Symbolism

Some painters had grown tired of depicting only what could be seen. In September 1886, the poet Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in Le Figaro, though this was a literary manifesto, and painting borrowed the name only afterward. Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes had both been painting this way for twenty years before the manifesto existed. What they painted was dreams, myth, vision, an anxiety with no name, the conviction that what cannot be seen is more real than what can. This current mattered again thirty-eight years later: when André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, he named Gustave Moreau as a forerunner. Because some painters had first insisted that dreams were fair subject matter, a later generation could make dreams their whole territory. Puvis de Chavannes's flat, simplified compositions also reached Gauguin and his circle. This current turns out to be a watershed for several rivers at once.