Describe Symbolism and Impressionism as styles in the arts of the West

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Symbolism,which flourished from roughly 1885 to 1910, held that the visible world does not constitute a true or universal reality. Realistic, objective representation, according to the Symbolists, failed to convey the pleasures of sensory experience and the intuitive world of dreams and myth. The artist's mission was to find a language that embraced the mystical, the erotic, and the ineffable world of the senses. For the Symbolists, reality was a swarm of sensations that could never be described but only suggested by poetic symbols—images that elicited moods and feelings beyond literal meanings. Stéphane Mallarmé, a Symbolist poet, cultivated an intimate literary style based on the "music" of words and his poems are tapestries of sensuous, dreamlike motifs that resist definition and analysis. In Symbolist poetry, images seem to flow into one another, and "meaning" often lies between the lines.
In the visual arts, Symbolists gave emphasis to the simplification of line, arbitrary color, and expressive, flattened form. Symbolist emphasis on suggestion rather than depiction constituted a move in the direction of Modernist Abstraction and Expressionism. Symbolism first evolved into the Impressionist style, which emphasized luminosity, the interaction of light and form, subtlety of tone, and a preoccupation with sensation itself. Often called an art of pure sensation, Impressionism was, in part, a response to nineteenth-century research into the physics of light, the chemistry of paint, and the laws of optics.