Art Criticism - The State University of New York

Guilt By Association: Gustave Moreau,
The Unwilling Decadent
Mary Cullinane
Do not fear to rely on the masters: you will never get lost.
Gustave Moreau
The only possible error in art is imitation; it infringes the law of time, which is
the Law.
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger,
Cubism
Gustave Moreau is generally accepted as an established Acadertty
painter, yet he became the darling of the decadent literary movement infin-desiecle
France. He achieved his first major popular acclaim following the publication
of J.K. Huysmans' Against the Grain, the manifesto of decadence, in
1874. The decadent writers of the fin-de-siecle had a highly developed aesthetic
sense and often assumed the role of the dandy. This paper examines the
character of the dandy and his contemporary background. The treatises of
decadence as expounded in Against the Grain will be elaborated in order to
establish the basic tenets of decadence. The art of Gustave Moreau will 6e
evaluated according to them. The hindsight of a century has proved invaluable
in this judgment process, due to the extended and repetitious nature of
the evolutionary cycle of art.
I. THE NATURE OF THE DECADENT AESTHETE
Who were these decadent aesthetes common to literary circles of the
fin-de-siecle? They derived from the mid-nineteenth century French Dandy,
who in turn was a descendant of the English original, Beau Brummell. Dandyism
infin-de-siecle France developed into an aesthetic and philosophical movement.
Baudelaire, the icon of mid-nineteenth century dandyism, espouses the
virtues of dandyism in his essay The Painter of Modem Life (1863). He wrote
that the Dandy belonged to "a new kind of aristocracy."l He had nostalgia for
a lost era and longed for the simple, clear-cut class divisions of earlier times.
While "Dandyism may reinvigorate or even improve upon a waning aristocracy,"
he regarded Dandyism as "the last burst of heroism in the decadent
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