Symbolism

    Symbolism was an art movement that flourished in France,Russia and Belgian in late 19th century.In literature the style began with the publication  les Fleurs du mal(The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire.During the 1860s and70s the aesthetic was developed by Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine.The name 'symbolist' invented bu Jean Morias because he wanted to distinguish symbolists from the related decadent of literature and of art.Symbolism was a reaction against naturalism and realism.It was a reaction in favor of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams.Symbolists wrote in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner ,enriching particular images or objects with symbolic meaning because they believed that art should represent absolute truth that could only be described indirectly.
     Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism, and its effects can be seen on many work of modernist artists such as Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken,Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats.
     After the begining of the 20th century symbolism had a major effect on Russian poets such as Alexander Blok,Andrei Bely, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg(1912) is considered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.
     In Romania,symbolists  influenced by the French poetry when Alexandru Makendski reunited a group of young poets during the 1880s.Those effects can be seen on works of Tudor Arghezi,Ion Minulescu, George Bacovia,Mateiu Caragiale,Tristan Tzara and Tudor Vianu.
     In painting expressionism and surrealism are the effects of the symbolist painters.

 

                                 
La Mort du Fossoyeur(Tje death of the gravedigger) by Carlos Schwabe.

'The wounded angel' by Hugo Simberg








               SYMBOLISTS

• Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) German painter (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog)
• Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet and writer (Eugene Onegin)
• Gérard de Nerval (1808–55) French poet
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) American poet and writer (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket)
• Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) Russian poet and writer (A Hero of Our Time)
• Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French poet (Les Fleurs du mal)
• Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (Madame Bovary)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) English painter (Beata Beatrix)
• Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet