Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Dark canvas

Decadence was proudly taken up as a badge by artists and writers

OUT OF THE WORLD Peacock Room by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Decadent art luxuriated under an umbrella of gloom and despair of turn-of-the-century neurosis and angst

Like surrealism, symbolism or the romantic gothic and pre-Raphaelite movement, art and literature were closely related in the decadent movement as well. Sandwiched between the romantic movement and modernism, the decadent movement emerged in France from symbolism while in England it was closely related to the aesthetic movement. The decadent movement is characterised by a fin de siécle disquiet that is represented with bizarre visions and a fascination for the grotesque. Words like unwholesomeness, morbidity and perversity were constantly used to describe the works.

A name given by disparaging critics, decadence was proudly taken up as a badge by artists and writers. Artifice found favour as against the supremacy of nature so beloved by the romantics. There was a fascination for the gothic and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Elegance with a preponderance of exotic flora and fauna like butterflies, peacocks and orchids were favoured motifs in the art.

Blake's belief that "the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom" was wholeheartedly subscribed to with artists indulging in every form of substance abuse from alcohol, hashish and opium to absinthe, which was the drink of the movement.

The manifesto

With the publication of writer and art critic Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems, Les Fleurs de Mal or Flowers of Evil in 1857, the manifesto for the decadent movement was born.

In Baudelaire's work, the woman is a symbol of destruction and evil. Evil is natural while goodness and virtue have to be created. He writes: "All that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime... is natural in its origins." Baudelaire was the first to talk of "art for art's sake". His description of his work as "clothed in a sinister and cold beauty" aptly describes the movement as well. Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours (Against the Grain) was a sort of sequel to Baudelaire. Here the protagonist is an artist, Des Esseintes, who scorns all bourgeois concerns and dedicates himself totally to the pursuit of pleasure through the arts.

In Britain, the movement, like the arts and crafts movement, stressed the need for beauty in art but did not see any need for utility. Decadent art luxuriated under an umbrella of gloom and despair of turn-of-the-century neurosis and angst. Artists like Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Albert Moore were obsessed with death and decay and their work suggested the only way out was by pursuing pleasures.

Oscar Wilde was the archetypal decadent artist (think of The Portrait of Dorian Gray) and Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated Wilde's Salome, typified decadent art. By the mid 1890s artistic temper shifted from decadent to symbolism with an attendant shift from the sensual to the spiritual.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail