#decadent movement

[charnel-grounds]

Alméry Lobel-Riche (1877–1950), The Sun of Death, 1922

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Ramon Casas (1866-1932) "A Decadent Girl" (1899) Located in the Museum of Montserrat, Barcelona, Spain

[garlandedspirits]

Book bindings for various editions of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du mal”

[diana-andraste]

La parodie humaine, Félicien Rops, 1878

pencil, black chalk and watercolor on paper

[toyastales]

Chocolate Brownies

[dark-longings]

Woman with a Skull, 1916. Eduard Wiiralt.

[figcatlists]

Decadent literature chart

Decay, beauty, and everything in between! This is a selection from my list of 90 alluring and disquieting works of literary decadence.

[virgoantendencies7]

“The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it—and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored* Picture of Dorian Gray (Belknap Press, 2012)

*This passage from Wilde’s original typescript of the novel is virtually identical in the 1891 text, except the em dash after “Resist it” has been replaced with a comma.