Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian

In addition to the written sources listed above, this paper will draw from various nineteenth-century landscape pieces, from France specifically, but also Europe overall, to debate the conflict between mankind and nature as exemplified in these theories of the sublime. Since the major writers of the sublime (Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer) are writing in the eighteenth century from England and Germany, this paper will focus upon these authors’ influences upon the aesthetic and theological thinkers of France in the nineteenth-century (Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire).

This paper will attend to the nineteenth-century cultural and theological milieu of fin-de-siècle France, focusing specifically on the theological, philosophical, and artistic interpretations of the theory of the sublime. The almost two hundred undated pictures are entitled in the inventory as “Sketches” and according to the artistic concepts of the 20th century they can be described as genuine abstract compositions.

A certain group of works found among the relaxed sketches and inventive technical experiments in Gustave Moreau’s studio museum comes as a real surprise to the visitor who sees it several generations after the artist died. The pictorial effect of the works Moreau created in seclusion, away from the eyes of the public at which time he was able to ignore any outer respect displays far greater courage than his earlier pieces displayed to the public. It was a surprise when after 1880, at the peak of his success, he permanently retreated from public appearances, shutting himself away from the outside world to create works of art for himself. Gustave Moreau was the first true symbolist painter and the idol of a successful and large circle of artists which instead of exploring nature delved into the world of mystery.

Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian