Satire and sadism: Francois-Rupert Carabin and the symbolist treatment of female form

The furnishings and objets d'art crafted by the French symbolist sculptor Francois-Rupert Carabin (1862-1932) are relatively visually familiar to those acquainted with the Art Nouveau movement, yet there has remained a paucity of critical analysis of the content of his oeuvre. Although Carabin has been assured a position within the canon of design history as one of the first French artists to challenge the hierarchical divisions ideologically elevating the fine arts over the decorative arts, the fundamentally unsettling nature of his work, which often utilizes the sensuous bodies of subservient female forms as both structural and decorative elements, has deflected further scrutiny. In engaging Carabin's oeuvre critically, this dissertation is governed by two chief intellectual aims serving as poles generating a field for interpretation and analysis. The first is an archivally anchored concern for situating Carabin's oeuvre within the rich and distinctly interdisciplinary historical context of the fin de siecle, allowing for engagement with a wide array of contextual forces including the literary and visual output of the Symbolists and the Decadents, the coalescence of the Occult Revival, the emergence of the fields of psychology and sexology, the eruption of contemporaneous fears of biological, social, and artistic degeneration, and the prevalence of artistic constructs of "natural" and "perverse" women in the face of an extremely vocal feminist movement. The second driving concern is philosophically grounded, and seeks to critically engage with the dilemmas brought to bear in Carabin's work, including aesthetic debates surrounding artistic hierarchies, modernist negotiations of philosophies of ethics, conflicted critical responses to sadism and masochism in the arts, and vacillations between fantasy and censure in the face of sexually fraught works of art.