Special issue on decadence of the journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi

Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi, Vol 34/1-2 (2025): Special Issue on Decadence
PDF of the special issue

 

Table of contents

Tiina Abel. Decadence in Art. Foreword to the Thematic Issue

Margus Vihalem. Hippolyte Taine and His Philosophie de l’art: The Naturalist Foundations of the Arts

The article focuses on the philosophy of art of the French philosopher, critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, whose theory of art and its adjacent concepts of milieu, race and moment, inspired by the emergence of the natural sciences, exercised a strong impact on the intellectual scenery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Looking into his most art theory-related book, based on university lectures delivered on aesthetics in the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Philosophie de l’art, the article aims to examine how these three concepts were articulated and disseminated in different periods of the history of Western art, starting with the art of Ancient Greece, and how they constitute the very backbone of Taine’s view that natural forces and instincts necessarily contribute to the emergence of the arts and determine their character.

Lola Annabel Kass. Decadent Art: The Pursuit of Transcending Decay and Decline

This article, based on my doctoral thesis, The Beauty of Ugliness: Estonian Decadent Art in the First Half of the 20th Century1, explores decadent art’s significance within modern art culture. It introduces key terms, such as ‘imagined community of decadence’, ‘aesthetics of ugliness’, ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘inward turn’, helping to define decadent art as a mode of expression critical of the modern materialistic world.

Timo Huusko. Bohemian Artists in Liminal Space. Finnish Echoes of Modern Decadence

In my article I discuss the manifestations of certain aspects of decadence in Finnish visual art through a community of artists called the ‘Congregation of the Sorrowless’. The name comes from Viljo Kojo’s (1891–1966) 1922 artist’s novel Suruttomien seurakunta (The Congregation of the Sorrowless). The book and its sequel, published in the same year, romanticise the bohemian life and community of young artists in Helsinki. I connect the narrative constructed by the books and their actual artists to Mirjam Hinrikus’s broad definition of decadence, which highlights the intensification of decadent traits during periods of social and historical upheaval and transition. In Estonia and Finland, the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century, a time when the modern nationalism of peripheral cultures was built on the ruins of old Europe, can be considered such a period of transition.

Tiina Abel. Resolving Inner Struggles Through Artistic Practice: Kristjan Raud, Erich von Kügelgen, Eduard Wiiralt

Much has been written about Kristjan Raud (1865–1943), mostly without using the term Decadence but instead in the context of Symbolist and national art. The boundary line between Decadence and Symbolism in fine art is indeed blurry. Art scholars have often resorted to simply using the term Decadence interchangeably with Symbolism. Yet a more substantive analysis of the interplay between form and content in the works would probably help to better understand the differences between Decadence and Symbolism, something not encouraged by a focus purely on form or thematic aspects. The term Decadence cannot therefore be applied using simple analogies. In my article, I focus on the works of Kristjan Raud portraying him as an artist who was immersed in the fin-de-siècle Decadent sensibility and who aspired to embody his perceptions in his art practice. To understand Raud’s distinctive position in relation to his contemporaries, I examine two other artists who worked in the Decadence/Decadentism vein: Erich von Kügelgen (1870–1945) and Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954), in whose work the discourse on Decadence is manifested mainly as typical themes explored in Decadent art.

Kai Stahl. The Multifaceted Image of the Commodified Woman in the Oeuvre of Natalie Mei

This article continues my research published in Studies on Art and Architecture in 2011, where I examined how Natalie Mei, as a woman and a female artist among male peers, represented and challenged conventional visual interpretations of women selling their bodies through the first three drawings mentioned. In my previous research on female authorship, I explored Yuri Lotman’s concepts of culture and non-culture within the semiotics of culture. This time, I will focus on the motifs and topoi associated with the imagery of sex work, examining three modes of representation and interpretation: a mother and child, a man and woman as a couple and a reclining female nude.

Tõnis Tatar. On Tõnis Vint’s Nude Art of the 1970s in the Context of Decadent Aesthetics

This article discusses the Estonian artist Tõnis Vint’s 1970s nude drawings and prints within the framework of decadent aesthetics. Vint’s works have often been associated with Far Eastern art and philosophy, but he himself highlighted links to historical decadent aesthetics. He frequently cited Romanticists and Pre-Raphaelites as influences. Nevertheless, his reception so far has considered connections with decadence only briefly. As Tõnis Vint’s oeuvre is very multifaceted, the current article focuses only on a part of it – the figurative compositions from the 1970s.

Aare Pilv. How Decadents Became Propagandists. The Example of Barbarus and Semper

The paper is continuation of an earlier article, „Barbarus (and Semper) and ‘modern apedom’“ (Keel ja Kirjandus 2024, no 1-2), which tried to discover an inner logic in the co-existence of decadent aestheticism, avant-gardism, earlier leftism and later Soviet ideology in the creative life of Johannes Barbarus and Johannes Semper. This paper clarifies some of these arguments and moves forward to the next stage in Barbarus’s and Semper’s lives and creative works: World War II. Looking at the choices made at that time provide additional nuances for comprehending the deeper connections between avant-garde and ideology; also, nationalism in its peculiar Soviet form comes into play. The paper argues that the ideological turn was not something that happened randomly with the modernist artists but was rather ‘preprogrammed’ into their artistic position. In this sense, Barbarus and Semper are no exceptionary figures but rather the most outstanding examples of a tendency quite widespread at the time.