Decadence: A Literary History

The Decadent Movement was a late manifestation of Symbolism, principally in literature, that flourished in the final two decades of the Nineteenth Century. It is thought to be a largely British and French movement. It is considered to have lasted from around 1880 to 1895 (Wilde’s imprisonment), with 1914 forming the terminus ante quem for the Decadent Movement, as it was for so many fine de siècle movements. (The stature and reach of the Men of 1914 diminished the standing of the preceding generation.) This collection of academic papers seeks to expand our common understanding of Decadence. Topics include fine art, poetry, theatre, cinema, prose, music, politics, antiquity and other areas, with academic authors addressing Decadence in relation to countries other than Great Britain, France and Belgium.  

There are perennial problems of defining Decadence. Does Decadent art reflect or celebrate – even encourage – degeneration from seemingly stable, ennobling, aspirational moral and aesthetic standards? Editor Alex Murray somewhat fudges the issue, by claiming that conservative “moral hysteria” regarding Decadence was unwarranted, yet this reaction was one that the Decadents instigated, using the succès de scandale as a promotional tool and social ostracization as a badge of honour. Murray discounts the acuity of conservative opposition to what Arthur Symons characterises as “typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of being true to nature.” Murray notes Paul Bourget’s commentary on Decadence with regard to Baudelaire, which bears lengthy quotation:

In 1883, as part of a series of essays in La Nouvelle Revue on ‘contemporary psychology’, Bourget published a wide-ranging essay on Baudelaire in which he set forth a striking thesis on the nature of Decadence. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Bourget’s articulation in this essay of a ‘theory’ of Decadence. In the most oft-quoted passage Bourget offers a striking triple analogy: in biological terms cells decay, leading to the corruption of an organism; society is an organism, and the individual is a cellular unit; under decadence the energy of the individual refuses to be subordinated to the whole, with the result that broader social energy dissipates and declines. These rules governing the social and cellular order also pertain to ‘the decadence of another organism, language’. Bourget’s analogy then leads to one of the most memorable, if misleading, characterizations of the literature of Baudelaire and others: ‘A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word.’

Murray suggests otherwise – stating that Decadent art does have meaning and is purposeful – but what lingers with us regarding Bourget’s critique is that it is one also consonant with our own era’s deconstructionism, Post-Modernism and political cultivation of a fractured society. The decomposition that Bourget sees in Decadence is something that seems apparent in relativism and multi-culturalism. Post-Modernism is an extension of Decadence, using linguistic and semantic games to undermine established orders with the explicit aim of discrediting and defeating “hegemonic majorities” (demographic or political) of masculinity, logic, the scientific method, Christianity, heterosexuality, whiteness and so forth. Bourget’s statement about the decline of unity and stability is significant not for what it tells about Decadence in 1900 but for what it tells us about the situation of Western civilisation around 2000 and immediately after. No matter how unstable, partial and self-contradictory those core values were, we respond to the emotional truth of Bourget’s observation that Decadence is a movement with social implications that atomise populations and undermine commonly held value systems, regardless of the intentions of individual creators, distributors and consumers of that artistic material. However flawed Bourget’s critique is of Decadence, it functions effectively as a critique of decadence.

Stylistically and politically, Decadence is as broad as any other form of Symbolist. However, Murray’s celebration of the recent expansion of the Decadence canon – or an expansion of what we understand to constitute Decadence – means that the inclusion of more women, non-Europeans and minor creators causes a diminution of our understanding of Decadence. By making the Decadent Movement broader, it also makes it (relatively) thinner, more diffuse. It becomes commensurately more difficult to say something meaningful about a movement that has expanded to encompass adjacent areas. This is the iron law of all academic disciplines: the demands of academia mean academics must find new figures to study and professors of new academic fields need to claim attention of other fields by appropriating established subjects to themselves, claiming unique insights. This leads to field creep and therefore dilution. When connoisseurship of a movement becomes a field of academic study – and a discrete body of committed individuals with shared aims and language becomes a tendency or sympathy diffused among unconnected individuals in many places and eras – useful investigation of that subject is doomed to depletion; notwithstanding how cognisant academics are of this tendency, it seems inevitable.  

