Symbolism followed Impressionism chronologically, but it was the antithesis of it, as the emphasis was on the meaning behind the shapes and colors. Symbolism artist's showed greater concern for the interior life rather than external reality.
Looking at the effects of light of the outside/exterior world, concentrating instead looking inward to explore themes of love and jealousy, loneliness and anxiety, sickness and death.
Also other statements regarding the movement state Symbolism is an artistic and poetic movement or style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions and states of mind... It originated in late 19th century France and Belgium.
Edvard Munch
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch created a work or works relating to this style called Frieze of Life. He spend over 30 years of this career on this work and for me gives a sense of the truth and torment an artist can create for working from emption and life.... Real vs an ideal.
Munch suffer with mental health issues and ill health, with this came disappointment in life, love and depression. This influenced the artist's emotional state. Many of these works are frozen in a moment and this is like a memory of the artist.. Some come across as different in the ways the figures are joined together almost merged as one..... This was to indicate the unity of man and woman and the sense of belongingness and togetherness.
For me this seems sad in many ways but the idea behind them for me helps to empower the work..they emotional and honest and yet portray desire, grief and despair. embraced as a need of love and wonderment like, once they let go all will be lost.
An art critic said "The couple represent a threatening loss either of togetherness. or individual loss.... a loss of ones own existence and identity. Which hints at death!" This for me sings with my interests at the moment. For me I enjoy the hidden meaning behind the figures and how each person will take away different things.
For me I decided to look at the preliminary works he did with the lithograph. I know from doing prints of my hand the more you work and sketch something the easier the lines and work becomes. His marks seem confident but I think the landscape and figures seem to be mixing areas... I think he was identifying what marks were strongest for the idea of his emotion. This for me this is a strong and intense image than lets you feel the connection between the two. Like you shouldn't be there.... its special and needed like they have no control.... a must and desire, intense and hurried..... I like the movement you feel from it , like the mans arm lifting and grabbing her, she looks empowered by him.... feeding him her breast, making him want her......
I decided I would copy this as an etching to see if I get the same senses... and style......It wasn't until I looked at the plate that I came to realise the artist must of gave movement really studying what marks were needed and where. For the artist to give the sense of lifting and grabbing the women takes skill. It's not flat and the contours are light giving a sense of desire and innocence.
The Scream
Munch was out walking with friends one night when, he wrote, "Suddenly the sky turned blood-red [and] I stood there trembling with anxiety and I felt a great, infinite scream through nature."
Munch was influenced by Van Gogh and Gauguin, and went on to inspire the Expressionists.
Poetry was also greatly represented with symbolism, the poet and one of the three leading poets of the movement, Stephane Mallarme said that Symbolism is to be used "to depict not the thing but the effect it produces".
Les Fenetres - The Windows
"les fenêtres, tells of an old man longingly looking out from a death and sickness ridden hospital at the youthful world outside that he cannot forget, but from which he is forever separated by the closed window
This is the torturing vision of such an ideal world, which he knows must be an illusion. This speaks to me on so many levels. Emotional levels of the sense of death looming and not being able to do anything about it, a young man in mind stuck in an old body. Hope and realisation, truth and loss.
The window is said to suggest memory and separation as a metaphor to art, the window represents the hope or even the assurance that a better world exists elsewhere, beyond reality. On the other-hand it also an obstacle that keeps us separated from the ideal world.
Art can produce both things, the truth being that art can create an illusion of presence in the moment but its also in the past and is false no matter how close you are of seem to know it.
In the poem the man seals this moment of separation and longing at the window with a kiss on the glass.... momentarily finding himself in a sea of memories of gratitude and appreciation, greedy for emotion and the bitter truth of the connection of the lips and the glass.... bringing reality against a youthfulness gone.
How powerful are these words, conjuring up feeling, emotion and our own memories and rational yet sobering thoughts.
In other words art produces a dream which acts as a refuge from the real life and death.... covering the subject in a warm hug (artist, consumer) in a timeless space.
What unites the various artists and styles associated with Symbolism is the emphasis on emotions, feelings, ideas, and subjectivity rather than realism. Their works are personal and express their own ideologies, particularly the belief in the artist's power to reveal truth.
Odilon Redon -
Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)
A large head held aloft by wings floats above a tranquil sea, gazing upon a small sailboat with enormously expressive eyes. Seagulls flit through the air and skim the water's surface, while the water stretches out toward the distant horizon.
One of the main themes in Redon's oeuvre is the decapitated or disembodied head. Often shown free-floating, and sometimes reduced to a mere eyeball, the severed head encapsulates the Symbolist desire to free oneself from the shackles of the ordinary, mundane world, and achieve a higher state of consciousness through the exploration of dreams and subjective vision.
Gustav Klimt
Death and Life - Death stares across the negative space as Life reveals itself in the figures who come into being, exist, and pass out of existence; they are born, live, and die as part of the great stream of life.
It has been pointed out that Klimt offers a note of hope; instead of feeling threatened by the figure of death, his human beings seem to disregard it. Klimt himself was approaching death, and perhaps the passive quality of this work is suggestive of him being resigned to that fact.
The painting also reflects the time and ideas of Sigmund Freud and the work and ideas from the Greek mythology of Eros the Primordial God and God of Sexual Attraction.
See - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros
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