Beginning May 1, 2022 for 7 Sundays
$190.00 (Patreon members) / $210 regular price from Morbid Anatomy
Decadent Art Salon: A Season in Hell; A Live, Online Seven Session Atelier Arts Course with Artist, Educator, and Morbid Anatomy European Attaché Eleanor Crook. Absinthe optional!
Date: Sundays May 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 and June 5 and 12 Time: 7-9 pm EST/NewYork City time (4 pm - 6 pm California time, 12 am-2 am London time, 1 am-3 am Paris/Amsterdam time) Admission: $190 (Patreon members) / $210 price (regular admission)
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time Taught via Zoom by Artist, Educator, and Morbid Anatomy European Attaché Eleanor Crook
"Whether you come from Heaven or Hell,
what does it matter, O beauty? " - Baudelaire.
"These times of upheaval and covid fatigue, of eco-apocalypse and disillusion, throw Morbid souls back on their own resources. They make us long for worlds of the imagination, for sensoria, for indulgence, transgression. Whatever art you wish to make, the time to make it and to explore your darkest and most exotic visions is at hand. You may be longing for travel and invisible places, for visionary experience and an outlet for complex and inadmissible passions. So, this March join artist and Morbid Anatomy European attaché Eleanor Crook for a series of morbid art studio online sessions celebrating the Decadent art movements of the late 19th century.
Our guides and inspirations will be those explorers of the poetic extreme, the opium and absinthe - soaked hallucinatory and threatening place of the diseased and exhausted imagination, where artifice trumps the natural, the tortured creations of hectic desperadoes are preferred to the disappointments of the mundane world. The Decadents (and their brethren, the Symbolists and Fin de Siecle Aesthetes) arose as a resistance to a moralizing tendency in the arts, believing that beauty of expression could make even the basest subject matter sublime, and that art could give life a charge and meaning in the teeth of the most unpromising social conditions.
Crook will present poetic work by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarme and more as prompts for drawing collage and painting; will offer readings in Decadent prose that still shocks and inspires, from Joris-Karl "Against Nature" Huysmans, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "Cruel Tales," to Baudelaire's writings on art; and present the paintings and sculpture of the period, peopled with dark beauties, indistinct monsters and heady atmospheres, from Odilon Redon, Fernand Khnopff, Rops, Klimt , Klinger and more.
The sixth session locates these movements at the early period of Modernism, showing that they were not merely a backward looking and nostalgic moment but opened the door to Surrealism, Expressionism and other early 20th century developments with a rebellious and stylish refusal to conform. All these inspirations will be worked into our own artworks, writings and imaginary worlds.
The sessions will be themed as follows - Six sessions, each including a richly illustrated lecture, poetry reading, musical interlude, recommended incense and cocktail, group art making and discussion.
Decadence - Introduction - Baudelaire, Huysmans and the triumph of artifice over nature
Exoticism - The long ago , mythical and symbolic
Opium - Pipedreams , Orientalism and the fantastic
The Little Death - Sensuality and syphilis
Absinthe - Hallucination, degradation and the pleasures of the night
O Vienna - From nostalgia to modernism - Klimt Schiele Schoenberg and the intoxication of Viennese modernism
The seventh and final session will be a celebration of decadence and presentation of the work produced during the course. Eleanor will be on hand to share skills in painting, drawing, collage, Jungian image generation, sculpture and splenetic expressionism. There will be a group online private Cluster gallery to share work in progress and the usual atelier style teaching, cameraderie, morbid community and art moments. "
À Rebours, la Nature!
Tickets available here
Images:
Fernand Khnopff - I lock the Door Upon Myself - 1891
Odilon Redon - The Cycops - c.1900
Fernand Khnopff - The Caress of The Sphynx - 1896
