ESSAYS

Symbolism, in it’s core, is most notable for the inner irrational experience that becomes an important pillar with it’s emphasis on death and dreams. Just to paint a picture, forms of impotence, heaviness and decadence evoke an atmosphere of doom and death.
A pessimistic outlook on life compiled by complaints about sadness, boredom, disappointment in love, dullness and loneliness. In Symbolism the deepest emotions are expressed with inspiration drawn from the extra-ordinary, mythical and fantastical. An absent reality that transcends the everyday. Two worlds in one. On the one hand the unchanging world of trade and industry indifferent to deeper morals and on the other a dream world that promises total change to what is now known.

One of the things that is reminiscent to this art movement, and in particular the oppressing of the unchanging world that we can now call ‘daily life’ is the internet. The internet is a visualization in terms of everyone having their own screen, literally, of what they use to escape daily life. It infatuates you and lures you into it’s deep pool of knowledge and distractions. It is the path on the beam that Roland explores in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. It is the way to Mordor on which a Hobbit wonders a trail on which he encounters his deepest emotions, doom, death and mythical fantasies. It is the embodiment of ‘The Sceam’ that Edvard Munch painted. The Internet is the place where you are truly alone, together. It is a way to escape boredom and express your disappointment in love. It is the symbol of Symbolism, redefined.

A grand example for this mirrored life everyone leads online is Tumblr. Everyone can have their own, if necessary anonymous, page and post everything that is required to express their thoughts, feelings and reactions against the current events in the world. It’s quite literally that absent reality that transcends the everyday life. It comes forth from the inner experiences the Symbolists are known for. Thinking from their heart instead of their head. What you get is a mood-board of pictures, illustrations, art, design, fashion and literary references from poetry and cinema. Has the internet become our version of a dreamlike state? Staring at images from moments another person has experienced, as if they are your own. You feel the connection and you built upon it until you’ve reached a dreamlike state vs. reality: inception.

Another example of comparing the internet to the core of the Symbolism movement is YouTube. Listening to music and getting caught up in different places, different times while sitting where you are sitting. How would this have been perceived by the core founders of the movement? It is the ultimate fantasy, an unlimited pool of information, music to wonder off with and content that is continuously expanding.

The only downside to all of this however, is that Symbolism is something that is also an expression of your inner self. Something you add on too, not just something you perceive and take as it comes along. The only answer I am able to find for this in terms of the Internet, is Twitter. Expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, to let your following know what your thoughts are, where you are or what you are doing. The most banal answer to the most profound quality of what makes us human: what stirs the soul?
However, silly as it may sound, some ‘Tweets’ or even Six Story Words do argue reason and objectivity which leads back to the origin of Symbolism.

As long as there is Internet, there is no end in sight. It’s the journey of a lifetime this online life we live, one that we have adapted too and take with us everywhere we go.
We don’t fully commit to one world, nor the other. It is as if the two intertwine more and more as the years pass us by. Who knows where we will be in a few years. It is already a place for pessimism and irrational experiences. It’s the dream world we visit when we are awake, it evokes our senses and blurs the concept of time. But will the Internet be truly capable of expressing our deepest emotions? Or will the Internet turn out to be the thing the Symbolists were afraid of in the first place? That unchanging world of trade and industry, indifferent to deeper morals?

Symbolism is an art movement in the visual art, music and literature that mostly came from France, but soon after from all over Europe. The origin of this movement is a reaction towards the dominant realism and natural- ism around the second half of the 19th century. Imagination, fantasy en intuition are central key words in Sym- bolism. It characterizes itself due to its strong references towards the past en a main focus towards the unknown and subconscious. That fine line between ordinary and the unexplainable. The Symbol plays a pivotal part in this, and becomes a sensory observable sign that refers to a gate to the non-sensory world. The inner, irrational experiences become important, with the emphasis on dreams and death. Forms of impotence, heaviness and decadence evoke an atmosphere of doom and threat.During this time the European society featured big changes. There was the increase of industrialization, techno- logical changes, urbanization and increasing social differences. It was a time of new discoveries and progressive thinking: rationalism and social economic realism were at the center at those times.

