Aubrey Beardsley, Design for a headpiece to the preface of Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, 1892-3

Image here: London, V&A Museum, D.1823-1904

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O860383/le-morte-darthur-drawing-aubrey-beardsley/

There were many revolutionaries in the late nineteenth century art world. If anything united them, it was a loathing for the staid, predictable, and cliched output of the academic painters. The establishment artists and the arbiters of so-called good taste needed sweeping away in order to allow art to begin anew.

But that did not mean that the young radicals were all headed in remotely the same direction. Some sought new ways of seeing, and developed techniques which more faithfully captured reality as it was actually perceived. We call them Impressionists, and their work is still rather popular!

Other artists, though, were quite different. They wanted to explore myths, symbols, and ancient truths, and to push the staid ideals of beauty to their absolute limits. Observable reality was much less important than the ideal of the imagination and the desires. In short, plain old nature simply wasn’t enough. The most extreme of that group celebrated hedonism, sensation, and eroticism above all else. They soon became known as Decadents – and some of them even tried to live what they painted.

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