The Art of Fin de siècle
There are few terms in cultural history that I have found more challenging to understand than “fin de siècle”. It has a strong component of visual art but multiple dimensions beyond—heavily philosophical, literary and political. French for “end of century “, it is typically used for the closing of the 19th century. It conjures the imagery of clubs and cabaret—the atmosphere dark, with green and gold. Things look good enough on the surface—you see people coming together, they are well-dressed and seem materially secure. But then you encounter the words “social degeneracy” but also “hope”, which makes the time quite confusing. Applied mostly to France, Fin de siècle affected other European countries as well.
It is hard to locate the exact source of the phenomenon. I have found the introduction provided by a 2017 exhibition at The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao titled “Paris, Fin de Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Their Contemporaries” helpful: “Fin-de-siècle Paris was a time and place of political upheaval and cultural transformation, during which sustained economic crisis and social problems spurred the rise of radical left-wing groups and an attendant backlash of conservatism that plagued France throughout the late 1890s.
“In 1894, President Sadi Carnot fell victim to an anarchist assassination, while the nationally divisive Dreyfus Affair began with the unlawful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, an officer of Alsatian and Jewish descent. Such events laid bare the poles of France: bourgeois and bohemian, conservative and radical, Catholic and anticlerical, antirepublican and anarchist.”
These clashes and lack of closure explain the pessimism and cynicism of the period. From a political point of view, it is said to have generated harmful fascist notions, including Lebensraum—ethnic nationalist and expansionist German ideology that
dominated the region from the 1890s to the 1940s, culminating in Nazism. In addition, philosophical and literary figures like Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire —with a negative perspective on existence—seemed to have significantly influenced the era.
From an artistic point of view, Fin de siècle is famous, firstly, for its distinct posters, copiously produced and easily identifiable through their consistent minimalist but dramatic style, pointing to the social and individual decay of the period. Several collections, both informal and well-curated, are available online: among them galleries from the Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Open Culture, Media Storehouse and Alamy.
Next, a painting movement known as Neo-Impressionism or Post-Impressionism (reaction against Impressionism) is evidently associated with the period, its most prominent artist being Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864– 1901) who portrayed the Moulin Rouge. There are some other art movements that go with Fin de siècle: those of the Aesthetes, Decadents and Symbolists.
Aestheticism, shaped by writers like Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, can simply be defined as the position that advocated “art for art’s sake”—that is, art must be produced for its appearance, devoid of didactic functions. An example would be the work “The Golden Stairs” (1880) by English painter Edward Burne-Jones, wherein a group of female musicians in classical robes descend a staircase; they are no personifications of virtues or dwellers of some fantasy kingdom. The art critic Frederic George Stephens wrote that they “troop past like spirits in an enchanted dream…whither they go, who they are, there is nothing to tell,” capturing the lack of story and instruction in the painting, major characteristics of Aestheticism.
The Decadent group is marked by a preoccupation with artificiality, lack of restraint, moral decline, disregard for convention, disillusionment with rational thought and the natural world. The painting above by Catalan artist Ramón Casas—a modest and polite variety of artwork compared to other extreme examples from the movement—captures the mood of ennui and self-indulgence. It is believed that the roots of the Decadent movement are found in an awareness and mirroring of tendencies that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire, an abandonment of standards for the sake of pleasure.
Lastly, we find Symbolism—as the name suggests, it promoted the metaphorical representation of truths rather than literal depictions. It stood against straightforward “natural” and “real” narratives and imagery.
The term “Symbolism” was first used by the Greek-born art critic Jean Moréas (1856-1910), whose “Symbolist Manifesto” was published in the French newspaper Le Figaro in 1886. He considered the poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine as leaders of the movement. The point of the undertaking was to clothe direct, plain, dry, matter-of-fact accounts of ideas and emotions in noticeable signs that could produce intense effects in the reader or viewer.
“Death and the Grave Digger” by Swiss artist Carlos Schwabe is a well-known Symbolist painting, in which we find a grave digger looking at the Angel of Death. The winter landscape in the cemetery indicates an end, the loss of growth and vitality. The angel holds a mysterious green light. The grave digger’s expression and posture indicate weariness with his current surrounding and state but also longing for deliverance and transformation. This artwork, interestingly, reveals the dual aspect of the larger Fin de siècle itself—in which all exhaustion runs side by side of anticipation…for a new society, world, and even realm.
By Tulika Bahadur