There are essays on Decadence and the hermaphrodite, gender politics, Christianity and Swinburne’s poetry. Various writers pay attention to Decadence in the literature of the USA, Spain, Russia and Czechia. Hilary Fraser examines how the Renaissance influenced painters the Gabriel Dante Rosetti. Matthew Creasy explains how British Decadents responded to Verlaine. The periodicals of the movement (The Yellow Book, The Savoy) are summarised by Nick Freeman. The role of technology and science in relation to M.P. Shiel and Arthur Machen’s novels by Will Abberley is welcome. He suggests that the authors saw advances in science and technology as a front of rationalism that would founder on the impossibly unarguable redoubts of the occult and spiritual. Rationalism and materialism were foils for Decadent themes of the irrational, private and mystical and the Symbolist dedication to the archaic and anti-productive, for rationalism and materialism were associated with capitalism and bourgeois morality – enemies of the twin Decadent poles of the elevated and the debased. Kristin Mahoney expounds the relation between Decadence and what she calls “camp modernism” – “the persistence of fin-de-siècle styles into the modernists moment, and it similarly calls into question categories of periodization by allowing us to see how late Victorian aesthetics remained vital and present long after the century turned.” She identifies Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Sitwells as exponents of camp modernism.

This is necessarily a specialist volume but one which eschews jargon. Recommended for students and scholars of the Aesthetic and Decadent Movements and late Victorian culture.

Alex Murray (ed.), Decadence: A Literary History, Cambridge University Press, 2020, hardback, 530pp, 14 mono illus., $110/£84.99, ISBN 978 1 108 42629 9

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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The Decadence and Darkness of Symbolism

“Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie exhibition of Belgian Symbolists, Decadence and Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism, closed last month. As few were able to attend, for obvious reasons, this article will review the exhibition from the catalogue.

“Symbolism – like its precursor, Romanticism – is a school that thrived, and had its premier exponents reside, in Northern Europe. Belgium produced some of the best Symbolist art in the era 1860-1914. Artists of the new nation of Belgium in search of an identity reached back to the Flemish Primitives as a strong regional model and nation achievement.

Symbolism was a rejection of the deracinating impact of greater homogeneity in industrial production, education, and news dissemination, and the dwindling of traditional religion, farming and attachment to the land and homeland

“Symbolism was a rejection of the deracinating impact of greater homogeneity in industrial production, education, and news dissemination, and the dwindling of traditional religion, farming and attachment to the land and homeland. In the same way the Arts & Crafts movement was a reaction against industrialisation, Symbolism was a reaction against rationalism…”

To read the full article visit The Brazen Head here: https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/26/the-decadence-and-darkness-of-symbolism/

James Ensor: Chronicle of his Life

Xavier Tricot, Ensor scholar and author of his catalogue raisonné, has written James Ensor: Chronicle of His Life, a summary biography of James Ensor (1860-1949). Ensor is a significant artist in the development of Post-Impressionism and the foundation of Expressionism and has gone to be one of the most influential of Belgian artists. This book illustrates paintings and photographs, giving an account of major events and relationships, with lengthy quotations from letters and press articles.

Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860. His mother was Belgian and his father English. He met his future wife while on holiday in her native city. Ensor revered his father, whom he described as exceptionally intelligent, handsome and athletic. He had hoped to start a new life for the family in the USA but his foray across the Atlantic coincided with the Civil War and he had to return. It seems the set-back left him increasingly resentful of narrow materialism and limited intellectual scope of Ostend. More than a little of this attitude seems to have been adopted by his son. The family ran a gift, curio and seashell shop. The many masks in the shop and the apartment above provided Ensor with his most compelling subject, one that make him famous.

Ensor studied fine art in Brussels from 1877 to 1880. His art education in Ostend had been limited and traditional. At the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts he received more traditional training. He did not do well in examinations and tended to be placed in the middle or bottom of the class. One of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor worked alongside Willy Finch (1854-1930). They sometimes painted the same still-life side by side and they used similar styles; they painted each other’s portraits.

Ensor was disillusioned by the expectations of the academy and the opportunities for advanced art in Belgium in 1880. That year he left both the academy and the capital, to return to live with his parents in Ostend. Advanced art was synonymous with Impressionism and Realism. Ensor enthusiastically explored both avenues, relishing the use of paint that made clear its materiality. The Oyster-eater (1882) is a good example of Impressionist-inflected Realism.

His early paintings were marines, townscapes, still-lifes and interiors. They show careful observation and the adoption of a Realist palette, enlivened by attention to facture. Tricot has included seminal works by Ensor, stressing the paintings rather than the drawings or etchings. The book amounts to a biography of Ensor through his own words and art as Chronicle contains quotes from Ensor’s own writings, which were extensive. He wrote some articles and many letters, few of which are available in English translation. The reproductions are largely accurate and all the paintings are reproduced in colour.

