From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? the Goncourt’s “decadent” Eighteenth-century Art Revival

As consummate collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts’ contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article explores a less well-documented aspect of their L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latent decadence prior to the term’s fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of a period linked with ideas of political and cultural decay to foreground and redefine latently “decadent” tendencies in mid-nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of “decadence” as a dynamics of history, art and art-writing operating at the boundaries between ideas of cultural decline and its recuperation in terms of a new artistry of heightened material, sensory and aesthetic expression. My article’s principal concern is this relationship. It is to consider how, and in what sense aspects of the Goncourts’ L’Art du dix-huitième siècle contribute to an expanded sense of “decadence” for mid-nineteenth-century cultures of art, creating from this, a “decadent” type of revival that situates the Goncourts’ art writings as significant, if overlooked sources for fin-de-siècle literary and artistic interest in “transgressively” modern literary and artistic innovations.