La source du Mal (The Source of Evil)

Georges de Feure

1894

Color lithograph

Minneapolis Institute of Art

The artistic currents fomented in fin-de-siècle France were such that a single artist could design symbolist prints in one decade, an Art Nouveau boudoir for the Paris Exposition Universelle the next, and airplanes the next. That is what Georges de Feure did. While exploring symbolism in the 1890s he focused on the femme fatale, inspired by the misogynistic verse in Charles Baudelaire's 1857 Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). In the diabolical scene envisioned here, de Feure's woman of a thousand curves, as critic Octave Uzanne described her, infects all of nature with her lethal power. Gallery Not on View Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edw