.

The Scream is not a literal representation of an ordinary event. Its distorted landscape, intense colour and anguished figure communicate an emotional and psychological state.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt represents a later Central European flowering of Symbolist ideas.

His highly decorative paintings combine symbolic subject matter with ornamental patterns, gold surfaces and the visual language associated with the Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau.

The Metropolitan Museum identifies Klimt's work as part of the late Central European development of Symbolism and notes the movement's influence on his art.

Klimt's The Kiss is particularly important because its ornamental surface, intimate figures and symbolic atmosphere transform a simple embrace into a larger meditation on love and desire.

Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones was a British artist whose dreamlike mythological and literary scenes became important to the Symbolist tradition.

His elegant figures, medieval settings and romantic narratives share the Symbolist interest in escaping ordinary contemporary reality.

The Metropolitan Museum includes Burne-Jones among the artists who laid important groundwork for Symbolism during the 19th century.

Famous Symbolist Paintings

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau

Oedipus and the Sphinx is one of the most important early works associated with Symbolism.

Moreau depicts the mythological moment when Oedipus confronts the Sphinx. Rather than presenting the scene as a straightforward illustration of Greek mythology, he creates an intense psychological encounter.

The Sphinx clings to Oedipus while staring directly at him. The two figures become locked together, creating a strange mixture of threat, sexuality, intelligence and violence.

The Metropolitan Museum records the painting as dating from 1864 and notes that it made Moreau's mark at the Paris Salon of that year.

The work demonstrates how Symbolist artists could use an ancient myth to explore universal human concerns rather than merely illustrate a historical story.

Island of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin

Island of the Dead is one of the most recognizable paintings associated with Symbolist art.

The composition shows a small boat crossing dark water toward a mysterious island dominated by tall cypress trees and monumental rock formations.

The scene is quiet rather than violent. There is no dramatic battle or explicit death scene. Instead, the sense of death emerges from the atmosphere, isolation and destination of the boat.

This is quintessentially Symbolist: the painting does not need to explain death. It creates an environment in which the viewer feels it.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Odilon Redon

Redon's The Temptation of Saint Anthony demonstrates the Symbolist fascination with visions and the subconscious.

The story of Saint Anthony provided Redon with a framework for depicting a succession of fantastic creatures, monsters and hallucinations.

The work is less concerned with creating a believable physical world than with visualizing the psychological experience of temptation and fear.

Redon's imaginative creatures are particularly important because they exist somewhere between recognizable biological forms and pure fantasy.

The Scream and Symbolism

Edvard Munch's The Scream is often discussed in relation to Expressionism, but its roots are deeply connected to the Symbolist interest in psychological states.

The figure's distorted body, the swirling sky and the intense landscape are not intended to reproduce ordinary visual reality.

Instead, the environment becomes an extension of emotion.

This is one of the important bridges between Symbolism and later Expressionism: the visible world becomes a vehicle for representing an internal psychological condition.

Symbolism and the Femme Fatale

One of the most recognizable recurring motifs in Symbolist art is the femme fatale.

Women were frequently used as symbols of desire, danger, sexuality, temptation and psychological anxiety.

Salome and the Sphinx became especially important examples. Gustave Moreau repeatedly explored these figures, transforming biblical and mythological narratives into complex images of attraction and threat.

The Symbolist femme fatale should therefore be understood as a cultural motif rather than simply a portrait type. She often represents a psychological or universal idea.

Symbolism and Death

Death was another central Symbolist subject.

Artists explored death through cemeteries, skeletons, funerary landscapes, dark forests, mysterious islands, dying figures and allegorical scenes.

But Symbolist treatments of death were often less concerned with documenting mortality than with exploring the unknown.

Death could represent transformation, spiritual passage, fear, isolation or the boundary between the visible and invisible worlds.

Symbolism and Dreams

Dreams provided Symbolist artists with an ideal model for creating images that were emotionally convincing without being logically realistic.

Dream imagery allowed artists to combine objects that normally would not appear together, distort scale, remove ordinary perspective and introduce supernatural figures.

Odilon Redon's work is especially important in this context. His strange heads, monsters, eyes, plants and floating forms seem to emerge from a world between dream and waking consciousness.

This interest in dreams would later become extremely important for Surrealism.

Symbolism and Mythology

Mythology gave Symbolist artists a ready-made vocabulary of universal stories.

Oedipus, the Sphinx, Salome, Orpheus, Venus, Medusa and other mythological or biblical figures could be reinterpreted according to the artist's psychological concerns.

Instead of painting mythology as historical illustration, Symbolists used myth as a way of discussing timeless human experiences.

Symbolism and Spirituality

Spirituality was central to much Symbolist art.

