Symbolism in Painting: Khnopff, Böcklin and the Art of the Idea
From Moréas's 1886 manifesto to Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, from Khnopff to Delville and von Stuck: how Symbolism transformed European painting.
On 18 September 1886 the Paris daily Le Figaro published a manifesto signed by the poet Jean Moréas. It proposed the name Symbolism for a new art that would seek to clothe the idea in a perceptible form, rejecting both realism and mere description. Born in literature, the movement soon spread to painting and crossed the whole of Europe, from Belgium to Germany, from Switzerland to Italy.
Belgium, a laboratory of dreams
Brussels was one of the liveliest centres. From 1883 the group of Twenty, Les XX, organised exhibitions open to the boldest experiments, and artists such as Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville worked in the city. Khnopff, a reader of the Pre-Raphaelites and admirer of Moreau, painted enigmatic female figures, often with the face of his sister Marguerite, and silent interiors in which time seems suspended.
In a painting of 1891, titled after a line by Christina Rossetti, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, a woman leaning on a table stares at the viewer beside a bust of Hypnos, the god of sleep. In 1896 Khnopff produced The Caresses, also known as The Sphinx, in which an androgynous youth is caressed by a creature with the body of a cheetah and the face of a woman.
The Isle of the Dead and the North
In the German-speaking world the most influential painter was the Swiss Arnold Böcklin. Between 1880 and 1886 he painted five versions of the Isle of the Dead: a boat carries a coffin and a veiled figure, standing and dressed in white, towards a rocky island covered with cypresses. The picture, lacking any precise narrative reference, became one of the most widespread images of its time, reproduced in countless prints.
In Munich Franz von Stuck painted Sin in 1893, a naked woman wrapped in a great serpent that stares at the viewer from the shadows. The subject was so successful that it was replicated several times. German-language Symbolism thus combined a taste for myth, an unsettling eroticism and a profound meditation on death and destiny.
An art of the idea
What united such different artists was the conviction that painting should suggest rather than describe. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé held that to name an object is to suppress most of the pleasure of poetry, and Symbolist painters applied the same principle to images. Many of them were drawn to Theosophy, spiritualism and the Rosicrucian orders, which offered a secret knowledge hidden beneath appearances.
The Belgian Jean Delville, a committed Theosophist, made these ideas the heart of his work, as in The Treasures of Satan of 1895, where sleeping bodies float among the devil's red coils. In the same years he founded his own salon of idealist art in Brussels, on the model of the Rosicrucian exhibitions held in Paris.
Symbolism lasted, in its most intense phase, little more than twenty years, but it left a vast legacy. From its rejection of the mere imitation of reality came Kandinsky's abstraction, the visions of the Surrealists and many spiritual quests of the twentieth century. In Italy the same sensibility can be found in the canvases of Gaetano Previati and Giovanni Segantini, poised between nature and vision.