MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1890 novelist and art critic J.K. Huysmans published À Rebours, a novel emblematic of the movement now known as fin-de-siècle decadence. With this work Huysmans broke with the Naturalist style within which he had achieved a degree of fame and created a work based on “gloom and fantasy” but which he believed would retain the same truthfulness and realism as the Naturalist style. À Rebours described a man so full of pessimism and cynicism that he succumbed to a decay in standards, morals, faith and governance and instead embraced emotionalism, irrationalism and subjectivism. The novel therefore captures the same sentiments that characterize the last decade of the nineteenth-century in France, predominantly. Huysmans, as art critic and writer, befriended and/or critiqued well-known artists such as Edgar Degas, James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt. This paper, as a segment within a larger research project, will explore the impact Huysmans’ ideas had on Whistler and Cassatt. Though expatriates for their professional careers, if not lifetimes, Whistler and Cassatt form a bridge between France, where the decadent movement flourished, and the United States where such ideas were generally rejected outright or significantly diluted.
Using artworks and primary texts I hope to demonstrate that artworks by Cassatt and Whistler done within the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth can be read as visual representations of Huysmans’ decadent philosophies. Specifically, his emphasis on physical and moral decay and the inherent grotesquerie of biological and human nature. I am hoping that this research will lead into a larger study of Huysmans’ influence on American artists during the last decade of the nineteenth-century.