Some artists were fascinated by Christianity, mysticism and medieval religious imagery. Others explored occultism, mythology, esoteric philosophy or alternative spiritual ideas.

The important point is that Symbolist artists often viewed art as capable of accessing realities beyond ordinary material experience.

This spiritual dimension distinguishes Symbolism from purely decorative art. Even when a Symbolist painting is beautiful or ornamental, its imagery often points toward something beyond the surface.

Symbolism and Colour

Colour became increasingly important because Symbolist artists did not necessarily believe that colours had to correspond to the colours found in nature.

A landscape could therefore be blue, green, purple or gold according to the emotional effect the artist wanted to create.

Colour could establish mood, suggest a psychological state or contribute to the symbolic structure of a composition.

This approach helped prepare the way for later modern artists who treated colour as an independent expressive element.

Symbolism and Line

Line could also become expressive rather than merely descriptive.

Curving lines, elongated bodies, decorative contours and simplified shapes could create sensuality, anxiety, elegance or mystery.

This expressive use of line became particularly important in the relationship between Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Symbolism and Art Nouveau

Symbolism and Art Nouveau were closely connected at the end of the 19th century.

Both movements were interested in decorative pattern, expressive line and alternatives to strict naturalism.

Gustav Klimt is an especially important example because his work combines Symbolist ideas with the ornamental language associated with the Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau.

The relationship shows that Symbolism was not limited to easel painting. Its ideas influenced decorative arts, illustration, posters, literature and design.

Symbolism in Different European Countries

Symbolism vs Impressionism

Symbolism and Impressionism developed during overlapping periods but pursued very different artistic goals.

Symbolism vs Post-Impressionism

The boundary between Symbolism and Post-Impressionism is more complicated because several artists participated in overlapping developments.

Paul Gauguin is an important example. His simplified forms, expressive colour and emphasis on subjective vision connect him to Symbolism while also placing him within the broader Post-Impressionist context.

For SEO and topical structure, Symbolism should therefore remain focused on the movement's ideas, characteristics, history and cross-artist influence, rather than becoming a substitute biography for individual artists.

Symbolism's Influence on Modern Art

Symbolism had a significant impact on twentieth-century art.

Its insistence that art could represent subjective experience rather than objective reality helped prepare the intellectual environment for later modern movements.

Expressionism inherited the Symbolist interest in emotional and psychological states. Surrealism later developed the Symbolist fascination with dreams, the subconscious and irrational combinations of imagery.

Symbolism also contributed to the development of abstraction by weakening the assumption that a painting had to reproduce recognizable physical reality.

The Metropolitan Museum specifically identifies the Symbolist rejection of naturalism and narrative as an important influence on German Expressionism and abstraction.

Symbolism and Expressionism

Expressionism developed later, but it shared an important principle with Symbolism: the visible world could be transformed to express an internal state.

Symbolist artists often used myths, dreams and allegorical images to reach the inner world. Expressionists increasingly used distortion, colour and simplified forms to communicate emotional intensity directly.

Edvard Munch is especially important because his career demonstrates the transition between these approaches.

Symbolism and Surrealism

Surrealist artists of the twentieth century became fascinated by dreams, irrational imagery and the subconscious.

Although Surrealism was a distinct movement with its own theories and historical context, the Symbolist fascination with dream imagery helped create an important precedent.

Odilon Redon is particularly significant in this lineage because his strange creatures, floating heads and ambiguous environments demonstrate how artists could visualize the imagination without submitting to ordinary physical logic.

Symbolism in Art: Key Ideas at a Glance

Timeline of Symbolism in Art

Why Is Symbolism Important in Art History?

Symbolism is important because it changed the purpose of artistic representation.

Instead of treating painting primarily as a window onto the visible world, Symbolist artists treated it as a doorway into the invisible world of thought, emotion, imagination and spiritual experience.

This was a profound change.

Once artists no longer needed to reproduce reality faithfully, they could distort figures, simplify forms, alter colours, invent creatures and create imaginary environments.

That freedom became fundamental to the development of modern art.

How to Recognize a Symbolist Painting

When looking at a potentially Symbolist painting, consider the following questions:

• Does the subject seem dreamlike or imaginary?
• Is mythology or religion being used for a deeper purpose?
• Does the image suggest an emotion rather than tell a literal story?
• Are figures or objects acting as symbols?
• Does the landscape feel psychologically charged?
• Are colours deliberately non-naturalistic?
• Does the painting resist a single obvious interpretation?
• Are death, love, desire, fear or spirituality central to the image?
• Does the artwork seem more concerned with an inner world than everyday contemporary life?

If several of these characteristics are present, the work may have strong Symbolist qualities, although classification should always consider the artist's historical context.

Frequently Asked Questions About Symbolism in Art