Philippe Jullian takes the reader on a conducted tour through the bizarre symbolism of this half-forgotten world, introducing him to a large number of writers and artists. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau their most obvious expression was Art Nouveau, a style closely interwoven with sinuous and half-unconscious eroticism.
The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850s. While public attention (like that of most later critics) was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different - and more imaginative way - to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them.
"There have been few movements in the history of Western art as strange as that of the Decadents of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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