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 March 6, 13, 20, 27 and April 3, 10, 24
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!
—Charles 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.

1. Decadence - Introduction - Baudelaire, Huysmans and the triumph of artifice over nature

2. Exoticism - The long ago , mythical and symbolic

3. Opium - Pipedreams , Orientalism and the fantastic

4. The Little Death - Sensuality and syphilis

5. Absinthe - Hallucination, degradation and the pleasures of the night

6. 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!

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and wax modeler who works between the UK and several international medical museums. She is an art tutor a number of UK's major art schools and an art educator in various European medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam. Her work is in the collections of the Science Museum London, Gordon Museum of Pathology Guy's Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her specialism is handmade effigies, baroque bronze and eerie lifelike waxes. Most recently she is exploring visionary painting and collage.

Images

1. Fernand Khnopff - I lock the Door Upon Myself - 1891

2. Odilon Redon - The Black Pegasus 1909

3. Fernand Khnopff - Caress of The Sphynx - 1896

4. Harry Clarke - from Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum 1919

5. Henri Regnault - Salome - 1870