Decadence in art

Sin is no sin when virtue is forgot.
It is so good in sin to keep in sight
The white hills whence we fell, to measure by . . .
Ah, that's the thrill! . . .
First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire.

Richard Le Gallienne, from "The Décadent to His Soul"

"Decadence" conjures various images of 1890s England:

1. "Perversity" and "degeneration" in life and art (celebrating the "unnatural" and "unhealthy")
2. A devotion to artifice (fetid hothouses), where monstrous and seemingly artificial orchids are cultivated as a challenge to nature and assertion of human cunning
3. An artistic and literary protest against a spiritually bankrupt civilization
4. Experimentation in life and art (a Blakean belief that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom")

In the broad sense, a historical period marked by decline or decay. The term became associated with a group of 19th-century, fin-de-siècle authors/artists who sought inspiration, both in their lives and in their writings, in aestheticism (art for art's sake). In reaction to the naturalism of the European realists, the decadents espoused that art should exist for its own sake, independent of moral and social concerns. The epithet was first applied in the 1880s to a group of self-conscious and flamboyant French poets, who in 1886 published the journal Le Décadent. The decadents venerated Baudelaire and the French symbolists, the group with whom they are often mistakenly identified. In England the decadent movement was represented in the 1890s by Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Aubrey Beardsley (read "Ballad of a Barber" here) and the writers of the Yellow Book. J. K. Huysmans's À Rebours (1884) and Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) present vivid fictionalized portraits of the 19th-century decadent-his restlessness, his spiritual confusion, and his moral inversion.

Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s

Points of Departure

1. Assumptions underlying much of the poetry, fiction, and art

An (anti-Romantic) belief in original sin and in fallen man and nature; omnipresence of evil and the grotesque; lack of health, balance, and innocence. 

2. Mood and tone

• ennui

• incompleteness

• nostalgia

• sense of loss

• exile

• isolation. 

3. Imagery

• trance and dream

• life as a drama, dance, or puppet show

• jewels and instances of extreme artifice (the anti-natural), such as (a) masks, (b) Byzantine goldwork, and (c) cosmetics, and (d) the dandy;

• particularly ornate, perverse, or unnatural examples of natural phenonena, such as orchids and peacocks.

• perverse people, customs, and events in ancient Rome and Egypt

• instances of transience (butterfly, flower, sunset, autumn, self). 

4. Goal or theme

Incomplete and unsuccessful attempts to escape the human condition by means of posing, artifice, and evil, all of which are conceived of as unnatural and therefore better than nature. 

5. Techniques 

An emphasis on brief lyric forms (cp. Romanticism) and a corollary concentration upon intense moments, climaxes of insight, or spots of time and memory.

These epiphanies and perfect moments often connected with landscapes or scenes, thus preserving an instant of time in an "artificial" form (compare Tennyson's "Mariana").

Central technique of implicit contrast that often involves both extreme or hyperbolic juxtapositions and a reference to standards or beliefs for intense effect in which the speaker supposedly does not believe. As Richard Le Gallienne writes in "The Décadent to His Soul" (English Poems,1892), "Sin is no sin when virtue is forgot. / It is so good in sin to keep in sight. . . Ah, that's the thrill!

A corollary use of allusion almost entirely for emphasis or effect -- as opposed to more traditional allusions both for effect and also to locate a work or statement ideologically. Thus, whereas Wordsworth or Tennyson use complex allusions to Christianity as a means of communicating their own more or less orthodox belief, Decadents like Dowson do so more for the impact produced by taking something religious, say, a sacrement, for an aesthetic effect. This technique, which the Decadents often use to make themselves appear self-consciously naughty, become a staple of Modernism.

Artists and Writers

•      Konstantin Balmont

•      Charles Baudelaire

•      Franz von Bayros

•      Aubrey Beardsley

•      Max Beerbohm

•      Mateiu Caragiale

•      Jan Frans De Boever

•      Remy de Gourmont

•      Ernest Dowson

•      Gabriele d'Annunzio

•      Guido Gozzano

•      Joris-Karl Huysmans

•      Vojislav Ilić

•      Alfred Kubin

•      Comte de Lautréamont

•      Jane de La Vaudère

•      Arthur Machen

•      Octave Mirbeau

•      Robert de Montesquiou

•      George Moore

•      Gustave Moreau

•      Edvard Munch

•      Gérard de Nerval

•      Vincent O’Sullivan

•      Rachilde

•      Odilon Redon

•      Charles Ricketts

•      Arthur Rimbaud

•      Frederick Rolfe

•      Félicien Rops

•      Georges Rodenbach

•      Arthur Schnitzler

•      Eric Stenbock

•      Franz Stuck

•      Arthur Symons

•      Emile Verhaeren

•      Paul Verlaine

•      Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

•      Oscar Wilde

 References:
Victorian web
Decadence