August STRINDBERG

Fridays are the Best! Every other Friday, Artprice offers you a themed auction ranking. This week the ranking reveals the 10 rarest and best-performing 19th century artists at auction this year.

Around 1890, in a reaction against impressionism and the creeping materialism of the industrial revolution, a new pictorial language began to emerge across Europe, symbolism. Not content with reproducing the real world, the symbolists broke away from narrative and landscape art and its canons, and sought to connect with their viewers’ sensitivity through shapes and colours. Prices for their work have risen steadily in the past 10 years (+116% between 1992 and June 2003), but the diverse personalities and nationalities making up the symbolism movement is reflected in a wide variation in prices.