Symbolism is the applied use of any iconic representations which carry particular conventional meanings.

The term "symbolism" is often limited to use in contrast to "representationalism"; defining the general directions of a linear spectrum wherein all symbolic concepts can be viewed in relation, and where changes in context may imply systemic changes to individual and collective definitions of symbols.

"Symbolism" may refer to a way of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather than literal properties, allowing for the broader interpretation of a carried meaning than more literal concept-representations allow.

In Nutshell

Terminology
Term first used in reference to French literature and poetry around 1886. In April of 1892, the term was applied to the visual arts by the critic G. Albert Aurier.
Artists
Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Aubrey Beardsley, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Ferdinand Hodler, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Timeline
1880s through 1890s.
Started In
Europe and the United States.
About
In 1886, the writer Jean Moréas wrote a Symbolist manifesto regarding music and literature, in which he rejected the everyday, contemporary world popular with Realists in favor of timeless myths. In 1892, the critic G. Albert Aurier applied the term to Paul Gauguin's work. The term has come to refer to subjective, anti-Realist tendencies in art and literature at the end of the 19th century.
Theme
Symbolists were interested in exotic, erotic, spiritual, occult, and otherworldly subjects. Some Symbolist artists drew their subject matter from Symbolist poetry; thus, the femme fatale became a common theme, as did works dealing with death and sin.
Art Style
Not really a style as much as an approach, which was mostly manifested in a melancholy fin de siècle ("end of the century") attitude. Also, Symbolist poets believed there was a correspondence between the sound and rhythm of their words and the words' meaning. Symbolist painters picked up on this thought and believed that color and line could be expressive of ideas and emotions.
Known Work
MUNCH, The Scream, 1893.
Inspiration
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Post-Impressionists.
Become Inspiration Of
Surrealism.

All forms of language are innately symbolic, and any system of symbols can form a "language;" at the minimum using only two arbitrary symbols in a binary system.

Human oral language is based in the use of phonemes as representative symbols, and the analogous written forms are typically deferential to the phoneme. The written word is therefore symbolically representative of both the symbolic phoneme and directly to the cognitive concept which it represents.

The interpretation of abstract symbols has had an important role in religion and psychoanalysis.

As envisioned by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, symbols are not the creations of mind, but rather are distinct capacities within the mind to hold a distinct piece of information. In the mind, the symbol can find free association with any number of other symbols, can be organized in any number of ways, and can hold the connected meanings between symbols as symbols in themselves.

Jung and Freud diverged on the issue of common cognitive symbol systems and whether they could exist only within the individual mind or among other minds; whether any cognitive symbolism was defined by innate symbolism or by influence of environment.

Symbolism in Literature v/s Symbolism in Art

Symbolism in literature is distinct from Symbolism in art although the two overlapped on a number of points.

In painting, Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private movement of Decadence.

Symbolist Painters and Visual Artists

There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, among whom Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop were numbered.

Symbolism in painting had an even larger geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry, reaching several Russian artists, as well as figures such as Elihu Vedder in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture.

The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references.

More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis.

In their exploration of dreamlike subjects they are also precursors of the Surrealists; Bernard Delvaille has described René Magritte's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud".