PUBLISHED ONDecember 31, 2016 1:00 PMByFisun Güner
Art at the turn of the last century was not all sun-kissed Monet gardens. It was a time of angst and decadence, expressed through some truly disturbing paintings, writes Fisun Güner.
When we think about art at the end of the 19th Century, who and what comes to mind? Monet and Impressionism, certainly.
Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge, perhaps. Post-Impressionism, of course: Cezanne and his heavy-set cardplayers or Mont Sainte-Victoire shimmering on the horizon, magnificent and majestic; Gauguin in his Tahitian paradise; or the last ravishing landscapes of Van Gogh, who died just as the last decade of the century was getting into its stride.
But when we think of the art that's actually characterised as the art of the fin de siècle, particularly the last decade of that century, the mood changes, and it darkens.
We think of the art of anxiety and angst, of drama and febrile tension, of an acute sense of alienation. And it's all as far removed from Monet's sun-dappled garden at Giverny as you can get.
We might, for instance, think, most famously, of Munch's Scream, the first version of which the troubled Norwegian artist painted in 1893, or his various depictions of women as vampires, slaking their sexual thirst on unsuspecting men.
Or perhaps our thoughts turn to the young and eccentric English illustrator and printmaker Aubrey Beardsley and his darkly erotic, sinuous vixens - exotic femme fatales who could captivate and destroy any man.
And as the embodiment of lust and evil, naturally the femme fatale becomes a mascot of the fin de siècle, just as much as the dandy, that ultra-refined aesthete who rises above ordinary moral concerns, becomes its icon.
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