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WSWS : Arts
Review : Exhibitions
Gustave Moreau
An exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
(June 1-August 22)
By David Walsh
14 July 1999
Use
this version to print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is currently
presenting two exhibits devoted to French art of the late nineteenth
century Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of
Doctor Gachet (May 25-August 15) and Gustave Moreau: Between
Epic and Dream (June 1-August 22).
Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909) was the physician who
looked after painter Vincent Van Gogh in the months prior to the
latter's suicide in 1890. Gachet was as well a friend or patron
to Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and Cézanne. The collection
on display contains some remarkable works by Cézanne and
Van Gogh in particular.
But since no one is likely to deny that Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
have received over the years considerable and well-deserved critical
and popular recognitionand indeed one might argue that,
in fact, some of the Impressionists' blander creations have been
over praised (and certainly over-reproduced)I would like
to pass by the Gachet exhibition, packed with visitors, and visit
instead for a moment the nearly empty galleries at the other end
of the same floor of the museum, where the efforts of Gustave
Moreau are on display.
I found the Moreau exhibit much the more exciting of the two
current shows. Indeed some of the paintings seem to me as remarkable
as any accomplished in that era.
Moreau was born in Paris in 1826 and, according to the exhibit
catalog, nourished on classical culture from infancy. When
he was ten years old, his father, an architect, gave him a two-volume
edition of neoclassical engravings by the Englishman John Flaxman
illustrating Dante, Homer, Hesiod, and the Greek tragedians.
At the age of 20 he was admitted to the École des beaux-arts,
where he studied for several years. He pursued a career as a painter
in Paris from 1850, but a two-year stay in Italy (1857-59) proved
a significant turning point in his life. In Rome he studied Renaissance
artistsMichelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Sodomabut
also devoted himself to the art of the ancient world. He also
met and befriended Edgar Degas in Rome. According to the catalogue,
In Florence he began by copying Titian, in Milan he waxed
enthusiastic over Luini, in Venice he discovered Carpaccio. Returning
to Florence, he traveled with Degas to Siena and Pisa and developed
an interest in the Italian primitives.... Back in Paris, he resolutely
set to work.
A painter of enormous erudition, Moreau collected thousands
of prints, photographs and illustrated periodicals and visited
museums assiduously. Driven by his perfectionist temperament,
he chose, while still a young man, to devote his life entirely
to art, refusing the constraints entailed by family life.
His ambition apparently from an early age was to reinvigorate
history painting, a division of painting that had become largely
the domain of uninspired academics. In a certain sense Moreau's
effort was futile, but in the heroic attempt to revive an expiring
form he created something new, a kind of dream painting.
Moreau was at odds with the main artistic current of his time.
The symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, in his generally
insightful piece The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,
observed that we must affirm that Impressionism is the principal
and real movement of contemporary painting. The only one? No;
since other great talents have been devoted to illustrate some
particular phrase or period of bygone art, and he mentions
Moreau in this regard.
Certainly a great talent, but simply a devotee
of illustrating a bit of bygone art? His work doesn't
strike me that way. It is true that instead of painting music
halls and Parisian restaurants, lily ponds and sun-drenched fields,
Moreau represented figures from classical mythology and the Bible,
and borrowed motifs from a whole host of ancient civilizations,
as well as medieval art. He reorganizes them according to some
internal principles, in an effort to make sense of contemporary
spiritual and social problems, and with an intensity that is frightening.
The titles of some of Moreau's paintings indicate his interests
and obsessions: Diomedes Devoured by His Horses, Sappho
Leaping from the Leucadian Cliff, Hercules and the Lernaean
Hydra, Salome Dancing before Herod, Samson and Delilah,
Bathsheba, The Triumph of Alexander the Great.
Douglas W. Druick, in Moreau's Symbolist Ideal,
an essay in the exhibit catalog, notes the concerns of certain
artists who came of age in the mid-nineteenth century: They
found the culture in which they were living increasingly debased;
they deplored the materialism of the age, fed on the one hand
by the prosperity of an increasingly industrialized France and
on the other by a growing deference to science and its findings.
The capitalist-positivist spirit embodied in Napoleon III's illegitimate
Second Empire [1852-70] bred what Moreau called a savage
love of coarse reality,' a focus on the real' at the expense
of a transcendent ideal.' Moreau rejected the academic
painters, but he also rejected Realism as an art appealing
primarily to the senses and thus unthinkingly pandering to the
materialist spirit of the times in its emphasis on tangible reality.
