Symbolism, Early Abstraction, and the Emergence of Cubism
Foundations of Realistic Representation and Western Art Conventions
Mimetic Realism and Western Tradition:
Prior to the late nineteenth century, Western art was heavily anchored in the principle of representing physical reality in a convincingly realistic manner.
Artists devoted extensive study to rendering the human body with anatomical precision, accurately depicting natural landscapes, and constructing precise architectural forms.
The Greek concept of mimesis serves as the formal term for the realistic representation of visible reality.
Under these established conventions, works of art were expected to be realistic, clear, and recognizable to the viewer.
Linear Perspective and Spatial Depth:
Developed during the Renaissance and utilized continuously through the nineteenth century, linear perspective served as the primary method for rendering relative space and three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional pictorial plane.
Hierarchy of Genres and History Painting:
History painting was regarded as the highest form of artistic expression in Western art.
Understanding and appreciating history painting required both the artist and the patron/viewer to share a classical education, including deep familiarity with iconography, literature, and religious and literary traditions.
Symbolic visual codes—such as specific arrangements of birds depicted on ancient coins and medallions—required thorough classical training to interpret correctly.
Shifts in Inspiration: Non-Western Influences and Modernization
Cross-Cultural Borrowing and Collecting:
Beginning in the and accelerating rapidly in the early twentieth century, new artistic movements shifted away from traditional European models.
Artists began collecting art and material culture from non-Western regions, initially acquiring porcelain, silks, and paintings from Japan and China.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interest expanded to artifacts from Africa and Oceania.
Early modern artists incorporated the aesthetic surfaces and formal visual structures of these objects into their work without necessarily comprehending their native cultural or ritual functions.
Integration of Industrialization and the Machine Age:
Artists sought new visual languages to integrate the modern industrial world—including complex machinery, factories, and eventually the automobile—into fine art.
Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise () depicts an active industrial port complete with cargo ships, cranes, and smoking industrial smokestacks.
Impressionists and participants in the outsider art exhibitions of the and focused heavily on modern life; Pierre-Auguste Renoir frequently painted modern transit hubs such as railway depots (e.g., the site represented today by the Gare du Nord in Paris).
In the early twentieth century, artists became increasingly captivated by a vision of a speedy, streamlined, shiny, modern future driven by machines.
Impact of World War I:
The optimistic vision of the Machine Age was heavily darkened by World War I, the first large-scale, heavily mechanized military conflict.
The unprecedented scale of destruction inflicted upon human bodies and landscapes demonstrated the catastrophic potential of modern technology.
Key technologies of industrial warfare included airplanes, heavy artillery, tanks, and chemical warfare.
Consequently, modern industrial machinery was viewed dualistically: as a source of shiny, liberatory future potential, and as a terrifying engine of dark, mechanized destruction.
Influences from Psychology and Theoretical Science
Psychology and the Subconscious Mind:
In , Sigmund Freud published On the Interpretation of Dreams, formalizing the concept of the subconscious mind.
Artists embraced the idea that human consciousness contains hidden layers inaccessible through direct rational thought, turning to dreams, drug-induced states, and altered states of consciousness as sources for artistic creation.
Whereas historic Western art rendered external divine or religious visions, modern artists sought to uncover hidden psychological depths within the human psyche.
Physics, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics:
The year served as a major watershed year in the history of science due to Albert Einstein publishing his paper on special relativity.
Special relativity dismantled long-held assumptions that fundamental aspects of nature, such as time and space, were fixed, visible, and absolute.
Simultaneously, the development of quantum mechanics introduced the concept that physical matter is governed by unseen particle activities occurring beneath direct human observation.
These scientific breakthroughs established that both the cosmos and human perception possess unseen depths, profoundly undermining the premise of simple physical realism in art.
Symbolism and Internal Visions
Core Tenets of Symbolism:
Originating in the late nineteenth century, Symbolist artists abandoned the objective rendering of physical sights to portray internal states, including dreams, visions, hallucinations, and psychological distress.
In , Paul Gauguin articulated this fundamental shift: "Art is an abstraction. Extract it from nature, dreaming before it, and think more of the creations that will result than of nature."
Vincent van Gogh described his creative process similarly: "I am not conscious of myself anymore, and the picture comes to me as if in a dream."
Symbolist artists viewed creative output as an absolute inner compulsion; van Gogh pursued his painting with religious zeal, producing approximately paintings within a span of roughly prior to his death by suicide.
Advances in Pigment Chemistry and Color Availability:
The nineteenth century witnessed major chemical breakthroughs, including the synthesis of artificial aniline dyes starting in .
The first synthetic dye (aniline purple/mauveine) was discovered accidentally during chemical experimentation.
Historically, intense, durable pigments were exceptionally rare and costly:
Vivid blues required grinding lapis lazuli semi-precious stones.
Screaming scarlet reds were obtained by grinding cochineal beetles (Dactylopius coccus), which feed on cactus fungus in Mexico (and in smaller amounts in the Mediterranean).
Cochineal was historically imported to dye British military red coats, and remained a standard pigment in twentieth-century Hollywood lipsticks and food colorings due to the carcinogenicity of certain synthetic red dyes.
Mass-produced, cheap, chemically stable pigments enabled Impressionist, Symbolist, and Post-Impressionist painters to deploy vibrant, highly saturated color palettes.
