Fin De Siecle

Realism triumphed after 1850 with what appeared to be the forces of progress—liberalism, nationalism, and industrialization. This was the period when Italy and Germany were unified, when liberals took control in one state after another (even in the multinational Habsburg empire), and when in just a few years villages could become towns, towns cities, and cities metropolises. As is the way with progress, disillusionment was not long delayed. The social tensions created by the long recession beginning in 1873 and the eruption of new mass political forces, with socialism, clericalism, and anti-semitism to the fore, ensured that this bourgeois liberal culture did not reign for long. Once again the ‘grandfather law’ asserted itself, as a younger generation reverted to earlier models and discovered the wheel again. In 1888 the 20-year-old French painter Emile Bernard repeated Friedrich’s maxim of sixty years before when he stated that the artist should not paint what he sees in front of him but the idea of the thing he sees in his imagination. Similarly, the central tenet of what became known as ‘symbolism’, as expressed by its main organ Symbolist—‘Objectivity is nothing but vain appearance, that I may vary or transform as I wish’—could have been said by any romantic two or three generations earlier. The old romantic obsessions with death, the night, and sex were all back in favour again, nowhere more powerfully than in Gustav Klimt’s notorious ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna. What the academics had wanted and expected was a portrayal of the victory of reason, knowledge, and enlightenment; what they got was a world turned upside down, in which ‘Philosophy’ is subconscious instinct, ‘Medicine’ is overshadowed by death, and justice in ‘Jurisprudence’ is a cowed and helpless victim of the law.

By the time Klimt came to create these wonderful paintings (1898-1904), art was fragmenting into stylistic anarchy: the decadent movement, symbolism, synthetism, neo-impressionism, post-impressionism, constructivism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, orphism, neo-plasticism, vorticism, suprematicism, and so on. The disintegration of Europe’s classical vocabulary, which had begun with the romantic revolution a century earlier, was now complete. Even this multiplicity of - isms cannot accommodate an isolated genius such as Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90), who belongs in a category of one and who can yet serve as an appropriate symbol for the fate of the creative artist in the post-romantic age. In the course of his life, which was a constant struggle with poverty, lack of recognition, alcoholism, and insanity, ending in suicide, he sold just one of his 850-odd paintings—Ked Orchard for 400 francs to a Belgian artist. At the time of writing, his Portrait of Dr Gachet holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction, having been sold in 1990 to a Japanese paper-manufacturer for $82,500,000.

With the avant-garde thrusting into the new century and untold wealth (the ultimate accolade in a commercialized society but, alas, very often only awarded posthumously), it is time to stop. There are many ways of finding patterns in the infinite diversity of nineteenth-century European culture, most of them valid and none of them sufficient. To approach it by tracing the abrasive relationship between sacralization and commercialization at least has the merit of linking cultural artefacts to the society which produced them without reducing them to ‘superstructure’. The friction generated between spirit and matter also helps to explain the extraordinary vitality of a culture which colonized the world. As Kant observed (and theorists as diverse as Grillparzer and T. S. Eliot repeated in their different ways): ‘man wishes concord, but nature, knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord.’