Idle hours

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time... and the godawful silence and the white paper.

Erica Jong

We emphasize the set of female figures sunk in a tedium vitae, which is also called spleen or ennui, which was according to intellectuals and artists the disease of the new century. The spleen would be a decadent attitude of rest, melancholy or tedium. These figures could be put in the context of the intimate feminine space in the nineteenth century and the social conventions that made the woman prisoner of the domestic sphere. The spleen or tedium syndrome, highly represented by the decadency at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a consequence of the vertigo that humanity would be facing during this time of rapid and profound change and also as a consequence of the dissolution of the individual in the cities that would become metropolis (such as the Paris of the major boulevards), increasingly spectacular, mechanized and moved by the masses, in which, paradoxically, the individual would experience loneliness more than ever before. But it could also be read, since it was above all the women who appeared represented as suffering from it, such as the discomfort that invaded them on seeing their possibilities, aspirations and personal desires reduced, limited and imposed. However, it would be a feeling of the well-off woman, the lower class woman would not have time to get bored, would she?

Idle hours, Ramon Casas, 1898-1900