In this essay Pedro Emilio Coll replies to Latin American critics who, “in the name of tradition and good sense” deplore what they describe as decadent representatives of the new movements that took root in the Americas in the early twentieth century, especially the ones influenced by the French Symbolists. The Venezuelan writer responds to each of the critics’ negative arguments and recasts them in a positive light. He supports his statements with specific examples involving certain writers, discusses the assimilation of European ideas in the New World, and reflects on the nature of the “style of ‘decadence’.”

In this essay, the Venezuelan writer Pedro Emilio Coll (1872–1947) discusses early twentieth-century writers and intellectuals and their avant-garde movements, ideas, and sensibilities, and sheds light on the controversial mood of the times. The essay is also of great importance because of its Americanist content. First published in 1901, “Decadentismo y Americanismo” is also a testimony to how long it took for avant-garde ideas to manifest in Venezuela in the twentieth century, both in literature and in the visual arts. Countries like Argentina and Brazil had, since the turn of the century, had far more communication and contact with Europe than Venezuela, where such non-traditional artistic ideas made their appearance in literature ten years before they appeared in the visual arts. From 1898—when the academic painter Arturo Michelena died—until 1908 (when Emilio Mauri died) the arts were going through a decadent phase. This process coincided exactly with the transition of political power from one dictator to another: Cipriano Castro (1899–1908) to Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–35). Nineteenth-century styles remained in vogue in Venezuela until 1912, when the Círculo de Bellas Artes was founded, and the decadent-symbolist aesthetic was assimilated into Venezuelan painting in the 1920s by Pedro Centeno Vallenilla         

See the version of this essay published in the anthological edition organized and annotated by Miguel Gómez, who also wrote the prologue (Colección Claves de América de la Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 2002), for the information it provides about the author and the importance of the text; it can also be read within the context of the works of other Latin American thinkers and writers who either wrote about or represented the modernist aesthetic. Examples include Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexican), José Martí (Cuban), Rubén Darío (Nicaraguan), José Enrique Rodó (Uruguayan), and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez (Venezuelan), among others.