Symbolism (movement)

Lore & Background

Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles that attempted to represent reality in its gritty particularity. In contrast, symbolism favored spirituality, imagination, and dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists, reflecting an increasing interest in religion and spirituality. The movement also had a complex relationship with Parnassianism, retaining its love of word play and concern for musical qualities while rejecting its clarity and objectivity.

Reader's Guide

Symbolism's significance lies in its shift from direct representation to evocation through symbolic imagery, influencing later literary and artistic movements. The Symbolist Manifesto, published by Jean Moréas in 1886, declared hostility to plain meanings and matter-of-fact description, aiming instead to clothe the Ideal in perceptible form. Mallarmé defined symbolism as the perfect use of mystery to evoke an object gradually, revealing a state of the soul. The movement spread to painting across the Western world in a wide variety of styles. Its techniques, including free verse and synesthesia, influenced poets such as T. S. Eliot, Jules Laforgue, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud. The pursuit of 'art for art's sake' was seen as a sacred function, with beauty standing for a higher meaning beyond itself, aligning with Platonic ideals.

Did You Know?

• The term 'symbolist' was popularized by critic Jean Moréas in his 1886 manifesto 'Le Symbolisme', but it had been used earlier by others, including Paul Verlaine.
• Charles Baudelaire admired and translated Edgar Allan Poe, whose works were a significant influence on symbolism.
• Symbolist poets sought to identify and confound separate senses of scent, sound, and color, a practice called synesthesia.
• The Salon de la Rose + Croix, established by Joséphin Péladan in 1892, hosted presentations of avant-garde art, writing, and music, but it was not exclusively for symbolists and had a strong occult/religious orientation.

Roots in Mid-Century Design Reform

The Arts and Crafts movement did not appear in a vacuum. Its intellectual DNA traces back to the mid-nineteenth-century effort to reform decorative design in Britain, a reaction sharpened by the spectacle of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Organisers and critics—including Henry Cole, Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt, and Richard Redgrave—unanimously condemned the exhibits as excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of material qualities. Jones lamented that architects, weavers, and potters produced "novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence." From this shared frustration grew a body of influential publications: Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852), Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856), the latter running to nine reprints by 1910. These writers insisted that ornament must serve the object, that flat and simplified natural motifs should replace lifeless imitation, and that utility must take precedence over decoration. Yet these reformers stopped short of what later Arts and Crafts practitioners would demand. They focused largely on ornamentation rather than construction, lacked a full grasp of manufacturing methods, and did not fundamentally challenge industrial production itself. The Arts and Crafts movement would go further, fusing design reform with social reform in a way its predecessors never attempted.

Philosophical Architects of the Movement

The movement's worldview was shaped by a constellation of thinkers whose ideas interlocked across generations. Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy fed directly into John Ruskin's social criticism, which in turn became the bedrock of Arts and Crafts thought. Ruskin tied the moral and social health of a nation to the quality of its architecture and the nature of its labour. He regarded the mechanised production and division of labour born of the Industrial Revolution as "servile labour," arguing that a healthy, moral society required independent workers who designed the very things they made. In his view, factory-produced objects were inherently "dishonest," and true craftsmanship merged dignity with skill. Earlier, A. W. N. Pugin had anticipated several of these convictions through his Gothic Revival work. His 1836 book Contrasts juxtaposed the failings of modern buildings and town planning against superior medieval examples, and his 1841 specification of "rush chairs, oak tables" for a single building has been described as the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo. Pugin articulated the tendency to measure modern society's faults against the Middle Ages—a comparison that became routine with Ruskin, Morris, and the movement's practitioners. In France, Viollet-le-Duc's writings on nature and Gothic architecture also played an essential role in shaping the movement's aesthetic vocabulary.

The Art Nouveau Question and Global Reach

The relationship between Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau remains genuinely contested among scholars. Some position Arts and Crafts as the root of the Modern Style, which is the British expression of what later became known as Art Nouveau. Others see it simply as the English incarnation of Art Nouveau. Still others argue the two stood in direct opposition, noting that Arts and Crafts practitioners criticised Art Nouveau for embracing industrial materials such as iron. The movement, broadly speaking, flourished in Europe and North America between roughly 1880 and 1920, originating in the British Isles before spreading across the British Empire and to the wider European and American continents. Its influence also reached Japan, where in the 1920s it surfaced as the Mingei movement, a campaign to promote traditional craftsmanship. The term "Arts and Crafts" itself was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, although the underlying principles and style had been developing in England for at least two decades. By around 1920, the movement could be considered over in the UK, though the label continued to be applied loosely to various popular design elements well beyond that date.

Key Figures and Lasting Imprint

The movement drew together a remarkable cast of practitioners and thinkers across the British Isles. In England, William Morris stood as a central designer and advocate, channeling Ruskin's ideals into textiles, wallpapers, and furniture. In Scotland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh became the movement's most prominent figure, translating its principles into architecture and interior design. The broader circle included the historian Thomas Carlyle, whose ideas about work and society provided a philosophical underpinning, and the art critic John Ruskin, whose writings on architecture, labour, and moral life gave the movement its ethical framework. The movement's legacy extends well beyond its roughly four-decade active period. It is widely regarded as a foundational force in the development of modern design, influencing everything from the decorative arts to architectural philosophy. Its insistence on truth to materials, the dignity of the craftsman, and the integration of beauty with function resonated far past 1920. Even as the specific style faded in Britain, the underlying conviction that design carries social and moral weight continued to shape debates about production, craftsmanship, and the role of the individual maker in an industrialised world. The Mingei movement in 1920s Japan demonstrates how these ideas could be transplanted and reinterpreted in entirely different cultural contexts.