Druick continues: Over the years Moreau developed a clear-eyed
approach to this task which was informed, on several levels, by
the advanced scientific and philosophic thinking of the day. He
believed that, in order to produce art that signifies at the exalted
level he envisaged, the painter must develop the eyes of
the soul and spirit as well as the body.' Moreau associated this
inner vision with the predominant role of the imagination; following
current ideas, he apparently connected this faculty with psychological
penetration' and the unconscious.... Moreau wrote that his greatest
effort' was devoted to directing his imaginative energies, to
channeling this outpouring of oneself.'"
I think in his best work Moreau succeeded to an extraordinary
degree. He manages to convey in visual forms the truth of some
extraordinarily heightened, almost traumatic inner state, which
is not simply an individual inner state, but speaks to the needs
and desires and fears of his audience.
Moreau conceived of the critical struggle as one taking place
between the call of the ideal and the divine and the physical
nature that resists [it]. Druick notes that he aimed to
create visual situations that are more evocative than descriptive,
imbued with an indecisive and mysterious character.'
His Hercules, for example, is a representative of man's
best instincts battling the vile' and savage' forces
of unconscious matter.' In his work, woman represents
the forces of destruction and chaos. She is the unconscious,'
lacking thought and an inner sensibility'; an animal
nature,' at once vegetal and bestial,' driven by unsatisfied
desire' for the fulfillment of which she is ready to [trample]
everything underfoot.' Hence she is naturally fatal.'
Thus temptresses like Salome, Delilah, Bathsheba, Cleopatra, etc.,
people his canvases.
It almost goes without saying, of course, that this conscious
horror at woman's animal nature was matched by an
unconscious fascination and near adoration. What one remembers
most about his pictures are those female figures, which threaten
to disrupt everything. There is something monstrous, violent and
tense in them, something that Moreau must have felt in himself,
rejected on the conscious level and materialized in these forms
of the bestial Other. He is an artist, like a Poe, who seems a
kind of illustrator of psychological complexes before they had
been invented, so to speak, by Freud and others. It
is difficult to imagine art so fraught with neurosis and yet so
naive and unaware about its implications being produced after
the turn of the century.
Moreau made an immense impact on certain artists. Among the
painters, Paul Gauguin was an admirer; Georges Rouault and Henri
Matisse were Moreau's pupils. A small but select group of writers
as well have expressed their great admiration for Moreau, among
them the French novelist J.-K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust
and André Breton.
Wilde was inspired to write his play Salome in part
as a result of viewing of Moreau's painting (1874-76) of the princess
who, in exchange for agreeing to dance before her stepfather,
King Herod, demands the head of John the Baptist. The most famous
tribute to Moreau's work takes up half a dozen pages of Huysmans'
Against Nature ( À Rebours). The novel, which
became a cause célèbre on its publication in 1884,
is considered a kind of handbook of Decadence and dandyism. Huysmansa
former disciple of Zola, interestingly enough, who had concluded
that Naturalism had reached a dead endcreated in Des Esseintes,
the book's central figure, a man who despises and cuts himself
off from modern times and modern society and worships
everything perverse and artificial. Moreau is one of his favorite
artists. Des Esseintes has purchased two of his paintings and
spends hours dreaming in front of one of them, the picture
of Salome.
After an extended description of the painting, Huysmans continues:
Des Esseintes saw realized at long last the weird and supernatural
Salome of his dreams. Here she was no longer just the dancing-girl
who extorts a cry of lust and lechery from an old man by the lascivious
movements of her loins; who saps the morale and breaks the will
of a king with the heaving of her breasts, the twitching of her
belly, the quivering of her thighs. She had become, as it were,
the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal
Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties
by the catalepsy that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles,
the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning,
like the Helen of ancient myth, everything that approaches her,
everything that sees her, everything that she touches.
This somewhat overheated response, a perfect example of the
Critic as Artist (in Wilde's phrase), perhaps says
more about Des Esseintes' (and Huysmans') fantasies than it does
about Moreau's painting, but it does indicate the sort of passion
that his work has generated. The passage gives the impression,
if not read carefully, that the painting depicts a scene of unbridled
sensuality and passion. In fact, Moreau has presented the opposite
of obvious voluptuousness. His Salome is vaguely Asiatic, still
and restrained.
