Symbolist painting goes after what no eye can see, like love, fear or death. It began as a revolt against Realism and Impressionism, which painted what the eye sees.
Poets got there first. Jean Moréas published the Symbolist manifesto in the newspaper Le Figaro on September 18, 1886.
Symbolist pictures look like dreams, with no clear story. Ask what each figure stands for. I always start with whatever could not exist in real life. The idea usually sits there.
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How These Were Chosen
Here a Symbolist painting has to do one of three things. It turns a story everyone knew, from a myth, the Bible or a poem, into a scene no text describes. Or its first viewers fought over it. Or the artist could not leave it alone and kept repainting or retitling it for years.
12. Ferdinand Hodler, Night (1889 to 1890)
Six people sleep on a pale strip of ground under a dark blue sky, most of them wrapped in black cloth. A seventh man has just woken up. He has pushed himself up on one elbow in the middle of the canvas, his eyes wide and his mouth open.
A figure shrouded in black crouches over his legs, its face hidden. Ferdinand Hodler, a Swiss painter based in Geneva, finished the picture in 1890. The canvas is almost three meters wide.
Hodler meant that black figure as a sign of death. He gave it no skull and no scythe, only the weight of a body under cloth. Of the seven people on the ground, it has come for one.
Hodler had seen that visit at home. Tuberculosis killed his father and two younger brothers before he turned eight. His mother died of the same disease in 1867.
It pinches a fold of the black cloth, as if he could push death away by the hem.
In February 1891 Hodler sent Night to Geneva's annual municipal exhibition. The twelve members of the jury accepted it unanimously. Then the city's executive council stepped in.
Its three members banned the canvas for “lubricity” and “immorality.” The naked sleepers were the problem. The next day, Hodler rented the guardroom of the Bâtiment électoral, a public hall in Geneva, and hung the picture there himself.
He charged one franc at the door, a steep price at the time. Crowds came anyway, and the ban earned him a good sum.
A few months later, Hodler showed Night in Paris at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars. It became his first great success outside Switzerland. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, two senior French Symbolist painters, congratulated him.
At a Glance
Artist: Ferdinand Hodler (1853 to 1918)
Painted: 1889 to 1890
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 116.5 x 299 cm (45.9 x 117.7 in)
Where to see it: Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland
About This Painting
Which women from Hodler's life appear in Night?
Two women close to Hodler posed for Night. Bertha Stucki, whom he married around that time, lies among the sleepers. So does Augustine Dupin, a laundress who had given birth to his son Hector in 1887.
Did Night win a prize?
Night won Hodler a gold medal at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, together with his painting Eurythmy.
What did Hodler call his style?
Hodler called his style parallelism. He used the word for pictures built on symmetry and repeated rhythms, which he believed formed the basis of human society.
11. George Frederic Watts, Hope (1886)
A young woman sits curled on top of a globe that floats in blue-gray mist. A white bandage covers her eyes. She bends over a small wooden lyre.
Its strings hang broken from the top bar, all except one. The English painter George Frederic Watts finished her in 1886 and called her Hope. The title puzzled many of the people who first saw the picture.
Nothing in it looks hopeful. Some critics asked whether Watts had really painted Despair instead.