Symbolism in Art

Symbolism in art emphasizes suggestiveness, vagueness, and free departure in form. Aestheticism, as a broad movement, recognizes the connection between beauty and evil; Symbolism in art , in reaching toward transcendence, seeks to shed ugliness; Decadence cultivates a fastidious affection for the disreputable. Decadence stresses the interrelationship of virtue and vice. beauty and ugliness, whereas Symbolism in art separates them by converting offensive phenomenal facts into symbols for an immaterial reality. Symbolism in art is the direct descendent of Aestheticism and Art-for Art's Sake; Decadence is an illegitimate by-blow sired by Naturalism upon Aestheticism.

Steven P. Sondrup has demonstrated a clear resemblance between Hofmannstahl's poetry and that of the French Symbolists. The Viennese poet was similarly fascinated by language and employed a personalized and individualistic style. He believed that poetry should evoke sentiments, that it should suggest rather than describe moods. But although Hofmannstahl has been associated with Decadence, his poetry demonstrates only a slight connection with that style. His commitment to a philosophy of unity-of-all-being is essentially hopeful and, in his expression of it, contrary to the basically unnatural, atomizing method implied by the Decadent mode where unity in existence must be fashioned by man, not discovered in nature. Georg Trakl too has been classed among Decadents, but he can be viewed as a decadent only topically since he treats themes of decay and incorporates subjects familiar to Decadence. Trakl's symbolism in art is highly personal and his technique closer to Expressionism.

Impressionists tried to revive natural impressions by breaking images down into components of light, thereby renouncing the clear borders and chiaroscuro of academic painting. Symbolism in art sought images that evoked obscure responses. But the Decadent style, while retaining a realistic mode of rendering images, violated formal conventions by breaking up compositions into independent, even contending parts, the order and significance of which could be recovered only through an intellectual effort at comprehension. The paintings were not paintings only, as Whistler required, but embodiments of "texts."

Like Moreau and Khnopff, Toorop depended upon unusual details to contribute intellectual meaning, a sort of text, to his paintings. Thus in The Three Bri'des, while each detail bears its weight of significance, from the motif of the bell to those of flowers, hair, and brambles, these independently charged elements are unified by a rhythmic pattern most conspicuous in the design of flowing hair. The drawings Faith in Decline and The Sphinx, on the other hand, are purposely not unified by such an ornamental device but by the symbolic relationships of part to part. In the first work many details bear only a slight conventional weight of symbolism in art, though there are ecclesiastical allusions, a version of Christ, and a pair of swans. In the second, the pair of swans reappears; almost everything else, from the Sphinx itself to the Buddha-like idol, the water lily, the corpses, and the musical instruments, is energized by the familiar iconography of the age.