Art by Night
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| The Art of Decadence: European Fantasy Art of the Fin-de-Siècle (2017) |
Modern Art begins with the Impressionists. Famed for their brilliant, sunlit scenes, the Impressionists produced what might be called “art by day.” Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction all belong to this same art by day lineage. All were attempting to grasp the here and now.
But if theirs was an art by day, wasn’t their [sic] also an art by night lurking behind them?
Night is, by definition, a time of darkness, of things unseen. Being able to see at night is the gift of modernity. At the end of the nineteenth century gas lamps and then electric lights showed us the night. That was the era in which night life appeared in modern cities and an art by night also emerged. Here I would like to discuss the period of “Fin-de-Siècle Decadence” at the end of the nineteenth century as the discovery of the art by night.
The Art of Decadence: European Fantasy Art of the Fin-de-Siècle
(Book Design: Reiko Harajo)
(Musée d’Orsay Bookshop, Summer 2018)
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