Blog — Symbolism

Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead remains one of the most haunting images of nineteenth-century Symbolism: a silent island surrounded by dark water, a narrow boat approaching its rocky shore, and a white-shrouded figure standing beside what appears to be a coffin. Böcklin never gives the viewer a clear narrative. Instead, the painting exists somewhere between landscape, dream and funerary procession.

Few, if any, painters of the late nineteenth century returned so relentlessly to temptation, fear, sexuality, mythology, and the supernatural as Franz von Stuck.

Born in Bavaria in 1863, Stuck became one of the defining figures of German Symbolism. His paintings are theatrical and often deliberately unsettling: Lucifer staring directly out at the viewer, serpents curling around pale bodies, Medusa caught somewhere between beauty and terror, centaurs fighting beneath dark skies, and allegorical figures that seem to emerge from another world.

Max Klinger understood that some images belong to daylight and others belong somewhere much darker.

The German artist, born in Leipzig in 1857, worked as a painter and sculptor, but it was in printmaking that his imagination became truly strange. Across elaborate cycles of etchings, engravings, aquatints and mezzotints, Klinger constructed private worlds filled with desire, anxiety, erotic obsession, death, myth and dream.