Symbolist Women Artists: How Sarah Bernhardt, Camille Claudel, and Others Challenged a Male-Dominated Movement

Key facts

• Symbolist art emerged in late 19th-century France from literature and was an escapist movement with strict gender boundaries.
• Women in Symbolist art were mostly depicted as flat symbols of purity or destructive lust, with few women artists participating.
• Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress, was also a Symbolist sculptor who reclaimed the femme fatale archetype in works like a bronze inkwell self-portrait as a dragon-winged monster.
• Camille Claudel, a sculptor in marble and bronze, created Symbolist-influenced works; her 1905 Perseus and the Gorgon featured Medusa with her own facial features.
• Romaine Brooks, known for monochrome portraits of Parisian queer elites, incorporated Symbolist elements during her relationship with dancer Ida Rubinstein.
• Jeanne Jacquemin was active in the Symbolist community, socialized with Oscar Wilde and Odilon Redon, but her reputation suffered due to her personal life and spiritual inclinations.
• Around 40 pastel works by Jeanne Jacquemin are recorded, mostly self-portraits; her severed head of Jesus Christ with her own features was considered revolutionary.
• The Symbolist movement's main literary sources were Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and French translations of Edgar Allan Poe; famous Symbolists include Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Jean Delville.