Symbolism: Dreams, Myth, and the Inner Vision in Art (1880-1910)

In 1895, a Norwegian painter made a picture of a figure on a bridge, its mouth open in a soundless scream, the sky behind it swirling in bands of red and orange. Edvard Munch called it The Scream. He wrote in his diary that the image came from a specific evening walk in Oslo, when he saw the sky turn blood-red and felt "an infinite scream passing through nature." The painting is not a depiction of a landscape. It is a depiction of what a landscape felt like to one person at one moment. That distinction is the whole project of Symbolism.

Symbolism was an artistic and literary movement that emerged in Europe in the 1880s and flourished through the first decade of the 20th century. It rejected the external world as the primary subject of art. Where Realism painted ordinary life and Impressionism painted visual sensation, Symbolism painted dreams, myths, fantasies, and the inner life of the mind. Symbolist artists believed that art should suggest rather than describe, that meaning should be evoked through symbols and associations rather than stated directly.

This entry covers what Symbolism was, how it positioned itself against the dominant art movements of its time, which artists defined it across Europe, and how it opened the door to the 20th-century avant-garde. If you have ever looked at a painting and felt that it was not showing you something but haunting you with something, you were looking at Symbolist art.

What Is Symbolism?

Symbolism began as a literary movement in France. In 1886, the poet Jean Moreas published a manifesto in Le Figaro declaring Symbolism to be the "enemy of didaction, declamation, false sensibility, and objective description." The manifesto urged artists and writers to visualize the subjective over the material, the imaginative over the real. The poet Stephane Mallarme, whose work was the movement's touchstone, held that a work of art should suggest rather than show, that its meaning should hover at the edge of articulation rather than being stated plainly.

In painting, these principles translated into subjects drawn from mythology, religion, dreams, and the occult. Symbolist painters were not interested in the modern life that the Impressionists celebrated. They were interested in what lies behind visible reality: spiritual truths, psychological states, mythic archetypes, and the irrational. The movement was deliberately vague in its boundaries, which was part of its point. A 2024 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination, showcased 85 works on paper and deliberately kept the definition of Symbolism open, sidelining arguments about what the movement was in favor of showing the range of works that could fall under its umbrella. A review in Art News noted that Symbolism "perhaps suffers from middle-child syndrome" between Impressionism and Fauvism, and that its theorists "declaimed it with gusto if not always lucidity." Read the review at Art News.

The Art Institute's exhibition also highlighted the geographic spread of Symbolism, which was never confined to Paris. The show included works by Swedish painter Gustaf Fjaestad, Belgian artist James Ensor, and the French artist Adolf Mossa, alongside the more familiar names of Munch, Redon, and Van Gogh. A 2025 article on the Art Institute's website traced these "Symbolist Geographies," noting that while French journals boasted the movement's manifestos, Paris was never its most interesting center. Read more at Art Institute of Chicago.

Historical Context and Origins

Symbolism emerged in the 1880s as a reaction against two dominant tendencies in European art: Realism and Impressionism. Both movements, despite their differences, shared a commitment to depicting the external world. Realism painted social reality. Impressionism painted optical reality. Symbolism rejected both as insufficient. The Symbolists believed that the visible world was a surface, and that art's job was to reach beneath it.

The movement was also a response to the spiritual crisis of the late 19th century. The spread of scientific materialism, Darwinian evolution, and secular philosophy had eroded traditional religious certainty. Many artists and intellectuals turned to alternative sources of meaning: mysticism, occultism, spiritualism, mythology, and the psychology of dreams. The Symbolist fascination with dreams and the unconscious predated Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) by nearly two decades, and the movement created a visual language that Freud's theories would later validate.

A 2025 article in CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures traced the relationship between Symbolism and mysticism through the work of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and the British critic Arthur Symons. Symons's influential 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature argued that Symbolism was the inheritance of a mystical tradition, and that its use of symbols was directed not to any particular doctrine but to "mystery itself, to the human condition of being surrounded by an unknown metaphysical darkness." Read the study at Project MUSE.

Symbolism's peak period ran from roughly 1885 to 1905. By 1910, the movement had largely dissolved, absorbed into the more radical avant-garde movements it had helped to spawn. But its influence on 20th-century art was enormous. Surrealism took the Symbolist interest in dreams and the unconscious and made it a formal program. Expressionism took the Symbolist emphasis on inner emotional states and turned it into a style. Abstract art took the Symbolist insistence that art should not merely imitate the visible world and carried it to its logical conclusion.

Key Artists and Pioneers

Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

Redon was among the first artists to work in a Symbolist vein. His early work consisted almost entirely of charcoal drawings and lithographs, which he called his "noirs," showing bizarre, dreamlike creatures: floating eyes, spiders with human faces, botanical hybrids. The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1882, MoMA) is a lithograph showing a giant eyeball floating in a sky above a landscape. Redon wrote that his art "suggests" rather than "defines," and that "my drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They do not determine anything. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous world of the undetermined." In the 1890s, Redon shifted to luminous pastels and oils, producing works like Sita.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Munch's Symbolism is psychological and autobiographical. The Scream (1893, National Gallery of Norway, with a later version at the Munch Museum) is the most recognized Symbolist image in the world. Anxiety (1896, Munch Museum) shows a crowd of figures with hollow, skull-like faces against the same blood-red sky as The Scream. The Dance of Life (1899-1900, National Gallery of Norway) shows women in different stages of life dancing on a moonlit shore. Munch's work is fueled by personal trauma: the deaths of his mother and sister from tuberculosis, his own chronic illness, and his fear of inherited madness. A 2025 exhibition at Ordrupgaard in Denmark, Into the Dreams: Symbolism, presented an international selection of Symbolist art from around 1900, including works by Munch, Redon, Fernand Khnopff, Camille Claudel, and Maurice Denis. The exhibition emphasized how Symbolism shifted focus from the external world to "the inner realm of human individuality, subjectivity, and emotions." Read more at Centre Andre-Chastel. For more on Munch's personal story, read our blog post on Munch, anxiety, and a life of illness.

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)

Moreau was the elder statesman of Symbolist painting. He taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where his students included Matisse and Georges Rouault. His paintings are dense, jewel-like compositions filled with mythological figures and obsessive detail. The Apparition (1876, Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris) shows Salome hovering before a vision of John the Baptist's severed head, surrounded by jewels and architectural fragments. Moreau's work influenced the Symbolist writers and painters who gathered around him in the 1880s, and his studio-house in Paris is now a museum that preserves his work in the environment he created for it.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Klimt was the leading figure of the Vienna Secession, which was deeply influenced by Symbolism. The Kiss (1907-1908, Belvedere Museum, Vienna) shows two figures embracing against a field of gold leaf, their bodies covered in decorative patterns. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, Neue Galerie, New York) uses gold and silver leaf alongside oil paint to create a portrait that is part icon, part abstraction. Klimt's work combines Symbolist subject matter with the decorative intensity of Art Nouveau. Read our blog post on Klimt, gold, and the Vienna Secession for more.

James Ensor (1860-1949)

Ensor was a Belgian painter whose work is Symbolist in its use of masks, skeletons, and grotesque imagery. The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888, Getty Museum) shows a carnival procession with Christ surrounded by masked figures. Ensor was a founding member of Les XX, an exhibition society in Brussels that promoted progressive art from 1883 onward. His Scandalized Masks (c. 1883, Musee Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp) shows two figures in masks staring at each other with what the Art Institute of Chicago describes as "a sense of mystery and foreboding."

How to Spot Symbolism in a Painting

Look for subjects that do not belong to the visible world. Mythological figures, dreams, visions, religious ecstasy, death, and the occult are the movement's stock imagery. If a painting from the 1880s or 1890s shows a scene that could not have been observed in real life, it is likely Symbolist.

Then look at the treatment. Symbolist paintings often use color not to describe but to evoke. Munch's red sky in The Scream is not a realistic sunset. It is an emotional state rendered as color. Redon's late pastels use luminous, unnatural color to create a sense of otherworldliness. Moreau's paintings use dark, saturated color and obsessive detail to create a feeling of claustrophobic mystery.

The compositions tend to be static and frontal rather than dynamic. Symbolist figures often stare directly at the viewer or into space, their expressions ambiguous. The backgrounds are not realistic settings but atmospheric fields of color or decorative patterns. The overall effect is not of looking at a scene but of being addressed by an image that wants something from you.

Legacy and Influence

Symbolism's influence on 20th-century art was foundational. Surrealism took the Symbolist interest in dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational and made it a formal program with André Breton's 1924 manifesto. Expressionism took the Symbolist emphasis on inner emotional states and made it the basis of a style. The Nabis group in France, including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, extended Symbolist principles into decorative art and interior scenes. Klimt's Vienna Secession connected Symbolism to Art Nouveau and to the broader modernist project of dissolving the boundary between fine and applied arts.

A 2025 study in the journal RACAR examined the relationship between Symbolism and spiritualism, arguing that mediumistic creativity, including the trance paintings of the medium Helene Smith, contributed to transforming Symbolist theory into visual practice. The research situates Smith's work between Symbolism and Surrealism, showing how the methods of experimental psychology in late 19th-century France provided intellectual conditions for the avant-garde's embrace of altered states and automatic creation. Read the study at Erudit.

See Symbolism in Person

The Musee Gustave Moreau in Paris is the best starting point. Moreau's studio-house preserves his paintings in the environment he designed for them, and the experience is closer to entering a private temple than visiting a museum. The Munch Museum and the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo hold the largest collections of Munch's work, including multiple versions of The Scream. The Belvedere Museum in Vienna holds The Kiss and other major Klimt works. The Musee d'Orsay has a significant Symbolist collection, including Redon's pastels and Moreau's Jupiter and Semele (1895).

For more on the movements that connect to Symbolism, read our entries on Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau, or explore our blog post on how to read symbolism in art. To see how Symbolism fits into the broader picture, read our guide to popular art styles and how to recognize them.