Symbolists and Symbolism

83 REPRODUCTIONS IN FULL COLOR. 228 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS. The Symbolist movement was one of the dominant forces in European art and literature from 1870 to 1900. Influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelites, the operas of Wagner, and poets like Baudelaire, Mallarme and Maeterlinck, painters aimed at imaginative suggestions of emotion through symbolic allusions and luxuriant decorative form. Symbolism was less a school than the atmosphere of a period. Translated from the French by Barbara Bray, Elizabeth Wrightson, and Bernard C. Swift.