Symbolism was adopted by artists during the 1880s to break away from Realism. Realists used real objects as their subject matter. With time, some artists found these boring as they sought to explore their imaginations as they felt that the meaning of art arose from emotional experiences and thus they incorporated artistic styles such as form and color to make it more interesting and different from Realism. Symbolism enabled artists to explore their inner subjectivity rather than use the real world as an object of art (Myers, 2007). They also adopted signs and symbols that they acted created a fantasy world that provided an alternative world from the civilization in which they existed. Gauguin’s work titled Vision of the Sermon was an expression of emotional experiences and developed in synthetic style.
Fin-de-siècle marked the end of an era where art was used to represent aestheticism and used to depict social and moral concerns, such as the increase freedom for artists to use art to represent subversive content, a piece by Arthur Symons. This phenomenon attempted to increase the contribution of art in bringing different social concerns such as sexuality and gender to light. This was not readily accepted since it would combine art at the fin-de-siècle with naturalist art style to create a more modern form type of art. It thus described freedom of expression as an attitude and the search for artistic freedom as a behavior.
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Art Nouveau tried to synthesize total art by combining fine arts with applied arts (Gontar, 2006). A combination of the two was used to create non-narrative paintings, which represented freedom from past artistic styles that prevented artists from exploring their creativity. This movement aimed to reduce the influence of traditional artistic styles by incorporating different styles borrowed from arts and crafts to form a more cohesive style of style which would express the freedom of the artists as a result of adopting different styles of art. In order to spread the movement of Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing opened an art gallery where he displayed his contemporary décor that depicted the expressiveness of art as a result of Art Nouveau.
References
Gontar, C. (2006). Art Nouveau. Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/artn/hd_artn.htm
Myers, N. (2007). Symbolism. Department of European Paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/symb/hd_symb.htm
