Symbolism
A late 19th-century art and literary movement that used symbolic imagery, myth, and spiritual or psychological content to express ideas that lay beyond the reach of realism or direct description.
Symbolism emerged in France and Belgium in the 1880s as a reaction against both Realism's literal depiction and Impressionism's focus on surface sensation. Symbolist artists believed that art should suggest rather than describe -- that deeper truths about the soul, spirituality, and human experience could only be reached through symbol, myth, and dream imagery.
In painting, Symbolism is associated with artists like Gustav Moreau, Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Hodler, and the early Gustave Klimt. Their works draw on mythology, religion, and the unconscious, presenting figures in richly decorative, often mysterious contexts that resist single interpretation.
The Symbolist insistence on inner meaning over outer appearance directly influenced Expressionism, Surrealism, and early abstraction. Kandinsky's theoretical writings explicitly build on Symbolist ideas about art as spiritual communication. Hilma af Klint, whose abstract paintings preceded Kandinsky's by several years, worked within a deeply Symbolist and spiritual framework.