Decadence

Decadence is a late nineteenth-century literary and artistic tendency that represents an extreme, intensified manifestation of Symbolism and is closely bound to the idea of the fin de siècle. The term emphasises the spiritual, the morbid and the erotic, together with a cult of refinement, artifice and decline. Decadents set themselves against bourgeois morality and faith in progress, celebrating the beauty of decay, dissolution, sin and exquisite despair. In the visual arts these moods were expressed by Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Aubrey Beardsley, whose sinuous erotic illustrations became emblematic, while in literature they appear in Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel Against Nature served as a kind of manifesto. Decadent aesthetics prized art for art's sake and preferred the artificial to the natural. More broadly, the word describes any culture believed to be undergoing moral or creative decline. Its sensibility resonated across European modernism, feeding the taste for stylisation, ambiguity and heightened subjective feeling that shaped the turn of the century.