The Symbolist Manifesto and a Movement That Preceded Its Own Name

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 18 September 1886, the poet Jean Moreas published a manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro that gave a name, Symbolism, to a set of ideas that had already been visible in painting for at least a decade without one. Moreas wrote primarily about poetry, arguing against both Romanticism's direct emotional statement and Naturalism's documentary observation in favor of ideas clothed in sensuous form, images that suggested a private, often mystical meaning rather than describing an external scene. Painters read the manifesto as confirmation of a direction some of them had already been pursuing on their own terms. Gustave Moreau had been painting jewel toned, densely worked mythological and biblical scenes since the 1860s that treated ancient story as a vehicle for interior, almost hallucinatory states rather than historical illustration. Odilon Redon had spent the 1880s producing charcoal drawings and lithographs, his noirs, built from dream logic rather than observed reality. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, working in a completely different register, flattened space and simplified figures into mural-like allegories that painters as different as Gauguin and Seurat both separately cited as an influence. None of the three painters used the word Symbolism to describe their own work before 1886. All three were folded into the movement almost immediately afterward, which is part of why Symbolism's visual boundaries have always been argued rather than settled: the name arrived after the practice, describing a tendency several painters had reached independently rather than a program any of them had agreed to in advance.