The shadow side of progressive thinking however, evoked with many the feeling of losing ‘something good’ as well, especially for those closer connected to the older cultural system. The art movement came forth out of literature and the symbolist poet Gustave Kahn explains: ‘You get the feeling that these people are only looking at sources of income, the source of dreaming however is drying up.’
This positive look onto the world was by many artists experienced as an oppressive power. Within many the feeling of decay arose, which would later lead to the rise of Symbolism. Rejecting certain developments of the modern world, such as bourgeois and moral decadence, a rejection towards impressionism as an art which makes the objective world subjective. There were also massive breakthroughs in science, for instance demon- strating that the earth (and therefor men) are not the center of the universe and that the evolution theory demonstrated that man was not created by god. Besides this there was also the psychological discovery that the unconscious contained the ego, therefor the psychology of the human being was largely an unknown quantity.

The new movement is closely related to romanticism that also arose as a countermovement against reason and objectivity. Symbolist painters are more keen to draw inspiration from the moon than the sun, rather the fall than autumn, rather stagnant water than a stream and much rather rain than the blue sky. They complain about sadness and boredom, disappointment in love, about impotence, dullness and loneliness. This description is very apt, as it is certainly visible in the pessimism of artwork of those times.

Jean Moreas, introduced the term for symbolism for the first time in an article (1886). In which he states that a certain decadent group of writers deserve a better name: symbolist. ‘Only by expressing their deepest emotions do symbolist poets convey their imaginative ideas.’The term symbolism refers not so much to a certain style as it does to a way of approaching the subject. In the art world the term was applied to many different styles but were similar in a sense that they all rejected realism and naturalism. Imagination, spirituality and intuition became central focus points. Symbolist did not want to observe from a distance but rather search within themselves and draw inspiration from the extraordinary, mythical and the fantastical. The symbol is an image, a term or a sound that imagines something else, it refers to an absent reality that transcends the everyday. In its core it is about two dream worlds: on the one hand there is the unchanging world of trade and industry, indifferent to deeper morals. And on the other the belief in a transcending world that promises total change to what is now known.
Symbolism expresses something else than the visible reality, it is not superficial and goes deeper than the state civilization currently finds itself in.

Within painting symbolism led to a more conscious and more emphatic use of colors as ways to express emo- tion and with that, their own reality. The same goes for lines and forms, which do not necessarily have to stay within reasonable bounds nor depict reality as it is. Often symbolist painters sought inspiration with primitive cultures such Paul Gauguin, he thought higher of art than intellect, as it was much more about emotional approach. He often used unmixed colors and simplified shapes. He encouraged his followers to ‘paint by heart and head’ and let the imagination do its work because in emotions there is more meaning and symbolism to be found than in natural shapes.

The most famous Symbolist painters are the Austrian Gustav Klimt, the Norse Edvard Munch, Russian Wassily Kandinsky and French painter Paul Gauguin.
In the 20th century the influence of symbolism is found back in many movements, the clearest cross overs must be the expressionism, post-impressionism and surrealism. There are also some influences to be found in Dadaism. The big pioneers of the abstract art such as Kandinski, Picasso and Mondriaan were all initially sym- bolist painters. The irony however is that modernism and the acknowledgement of abstract art after the First World War got Symbolism as to largely disappear as an art movement: ties were radically broken with the past. Symbolism was mostly associated with decadence, the very thing it rejected in the first place.

Citations
Gibson, Michael. ‘’Symbolisme’’ Keulen, 2006. p. 18. Print

Myers, Nicole. "Symbolism". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/symb/hd_symb.htm (August 2007)

MLA
‘’Symbolism.’’ Wikipedia. S.d. Web. 24 September 2013.

‘’Dreams of Nature. Symbolisme van Van Gogh tot Kandinsky.’’ Van Gogh Museum. S.d. Web. 24 September 2013.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Symbolist Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Print. 24 September 2013.

Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. The Symbolist Generation, 1870–1910. New York: Skira, 1990. Print. 24 September 2013.