Ut pictura decadentia: Huysmans as an Art Critic. From Impressionnists to Grünewald’s Christ

Abstract

This paper examines the different periods in Joris Karl Huysmans’ art criticism: Impressionist, Simbolist and Catholic. In each of these periods the way the written word interprets visual art changes: paradoxically, in an historical moment in which pictorial language starts becoming autonomous from literature, in order to read Degas, Reson or Cézanne’s paintings, Huysmans returns to Horace’s topos ut pictura poesis. In such interpretation, allegory has a key place: it is a reading procedure that allows to give meaning not only to the painting, but to the Third Republic –which is in fact considered decadent- aswell. Both Moreau’s ‘allegorie hiératique’ and the ‘symbolique du moyen âge’ are, consequently, answers to the crisis of the romantic symbol, and allow Huysmans to approach a spiritual content that goes beyond naturalism’s positivist premises: allegory, whether considered as an expression of a subjective oniric world or as a holy scripture, is the way through which author of À rebours expresses and tries to overcome the nihilism of fin-de-siècle.