Edmond de Goncourt's Décors - Towards the Symbolist Maison d'art.

This article explores a particular and significant relationship between literature, art, objects, and decorative art in the context of a developing finde-siècle interest in the aestheticized house. Focusing on the Goncourts's 'maison d'art' created at Auteuil from 1868 to house their art collection and library, the article considers key ways in which a modest bourgeois domestic house became a stage and canvas for transforming it into a proto-Symbolist work of art. Addressing recent scholarship on the house collection in Edmond de Goncourt's 1881 La Maison d'un artiste, and on its interior aestheticization, the present discussion amplifies these approaches, analysing the interrelationship between the house as a material creation and its textual and photographic evocations. The article thus extends existing knowledge of the project's material and literary scope in two significant ways. First, it emphasizes Goncourt's Auteuil 'décors' as more multi-faceted and evolving creations than hitherto acknowledged, encompassing multiple material and fictional conceptions of 'décoration'. Second, it argues an enhanced role for Goncourt's concept of 'décoration' as a medium for a new literary and decorating artistry in ways that suggest Goncourt's creation as pivotal for younger contemporaries and for developing Symbolist literary, visual, and material cultures of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]