Collection: Decadent Movement

The Decadent Movement covers the late nineteenth-century French and British literary and artistic current that combined Aestheticism's principle of art for art's sake with a deliberate engagement with morbidity, ennui, artificiality, and erotic transgression. Its founding texts include Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1884 novel À rebours and Charles Baudelaire's earlier Les Fleurs du mal, which the Decadents claimed as their direct ancestor.

The French visual side was led by Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), whose late mythological paintings supplied the Symbolist counterpart in oil, alongside Odilon Redon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Georges Rochegrosse. The Belgian wing ran through Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), and Jean Delville. The British line included Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), whose drawings for The Yellow Book, Salomé, and Le Morte d'Arthur fixed the canonical image of Decadent illustration, alongside Charles Ricketts.

The Austrian and German wing included Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Max Klinger, and Franz von Bayros. The movement merged with full Symbolism in the 1890s and dissolved with the Wilde trial of 1895 and the wider cultural fatigue of the new century.