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Decadent movement
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late-19th-century artistic and literary movement centered in Western Europe
~36 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The 1878 Pornokratès by Belgian artist Félicien Rops The Decadent movement (from the French décadence, lit. 'decay') was a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality.
The Decadent movement first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by a belief in the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Decadent movement” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.