Expressionism and Symbolism are early 20th-century and late 19th-century art movements that rejected realism in opposite ways: Expressionism distorts color and form to convey inner emotion, while Symbolism uses imagery to hint at hidden spiritual truths. One is a subjective scream, the other an enigmatic whisper.
What Are Expressionism and Symbolism, Exactly?
Expressionism is an early 20th-century movement, chiefly German and Austrian, in which artists distorted color, line, and form to express subjective emotion rather than objective reality. The term first appeared in print in 1911, used by critic Herwarth Walden in his Berlin journal Der Sturm to describe avant-garde painters. The movement peaked between roughly 1905 and 1925, with groups like Die Brücke (founded 1905 in Dresden) and Der Blaue Reiter (founded 1911 in Munich) at its center.
Symbolism is older. It emerged in France and Belgium in the 1880s as a literary and artistic reaction against naturalism and realism. The poet Jean Moréas published its manifesto in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886, declaring that the movement’s aim was to “clothe the idea in sensible form.” Symbolists held that the material world was a veil, and that art should point past it to the eternal, the mystical, and the dreamlike.
The two movements share a parent: both descend from Romanticism’s insistence that the artist’s inner life is the true subject of art. But they parted ways on method. The Expressionist deformed the visible. The Symbolist abandoned it.
Where Did Each Movement Come From?
Symbolism grew directly out of the disillusionment that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The certainties of the Enlightenment had crumbled, and a generation of poets and painters turned away from the materialist worldview that had produced both industrial progress and the slaughter of the Siege of Paris. They looked instead to the occult revival of the period: the Tarot, the Kabbalah, and the writings of Éliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854) was being rediscovered by a new generation.
The central figures were the poets Charles Baudelaire, whose 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal had already mapped the territory, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose 1876 poem L’Après-midi d’un faune treated language as a system of allusions rather than descriptions. The painters Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon translated this into visual terms. Moreau’s The Apparition (1876), showing Salome before the severed head of John the Baptist, is a textbook Symbolist image: the subject is not a biblical scene but the idea of fascination itself, rendered in gold and dreamlike detail. Redon, who called his charcoal drawings “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible,” worked in near-darkness, conjuring floating eyes and strange flowers. These works rely on a shared vocabulary of related symbols that appears across Symbolist art.
Expressionism came from a different wound. It emerged in the decade before World War I, in a Germany that was industrializing at a brutal pace. The painters of Die Brücke, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, were young men who had seen the cities grow monstrous and the individual shrink. They wanted to paint the anxiety of that experience directly. Kirchner’s street scenes from 1913 and 1914 show Berlin as a jagged, hostile place, figures with sharp elbows and hollow eyes. The war itself, when it came in 1914, confirmed everything they had suspected. The movement’s later phase, after 1918, was shaped by the trauma of the trenches and the collapse of the German Empire.
The difference in origin explains the difference in method. The Symbolists had lost faith in the visible world and looked past it. The Expressionists had lost faith in the visible world and looked straight at it, refusing to flinch.
How Did Each Movement Treat the Invisible?
For the Symbolists, the invisible was the true reality, and the visible world was its imperfect shadow. They drew on Neoplatonism, on Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, and on the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below.” The artist’s job was not to describe but to evoke. Mallarmé said it directly: “To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is made of the happiness of guessing little by little. To suggest it, that is the dream.”
This is why Symbolist paintings so often feel like riddles. Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele (1895) shows the mortal woman consumed by the divine radiance of her lover, who appears as a vast, hieratic figure covered in vegetation and stars. The painting is not about a myth. It is about the danger and ecstasy of contact with the divine, which cannot be shown directly, only suggested through symbols: the lightning, the flowers, the fading body of Semele.
The Expressionists took the opposite position. They did not believe the invisible could be reached by turning away from the world, because the world was all we had. The only reality available was the self, and the self was in turmoil. So they turned the world into a mirror of that turmoil. Edvard Munch, who worked before the movement was named but is its most famous precursor, said of The Scream (1893): “I was walking along the road with two friends, the sun was setting, I felt a breath of melancholy, suddenly the sky became blood red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on, I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great infinite scream through nature.”
That is the Expressionist creed in one paragraph. The scream is not in the figure’s mouth. It is in the sky, the water, the distorted perspective. The world itself has become the emotion.
What Did Each Movement Actually Practice?
The Symbolists practiced suggestion, and they practiced it with strict discipline. In poetry, this meant a new use of language: words chosen for their musical value and their associative power rather than their descriptive accuracy. Paul Verlaine’s 1874 poem Art Poétique demanded “music before everything else,” and the Symbolists obliged, writing verse that was meant to be felt before it was understood. In painting, it meant a deliberate rejection of naturalistic color and perspective. The Nabis group, active in Paris in the 1890s, painted in flat planes of color, influenced by Japanese prints and by the cloisonné technique of Émile Bernard, where forms are outlined in dark contours like stained glass.
