Symbolism

A late-19th-century reaction against Realism and Impressionism, in favor of dream, myth, decadence and the inner life. Symbolist painters — Munch, Redon, Moreau, Khnopff, Klimt — used color and distorted form to evoke states of mind that strict observation could not reach: anxiety, eroticism, mortality. The movement was tightly bound to contemporary literature (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Maeterlinck) and to the new sciences of psychology and the unconscious; it provided much of the imaginative groundwork for Expressionism and Surrealism in the early 20th century.