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Symbolism was characterised by its revolt against positivism and science, proclaiming that its goal was, in the words of Gustave Kahn, to “objectify the subjective (the exteriorization of an idea), rather than to subjectify the objective (nature seen through a temperament).” Artists active in the Symbolist tendency, roughly during the years 1870-1910, varied widely in style, but were unified in their extreme subjectivity and their concentration on a limited number of motifs, among which the nature of woman is perhaps the most significant, with woman viewed as an evil or destructive force forming the primary subsection of this motif. Because of the concern with ideas rather than the accidents of external reality, Symbolist artists tended to think in terms of types rather than individuals, and to perpetuate these archetypal images as dogmas in countless variations intended as idealistic proof demonstrating a truth far more convincingly than the disturbing evidence of facts might.
Professor Reinhold Heller, from the exhibition catalogue
THE EARTHLY CHIMERA AND THE FEMME FATALE: FEAR OF WOMAN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART
Organized by the Department of Art, University of Chicago, 1981.
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Jacques, his head thrown back, tried to hold on to her hands. He felt himself sliding little by little into a bath of feathers. The curtains dissolved, and the multiplying mirrors in the room reflected a thousand times the silhouette of a woman in black, immense, gliding like a genie turned into a puff of smoke and thrown from the highest skies. He tensed all his muscles, stiffened all his limbs, trying in spite of himself to return to the earthly envelope that was being taken away from him, but falling in deeper and deeper. The bed had disappeared, and so had his body. He was spinning in the blue, turning into a creature like the soaring genie. At first he thought he was falling, but on the contrary he found himself floating above this world. Inexplicably, he had the proud feeling of Satan, who, though fallen from Paradise, still looks down on the earth and has, at one and the same time, his forehead under God’s heel and his own heel on the forehead of man!
Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (trans. Melanie Hawthorne)
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Nature has made the victims naked and civilization gives them only clothes.
Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (1889)

Call for submissions: Decadent Art & Feminine Beauty

Hello all! I know most of you are familiar with my thesis topic and my conception of the “Femme Fragile” (the antithetical sister of the Femme Fatale type) and would love some suggestions from anyone who has a female character or painting in mind that represents the fragile feminine beauty from the late 19th century.

Good examples, from both painting and literature, are characters such as Ophelia (from Shakespeare’s Hamlet), Abbot-Thayer’s Angel, Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia, Dante’s Beatrice, L’Inconnu de Seine (the plaster cast death mask found in the Seine river in c.1890’s), Pre-Raphaelite art (too many to name!) and many women described in Baudelaire’s poetry and Huysman’s writings.

I would like to create a definitive list of examples/figures for my thesis appendix, and I’m having trouble narrowing it down. My blog, Fetish of Silence has exploded with hundreds of figures and paintings, reaching from Delacroix to Degas.

Any specific examples, literary or artistic, from the 1890’s (or previous historical prototypes) as well as early 20th century (1900-1910) expressions are welcome!

For instance, one famous, oft cited example is John Everett Millais’ Ophelia painting of a drowned woman in the thicket of a river bank surrounded by flowers and stiff with rigor mortis, from c.1851-2 held currently at the Tate, London.

The Flowers of Decadence: Goodreads Group

“Here lies the lost souls who cling to the decaying beauty of Decadent literature and poetry. A group for appreciators of pessimistic literature that celibates despair, perversity and death. I am no connoisseur of Decadence having being slowly lead here by a trail of that has taken me through the entropic wastelands of the new wave into the cosmic void of horror and back into the forgotten places of the ghost story tradition… So pull up a seat in this decrepit café with other poets and lost souls and discuss decadent literature and poetry and history with the unlike-minded.”

For anyone who is interested in further reading or book recommendations, this is agroup on Goodreads I often submit material to, as well as post discussions and reading lists. Since this blog has become popular beyond all my expectations, I thought maybe you wonderful art historians might like to take a look. Enjoy! And please, submit, by all means!

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I was aware that on my skill as a painter would depend the physical and moral possession of the model.
Paul Gauguin
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Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932
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Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal of Paul Gauguin (1901)