The Expressionists practiced distortion, and they practiced it with equal discipline. The painters of Die Brücke carved their own woodcuts, reviving a medieval technique because its rough, jagged lines matched their aesthetic. They used color not as it appeared in nature but as it felt in the body: red for rage, yellow for anxiety, green for sickness. Kirchner’s 1913 self-portrait shows him in a studio filled with jagged angles, his face a mask of tension, the whole scene vibrating with unease. The movement’s writers, like Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn, did the same with language, using stark imagery and broken syntax to convey the fragmentation of modern consciousness.
There is a practical difference here that matters for anyone studying the occult. The Symbolists believed in a hidden order, and their art was a form of meditation on that order. The Expressionists believed in chaos, and their art was a form of confrontation with it. One is a path of ascent, the other a path of descent. Both are valid approaches to the invisible, but they are not interchangeable. For a deeper look at how visual styles carry esoteric meaning, the aesthetics hub offers a broader map of these currents.
How Do the Two Movements Compare to Each Other?
The easiest way to hold them apart is to remember their attitudes toward the world. The Symbolist looks at a tree and sees a symbol of the World Tree, the axis mundi, the connection between heaven and earth. The Expressionist looks at the same tree and sees its branches twisted by the same wind that twists the artist’s own nerves. One sees through the tree. The other sees the tree as a mirror.
This difference shows up in their use of color. Symbolist color is often jewel-like, precious, otherworldly: Moreau’s golds and deep reds, Redon’s luminous pastels. Expressionist color is aggressive, visceral, sometimes ugly: Kirchner’s acid greens, Emil Nolde’s burning reds and yellows, which he used in his religious paintings to make the sacred feel immediate and dangerous. Nolde’s The Last Supper (1909) shows Christ and the apostles as rough, primitive figures, their faces masks of intensity. It is a world away from Moreau’s jeweled mysticism, but both are attempts to make the divine present.
The two movements also differ in their relationship to the occult. The Symbolists were openly esoteric. Many of them were involved with the Rosicrucian revival of the 1890s; the Salon de la Rose + Croix, founded by the writer Joséphin Péladan in 1892, exhibited Symbolist art under explicitly occult auspices. Péladan, who called himself “Sâr Mérodack,” was a student of the Tarot and the Kabbalah, and he demanded that the artists he exhibited work in a mystical, idealist mode. To understand the esoteric framework behind that demand, see the glossary entry on Rosicrucianism. The Expressionists, by contrast, were mostly secular. Their interest was in psychology rather than spirituality, in the inner life of the individual rather than the hidden structure of the cosmos. The exception is Nolde, who was deeply religious, but his religiosity was personal and Protestant, not esoteric.
What Do People Get Wrong About These Movements?
The most common error is treating Expressionism as a form of Symbolism or vice versa. They are often lumped together under the label “anti-realist,” which is true but useless, the way “non-mammal” is true of both snakes and birds. The distinction matters because the two movements ask different things of the viewer. A Symbolist painting asks you to decode it, to move from the visible image to the invisible idea. An Expressionist painting asks you to feel it, to let the distortion work on your nervous system directly.
A second error is dating Expressionism too early. Munch’s The Scream is from 1893, and it is often called the first Expressionist painting, but Munch was a Symbolist in his own time, and the work belongs to that movement’s fascination with the inner life. Expressionism as a self-conscious movement begins with Die Brücke in 1905. The confusion is understandable, but it obscures the fact that the two movements overlapped for nearly two decades, and that some artists, like the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, moved from one to the other as the war approached.
A third error is assuming that Symbolism died with the 19th century. It did not. The movement’s influence runs through Surrealism, through the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, through the films of Ingmar Bergman. And Expressionism did not die with the Weimar Republic either. Its influence runs through film noir, through the horror cinema of the 1930s, through the German director F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which is a pure Expressionist work in its use of distorted sets and shadows. For more on how such visual languages persist, the glossary entry on the occult aesthetic traces the lineage further.
FAQ
Is Expressionism a type of Symbolism?
No. They are separate movements with different origins, methods, and goals. Symbolism turns away from the visible world toward the unseen; Expressionism distorts the visible world to express inner feeling.
What came first, Symbolism or Expressionism?
Symbolism came first. Its manifesto was published in 1886, and the movement flourished in the 1890s. Expressionism emerged around 1905 with the founding of Die Brücke in Dresden.
Which movement is more relevant to occult studies?
Symbolism is more directly relevant, because it was explicitly connected to the occult revival of the late 19th century, including the Rosicrucian Salon of Joséphin Péladan. Expressionism is more relevant to the psychology of spiritual crisis.
Two Languages, One Question
The two movements never reconciled, and they did not need to. Symbolism taught artists to look through the world, Expressionism taught them to look at it until it broke apart. Together they form the two great modern answers to an ancient question: how do you show what cannot be seen? One answer is the symbol. The other is the scream.