Shocking the bourgeoisie
is so old-fashioned.
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A Decadent Girl captures
the ennui of the movement. 1899, Ramón Casas, courtesy Museum of Montserrat.
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The Aristocrats is a very old dirty joke. A family—not the
Kardashians—pitches their act to a talent agent. It is a long list of obscene
sex acts, none of which I'm prepared to repeat in print. When they finish, the agent asks what their act is called. The father
proudly responds "the Aristocrats!”
A tag line is
sometimes added:
“Is that all you got?” the agent responds.
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Pornocrates, etching
and aquatint, 1878, Félicien Rops
|
Épater la bourgeoisie
was the slogan of the Decadent poets of fin
de siècle France. It meant “Shock the bourgeoisie.” In other words, they
weren’t just interested in the sensual experience of breaking taboos; they
wanted to be sure to offend the middle class while doing so.
Decadents focused on pleasure, sex, and the bizarre. Their overriding
aesthetic was, simply, excess. Of course, the movement was fascinated by drugs:
opium, hashish and absinthe (the hallucinogenic properties of which were
probably mostly in the drinker’s mind).
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Green Muse (absinthe),
1895, Albert Maignan, courtesy Musée de
Picardie d'Amiens.
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The seminal Decadent work is the now-forgotten À
rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its hero, Jean des
Esseintes, is the last member of a great noble family. Disgusted with
human society, he retreats to the countryside, where he contemplates literature
and art, punctuated, of course, with his own erotic fantasies.
French Decadence was more than just a rejection of middle-class
values, however; it was an obsession with sensuality, death, exotic beauty, fantasy
and beautiful language.
Like the closely-related Symbolists, the
Decadents were disillusioned with the meaning and truth offered by Nature. There
can be no doubt about it,” Hysmans had his hero say. “This eternal, driveling,
old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to
replace her by artifice.”
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La Mort et le Fossoyeur,
c. 1895, Carlos Schwabe
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While the Decadents were a French movement, they exported
their transgressive spirit to other European nations. In England, they were
mimicked by the Aesthetes, including Oscar
Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Aubrey
Beardsley.
The movement gained little foothold in the bustling, religious
United States, however. We strongly resisted the spirit of declining culture
emanating from Europe. Less than a century later, however, shock art, shock
literature, shock TV, shock movies and shock music were all the rage here. French
Decadence was just ahead of its time.
