Decadent movement

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The Decadent movement was a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality.

Apostle Bartolomew flayed alive, by Jan Luyken, 1685

Title page of the magazine Le Décadent

Medardo Rosso, Sick child, 1903–04

Portrait of Euphemia Pavlova Nosova [ru] by Nikolai Kalmakov

Symbolism (movement)

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Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly

Decadent movement

…heavily by Baudelaire, though they were also influenced by Gothic novels and the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Many were associated with Symbolism, others with Aestheticism. The pursuit of these authors, according to Arthur Symons, was "a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression…

Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration "anywhere, out of the world".

The Corner of the Table by Henri Fantin-Latour (1872); left to right: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d'Hervilly, Camille Pelletan (seated); Pierre Elzéar, Emile Blémont, Jean Aicard (standing)

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire (c. 1862), whose writing was a precursor of the symbolist style

Eugen Bracht, The Shore of Oblivion, 1889