Christa Giles

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the subjects Bresdin chose often had a literary source, as in
˝Saint Antony and Death.˝ But whatever his subject, this
artist is perceived as being not only superior to nature but
a re-creator of the natural world according to his
subjective vision.
In Baudelaire’s article ˝Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne,˝
he writes that ˝tous les bons et vrais dessinateurs dessinent
d’aprés l’image écrite dans leur cerveau et non d’aprés
nature.˝ And Huysmans and Wilde, like most decadent
artists, took a similar stance. Wilde maintained that all
creation in art is an expression of an internal vision, as man
is trapped within his own subjectivity, ˝for out of ourselves
we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the
creator was not.˝ 583 To Wilde, however, this did not entirely
preclude the use of ˝realism,˝ as he believed that the more
objective a creation seemed to be, the more subjective it was
in actuality. The reconciliation of the subjective and objective
viewpoints, in accordance with this new emphasis upon the
inner world and mental processes of the artist, was
summarized by Cézanne when he said, ˝I want to copy
nature…I wasn’t able to. I was satisfied with myself when I
discovered that the sun, for example (sunny objects), could
not be reproduced but had to be represented by something
else than that which I was seeing –by colour…˝ 584 Expressive