Symbolist Geographies

Rather than focusing on the beauty of exterior reality, they created highly emotive works drawn from subjective fears and desires.  

This fall’s exhibition Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination dives into this mysterious movement. Showcasing 85 works on paper from the Art Institute’s rich collection, the presentation considers this diffuse style and the different strains that emerged in the European countries where it was practiced.

France: Literature and the Dream World

Symbolism began as a literary movement in France, formally introduced by the publication of a manifesto by Jean Moréas in 1886, which urged followers to avoid “plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality, and matter-of-fact description.” Both artists and writers alike were encouraged to visualize the subjective over the material, the imaginative over the real. 

Odilon Redon was among the first artists to work in a Symbolist vein, primarily in prints and drawings. Like other Symbolists who would follow, Redon often drew inspiration from religion and mythology—spiritual ideas that transcended the modern world. In his luminous pastel Sita, he depicted a story from the ancient Hindu text Ramayana in which the goddess Sita is abducted and carried into the sky but, mid-flight, throws her jewels down to earth so that her husband might find them and rescue her. Emphasizing the dreamlike nature of his Sita, Redon wrote: “Her head surrounded by a golden-green radiance, against a blue sky, stardust falling, a shower of gold, under a sort of undersea mountain.” As if responding to Moréas’s Symbolist manifesto, Redon eschewed description in favor of dreams. 

Lesser-known French Symbolist Adolf Mossa’s Psychological Portrait of the Artist exemplifies the myth of the tortured artist that emerged alongside Symbolism. While Mossa prominently includes the tools of his trade—palette, brush, and violin—to highlight his creativity, the bloodied handprint, scorpion on Mossa’s chest, and snake coiled around his neck are more darkly ambiguous. The artist, however, appears calm amid this perilous imagery: he and the snake share a fixed gaze at the viewer—perhaps suggesting these mysterious elements represent his interior self.

Belgium: Exhibition Societies and Mystical Imagery

Symbolism in Belgium was promoted largely through exhibition societies. As was the case throughout Europe, progressive artists distanced themselves from state-run academies and formed alternative groups to promote and sell their work. Indeed, in France, Impressionism developed similarly in 1874 when artists whose work was rejected by the Paris Salon formed their own exhibition society.

Likewise, in Brussels in 1883 a group of 20 artists showed under the umbrella of Les XX (literally, the 20) after the artist James Ensor’s work was rejected by the Antwerp establishment. Typical of his production, Scandalized Masks depicts two figures wearing masks; the sitting man in a bowler hat and the standing woman in a conical bonnet stare at each other with a sense of mystery and foreboding. Ensor used masks frequently as a satiric costume, a ghoulish personal disguise, or a symbol of modern society’s hypocrisy.

Another Belgian artist, Jean Delville, established a different exhibition society in 1896. The annual Salon d’Art Idealiste promoted a Symbolist art deeply influenced by mysticism and occultism that pursued a spiritual and artistic “ideal” through mysterious imagery. Delville’s color pencil drawing Medusa is a prime example; it depicts the famous snake-headed gorgon of Greek mythology, whose gaze turned onlookers to stone. Here, Medusa’s hypnotic eyes stare out at the viewer from a web of sinuous liquids, serpents, smoke, and a blue veil that partially obscures her face. Delville strove to transcend materialism and exist in the world of pure idea and spirit.

Norway: Moody Landscapes, Anxiety, and Misogyny

Perhaps the most famous Symbolist work, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, first made as a painting and then as a lithograph, encapsulates the jarring expressiveness of the movement. While Munch’s early career, reputation, and market was built in Germany, the artist was Norwegian, and the imagery he used was distinctly Norwegian too. The landscape behind his screaming figure, after all, depicts the Oslo fjord. The Scandinavian variant of Symbolism frequently featured similarly moody landscapes, especially those that incorporated the long, blue-hued summer evenings the northern countries enjoyed. Those landscapes were rich with deeper meanings; the text written in German below Munch’s lithograph reads: “I felt the great scream through nature,” suggesting an outward expression of mankind’s anxiety and inner turmoil.

In addition to poetic views of nature, Scandinavian artists often indulged in the rampant misogyny that plagued fin-de-siècle Europe. Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, Munch’s color woodcut of 1896, depicts a woman’s red hair ensnaring the face of a disembodied man. During this period, Munch’s art was replete with depictions of red-haired femmes fatales, or fatal women, like vampires or sphinxes, who drained the life out of their male victims.

Germany and Austria: A New Romanticism

Similar to Belgium and France, Germany and Austria had their own particular brand of Symbolism, called Neo-Idealism or Neo-Romanticism. The term came from works like those of German artist Max Klinger whose painterly style and imagery recalled an earlier era of Romanticism, exemplified in Caspar David Friedrich’s depictions of lone figures amid forests or seascapes. Klinger’s modern take on this earlier style—seen in works like the color etching and aquatint Abandoned depicting a bereft woman walking along the shore, while a dramatic sky-cloud in the form of a hand unfurls above her—solidified his place in Neo-Romanticism’s nascent years.

In Austria, artists like Emilie Mediz-Pelikan likewise evoked emotion through the use of solitary forms in mystical landscapes. Following her training in Vienna, Paris, and southern Germany, Mediz-Pelikan embraced Symbolism’s potent connection to nature in works drawn in pastel on blue paper. In Larch Forest by a Full Moon, the central tree dominates the foreground, a misty hill crowned by a larch forest with a full yellow moon peeking out from the trees behind. Below the tree, the root system of the birch reveals the life force beneath the surface of the earth.

Despite regional variations, Symbolist artists tirelessly invented their own styles and imagery. Pushing against the boundaries of the Impressionists who preceded them, they forged new paths into depicting emotion, interiority, and all that could not be seen. They also set the groundwork for artists who followed. Their stress on unconscious desires and dream states, as well as their new approaches to religions and philosophy, served as important precursors to the Surrealists who further challenged perceptions of reality.

This fall we invite you to delve into this influential and curious movement with the prints and drawings on view in Strange Realities. You will discover a world rich with mystery and ambiguity and a restless search for deeper meaning that still feels relevant today.

—Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator, Prints and Drawings

Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination opens October 4, 2025, in galleries 124–127.

Sponsors

Support for Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination is provided by an anonymous donor and the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

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