“Just as Impressionism could be interpreted as an attempt to take a kind of psychological back-step, so that the artist could produce a suggestion of what the eye registered prior to the brain’s synthesis of a more coherent, knowledge-based image, so Symbolism, in the theories of Moréas, Kahn and Stéphane Mallarmé, could be interpreted as an attempt to suspend a part of the brain’s analytical process and tackle ideas in a more immediate form, prior to the intellectual sieve of interpretation and explanation.”

Brian Stableford, 2016