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Of movements and strokes
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Symbolism is all about expressing absolute truths
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Femme Aux Bras Croises, painted in 1902 by Pablo Picasso during his Blue period.
EXPRESSIONISM DREW from movements such as Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Fauvism, like Symbolism, marked a move away from Naturalism. While Fauvism followed a primitive style, Symbolism mined the mythic, mystic, and dream world. Started in the late 19th Century, Symbolism moves in the darker reaches of the Romantic Movement. In literature, Edgar Allen Poe's dark gothic style greatly influenced the movement.
Symbolist manifesto
The philosophy of Symbolism was all about expressing absolute truths by endowing objects with a symbolic meaning. In 1886, Jean Moreas published the Symbolist manifesto where he stated that Symbolism was hostile "to plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality, and matter-of-fact descriptions". He wrote the goal was to "clothe the ideal in a perceptible form".
In this art form, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena are described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial ideals.
In art, leading practitioners of Symbolism include Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and William Blake. The poet created a whole mythic universe with tropes to represent an alternative world. The movement was a precursor to surrealism, Art Nouveau and Les Nabis — a group of Parisian Post-Impressionists, whose work greatly influenced graphic art.
Pablo Picasso's paintings during the Blue Period show the effects of Symbolism; and Picasso is considered the founder of Cubism, which also influenced Expressionism — so there is a wonderfully interlinked circle of art for you!
The early black-and-white films of German expressionism owe of their set design and frames to Symbolism as do horror movies such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, which echo the early paintings of Edvard Munch — and we come full a circle again!
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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