Symbolism (art) is a late-19th-century movement that rejected naturalism in favour of dream, myth, and the suggestion of inner states.
Symbolism emerged in France in the 1880s as a literary movement (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud) and quickly extended into painting, music, and theatre. The movement rejected the Impressionist commitment to direct visual perception and the Realist commitment to social observation in favour of an art of mood, myth, dream, and inner experience. Gustave Moreau's mythological scenes (notably his many Salomes), Odilon Redon's noirs and his later luminous pastels, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's pale allegorical murals, and Edward Burne-Jones's medievalising figures in England all belong to the movement. In Belgium, Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville. In Norway, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' (1893). In Vienna, Gustav Klimt's gold-leaf portraits and allegories. Symbolist painters did not depict events; they evoked states. The movement was a major influence on Surrealism, on Wassily Kandinsky's path toward abstraction, and on the visual culture of fin-de-siècle Europe more broadly.