Synthesis of religious and mythological motifs in the visual arts of the Vienna Secession. Decadence as a blurring of intra-cultural boundaries

Abstract

The subject of the study is one of the features of the iconography of the artists of the Viennese Secession, namely the mixing in one work of elements belonging to different cultural traditions, and the use of the Nietzschean concept of decadence (primarily presented by the philosopher in his work "Casus Wagner") to understand the reasons for such a misplacement of boundaries. The author pays special attention to the combination of elements of Christian cult and ancient Greek and Roman mythology in one work (as in the cases of the "Beethoven Frieze" by G. Klimt or such works by M. Klinger as the sculpture of Beethoven for the 1902 Secession exhibition and the monumental canvas "Christ on Olympus"). Another aspect of the above-mentioned cultural mixing was the blurring of the boundary between the fantastic and the real, which is especially evident in such a work as "Self-Portrait with a Mermaid" by K. Moser. The main method of this work is the iconographic analysis of works of art in the collections of museums in Vienna. The conclusion of the article is that the artists of the Vienna Secession, who worked in the last years of the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was disintegrating due to many factors, despite their desire to create a new artistic language capable of uniting the peoples of the collapsing country, reflected the destruction of the social order surrounding them in their works. Decadence, which F. Nietzsche associates with the disintegration of a single whole and the loss of hierarchical relationships in favor of individual individuals, released the creative energy of an entire generation of Austrian artists who created their works, ignoring the boundaries that existed before between secular and religious and, as a result, between Christian and pagan, real and imaginary. The novelty of this study lies in the use of special optics, the core of which is the phenomenon of decadence. Through this prism, it is possible to consider the legacy of the Vienna Secession not as a regional vesrion of European art nouveau or the forerunner of twentieth-century modernism, but as part of a different stream of cultural phenomena permeating the culture of Europe of the XIX-XX centuries, not bound by strict stylistic (art nouveau) or iconographic (symbolism) restrictions.