Druick writes: [She] is cast in an impossible pose that,
rather than evoking the eroticism of the dance of the veils, embodies
the static quality Moreau referred to as that motionless
and disquieting aspect of fixity.' The figure of Salome, resolutely
inactive, thwarts the narrative context, freezing its flow. In
fact she exists out of time, as if between two continuous moments
of a sequence. Or, one might say, there is something in
the painting, conveyed to the viewer, of the determined attempt
made to slow down or freeze the flow of events common to certain
forms of hysteria.
Marcel Proust devoted a 10-page meditative essay to Moreau.
He makes reference to a number of the paintings, most prominently
to Bathsheba (c. 1886 and 1890), based on the biblical
story. (King David spies on Bathsheba and eventually seduces and
impregnates her. He then has her husband exposed in battle and
killed, and makes Bathsheba his favorite wife.) The paintingnot
shown at the Metropolitan, unfortunatelyis extraordinary.
In the lower left of the painting Bathsheba, unclothed, with a
robe draped around her shoulders, is seated on her terrace, attended
to by a kneeling servant. Behind her and to her left we see a
rather desolated-looking wooded area and beyond that, in the background,
the walls of a palacein fact, King David's palace. It takes
a moment for the viewer to register the fact that David is present
in the painting at all, as a tiny figure in the upper right-hand
corner, staring (one supposes) at Bathsheba from a palace wall.
The eye has to travel an enormous distance to link the two figures,
just as David's gaze has to traverse the entire field on
a diagonal that proceeds from the upper-right background to the
luminous body of the coveted young woman in the lower-left foreground
(exhibit catalog).
Whatever else it addresses, the painting certainly speaks to
Moreau's own sense of himself as he confronted female sexuality
and the dilemma of human relations more generally. Here is a figure,
so small as to be almost invisible, atop this battlement, looking
down from a vertiginous height and separated by a terrifying distance
from the object of his love and desire. Can a story with such
a tragic and desperate beginning have an entirely happy ending?
Proust refers to Bathsheba several times in his essay, observing
that she has the grave air of a saint. He writes:
For the courtesan has the air of being a courtesan just
as the bird fliesby a destiny which is in no way the result
of her choice or her dispositionbut her face is sad and
beautiful and she gazes while she plaits her hair among the flowers.
André Breton was another Moreau admirer. In his biography
of the inventor of Surrealism, Mark Polizzotti writes:
But the artistic discovery that had by far the greatest
impact [on Breton] was the Gustave Moreau museum.... The fact
that the museum was seldom frequented made it all the more mysterious
and attractive in Breton's eyes, the ideal image of what
a temple should be,' and he dreamed of being locked in it for
the night, free to roam the halls at will.
The real fascination of the place, however, lay in the
paintings themselves. Moreau had been captivated by the evil
women' of history and mythologyHelen of Troy, Salome, Delilahwhose
voluptuous figures reclined on divans of cruel sensuality and
debauched opulence. It was the paintings' unabashed sexuality
that gave Breton's admiration its full charge, and his response
to them was on grounds as much erotic as aesthetic: My discovery,
at the age of sixteen, of the Gustave Moreau museum influenced
forever my idea of love,' he wrote in 1961. Beauty and love
were first revealed to me there through the medium of a few faces,
the poses of a few women.'
In Communicating Vessels (1932), years later, Breton
was to write about encountering a woman who reminded him of those
eyes that have never ceased to fascinate me for the last fifteen
years, the Delilah of the little watercolor by Gustave
Moreau which I have gone to see so often in the Luxembourg museum.
Moreau seems one of the precursors of Surrealism in painting
in a fantastic work such as The Triumph of Alexander the Great
(c. 1874, c. 1882, and c. 1890). The painting makes visual reference
to the victory of Alexander over the northern Indian king Porus
in 326 BC at the battle of Hydapses, after which the former allowed
Porus to rule all the territories he had conquered east of the
Jhelum river. But it is no attempt to reconstruct an actual historical
scene. Alexander sits on a majestic throne in the lower right
foreground, his conquered foe before him. In the center, beneath
a towering statue (which Moreau based on a tenth century Jain
saint he copied from a photograph), stands a pack of elephants.
Most remarkable is a shimmering temple, filigree-like, in the
background. As well, in Moreau's own words, we see ... azure
mountains brushed with pink, rocks carved into architectural forms,
towering vegetation of poisonous scent ... There is no attempt
to make the various elements and areas of the picture cohere seamlessly.
The painting has the feeling of a collage and a reverie.
The Moreau exhibit moved and fascinated me as much as any I
have seen in years.
See Also:
A supplementary point about the Moreau
exhibit
[14 July 1999]
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