symbolism

 Symbolism originated in France, and was part of a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with mysticism. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art. French Symbolism was both a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a reaction to the realistic approach of impressionism. It served as a catalyst in the outgrowth of the darker sides of Romanticism and toward abstraction.

The term Symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an important element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus, the Symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul.

Symbolist painters stressed art’s subjective, symbolic, and decorative functions and turned to the mystical and occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual means. Though aspects of Symbolism appear in the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and the Nabis, its leading exponents were Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Though associated primarily with France, it flourished all over Europe, had great international impact, and influenced 20th-century

A List of the Greatest Symbolist Painters

Man Ray American 1890-1976

Odilon Redon 1840-1916

Edvard Munch Norwegian, 1863-1944

Gustave Moreau French 1826-1898

Diego Rivera Mexican, 1886-1957

William Blake British, 1757-1827

The Apparition. Gustave Moreau c. 1876

The Cyclops, 1914, Odilon Redon

http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c19th/symbolism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1570978/Symbolism
http://www.historyofpainters.com/symbolist.htm