Detailed Analysis of Key Symbolist and Post-Impressionist Artworks
Paul Gauguin — Vision after the Sermon ():
Subject: Depicts Breton/Belgian village women exiting a church service, collectively visualizing the biblical sermon they just heard regarding Jacob wrestling with an angel.
Composition: Fuses physical reality (the women, a tree trunk, a local cow) with an internal spiritual vision (Jacob and the angel fighting on an ungrounded field).
Formal Qualities: Abandonment of linear perspective in favor of spatial stacking and overlapping figures (recalling ancient Greek temple frieze reliefs); flattening of the pictorial plane; use of a completely non-naturalistic, brilliant red ground.
Vincent van Gogh — The Night Café ():
Artistic Intent: Van Gogh explicitly stated his desire to portray "the terrible passions of humanity" and convey that the café is a space where a person can go mad, ruin themselves, or commit a crime.
Color Theory and Palette: Built around aggressive, clashing tones—soft Louis XV greens, malachite, harsh yellow-greens, contrasting blue-greens, and pale sulfur tones evoking a "devil's furnace," set off by harsh Japanese grays.
Iconography and Social Taboos: Features tables strewn with liquor bottles and glasses, patrons slumped over in drunkenness, and unaccompanied women in a public drinking space.
Historical Context of Public Drinking: Nineteenth-century social norms dictated that respectable women drank only at home or in private room enclosures ("snugs") within public houses. Women visible in public bars were stigmatized as "public women" (streetwalkers or prostitutes).
Paint Application: Heavy impasto application, with paint squeezed directly from tubes or slathered with spatulas, creating a textured three-dimensional surface.
Paul Gauguin — Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? ():
Context: Monumental allegorical canvas executed in Tahiti right before Gauguin made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in .
Themes: Represents the human life cycle through three stages: birth/creation (infancy), life (adulthood), and destruction/death (old age).
Formal Qualities: Incorporates non-Western aesthetic choices, tropical color harmonies, and androgynous figure renderings reflecting Polynesian cultural influences, side-by-side with Western motifs like the reclining female nude.
Edvard Munch — The Scream ():
Background: Created by Scandinavian artist Edvard Munch after spending time among French Symbolists, bringing a distinct northern European sensibility to modern art.
Inspiration: Munch recorded the experience underlying the work: "I stood there trembling with fear, and I felt a loud, uninformed scream piercing nature."
Thematic Resonance: Serves as a visual embodiment of modern anxiety, existential alienation, and psychological dislocation (aligning with Freudian mental inhibition and Marxian concepts of worker alienation under industrial capitalism).
Visual Structure: Features a central writhing figure on a pier, distended swirls of green, a dark shoreline, and an intensely saturated, unnatural orange-red sky typical of cold northern sunsets altered by atmospheric particles.
Post-Impressionist Formal Innovations: Cézanne and Matisse
Paul Cézanne — Mont Sainte-Victoire:
Technique: Painted repeatedly from Cézanne's home in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France.
Visual Deconstruction: Rather than reproducing realistic mimesis, Cézanne constructed scenes using deliberate, visible, directional brushstrokes and flat patches of color to capture light, structure, and spatial relations.
Atmospheric Perspective: Transformed the traditional Renaissance blue atmospheric haze into discrete, structured passages of blue, red, and white paint.
Historical Legacy: Cézanne's structural approach directly paved the way for Cubism and total visual abstraction (prefiguring twentieth-century Color Field painting, such as Mark Rothko's monumental canvases at MoCA Los Angeles and the Rothko Chapel, as well as monumental single-color works like the black canvas at the Centre Pompidou in Paris).
Henri Matisse and Formal Reduction:
Color Usage: Disassociated color from literal representation, deploying arbitrary pinks, intense yellows, and unnatural greens to construct human skin tones and landscapes.
Human Figure: Reduced human anatomy to spare, expressive gestures (such as circular dancing figures) reminiscent of Archaic statuary structures, merging multiple viewing angles into a single flattened figure.
Pablo Picasso and the Development of Early Cubism
Pablo Picasso:
Profile: Spanish artist who became one of the most prolific and influential figures of twentieth-century art, radically altering the societal definition of the modern artist.
Pablo Picasso — Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ():
Developmental History: Worked on over two years; underwent drastic compositional changes before completion.
Subject Matter: Depicts five prostitutes inside a brothel located on Avignon Street in Barcelona, Spain.
Early Working Studies: Initial sketches included male figures—a sailor and a young man holding a human skull as a traditional memento mori (reminder of mortality).
Non-Western Formal Influence: Picasso repainted the faces of the figures on the right after viewing African masks and sculpture in Paris. He adapted their visual structures to break away from Western academic draftsmanship without engaging in their native cultural meanings.
Formal Breakdown and Geometric Abstraction:
Replaces smooth anatomical contours with sharp, intersecting diamond shapes, planes, and geometric angles.
Fuses figure and background into a single flattened, highly fractured surface.
Renders foreground elements (such as the still life featuring a melon shaped like a scimitar) tilted sharply toward the viewing plane.
Applies simultaneity: depicting individual figures from multiple vantage points (frontal view and side profile) simultaneously.
Conceptual Shift in Art History:
Early Cubism marks a definitive departure from the goal of capturing visible physical nature.
Similar to the historic transition from Roman naturalism to Early Christian art (where realistic proportions were abandoned to emphasize underlying spiritual ideas), early twentieth-century Cubism abandoned physical mimesis to emphasize internal sensation, visual concept, and formal geometric experimentation.