Ensor’s paintings earned respect from critics and fellow artist when they were exhibited in numerous group exhibitions over the 1880s. He was building the reputation of being a leading painter, without there being anything unique about his paintings. His association with Les XX (the Belgian group of avant-gardists, operational 1883-1893) and La Libre Esthétique group (the successor group, 1893-1914) helped to spread knowledge of Ensor’s art. Despite this recognition, sales were slow and prices low.

In 1883 Ensor began painting his mask series in earnest. These paintings were of figures wearing carnival and theatrical masks – and the masks with figures – as well as skeletons, each interacting with each other and with figures who seem unaware of their presence. They were to prove Ensor’s greatest achievement. They destabilised the narrative of Realist art and took on aspects of caricature, satire and dream imagery. They extended gothic art and fantasy art. Ensor was playing with the boundaries between real and unreal, living and inanimate, high and low art, entering the territory that Symbolists were examining in the same period. What made Ensor different was his wit and the use of images and conventions found in satirical prints. The Symbolists were rather averse to humour, satire and social commentary, which can make their art rather self-important, grand and detached.

He started to overpaint his older pictures, adding masks which mock the oblivious subjects. Ensor’s mask paintings were not his sole output during this time. He was as likely to exhibit a still-life, view of Ostend or a religious drawing. Ensor’s religious paintings are almost all centred on Christ, interpreting the life of Christ through a personal fusion of Ensor’s own surroundings and the art he loved. They are highly idiosyncratic pieces and vary in tone from the devotional to satirical and the autobiographical. His spurt of originality lasted from around 1883 to 1900, when Ensor’s verve diminished rapidly. His love of Turner blunted his earthy palette. He reprised old subjects but never recaptured his fire. Ironically, it was after 1900 that artistic taste caught up with Ensor and collector interest increased substantially.  

Ensor participated in the 1901 Venice Biennale. A series of publications and exhibitions raised his profile. He was knighted in 1903. In 1904 he met art dealer François Franck and in 1910 the well-connected gallerist Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg, both of whom bought and exhibited his art. Ensor ended up painting replicas of his old paintings to meet the demand of collectors but his new compositions were generally unremarkable. In 1925 Ensor was admitted to the Académie Royale. In 1929 a huge retrospective was held in Brussels, including 337 paintings, 325 drawings and 135 etchings. The same year he was awarded a barony.   

Tricot has uncovered new data about Ensor’s life from memoirs and Ensor’s own letters. It seems his father was brutally attacked in 1885 and was hospitalised, apparently mentally unstable, and died in 1887. Tricot reveals links between Ensor and a number of artists well-known and obscure. He quotes letters written to (and from) Ensor’s publishers and collectors. He discusses matters of price and provenance that allow us to understand Ensor’s attitude towards the disposal of his art. In particular, Tricot provides information about how Ensor attempted to place key pictures with certain museums. Although this is not a full biography, the inclusion of the artist’s words gives a vivid sense of his character and views. His sardonic humour, wild wit, self-pity and capriciousness emanate from his comments. Memoirs and letters of others tell us how he was seen. Tricot has corrected the dating of At the Conservatoire from 1902 to 1893, altering his position the publication of his 2009 catalogue raisonné.

Overall, this is a very useful guide to Ensor’s life and art, especially when read in conjunction with larger catalogues. Perhaps the only shortcoming is the absence of graphic work, which may be less familiar to readers but was a key aspect of Ensor’s oeuvre.

Xavier Tricot, James Ensor: Chronicle of His Life, 1860-1949, Mercatorfonds/Yale University Press (distr. Yale), 2020, paperback, 224pp, 200 col. and mono illus., £30, ISBN 978 0 300 25397 9

© 2020 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

“Belgian light amid the gloom”

“I once lived in Belgium by mistake. I moved into a flat in Ixelles, a district of central Brussels, and spent my free time in museums, where I encountered art by remarkable artists of whom I had never heard. Among these artists were two who are receiving current attention: Fernand Khnopff and Léon Spilliaert.

“Symbolism is a late manifestation of Romanticism, the movement dedicated to the irrational, mystical and emotional in art. Symbolism (which flourished from 1840-1914) was an approach which allowed artists to deal with fundamental fears, desires and the meaning of human life through use of general symbols to induce strong emotions in the audience. Both Symbolism and Romanticism were founded on morbidity — a hyperawareness of death and the brevity of life — and a sense of loss at a receding past of heroism. The greatest Symbolists came from Northern Europe (and Switzerland), as if a hostile climate and long cold nights nurture a melancholy attachment to a fantastic past…” 

Read the full review here: https://thecritic.co.uk/belgian-light-amid-the-gloom/