Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream
The usual practice at the death of an artist was to auction off the contents of the artist’s studio–possibly hundreds of works–which would then be removed from their context, changing hands from one private collector to another and perhaps finally arriving at a museum, an object of market speculation. A few years before his death, foreseeing this problem, Moreau began to organize his studio and apartments into a museum that would keep together all the finished works he still owned plus numerous unfinished works and thousands of sketches, notes, studies, maquettes, and variant versions. He spent his last years working on this project and starting several large-scale works that he never completed.
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It is therefore a perfect curatorial decision to open this exhibition with an anteroom containing only one major painting, Hesiod and the Muses. In Moreau’s painting, the eighth-century BC poet-shepherd stands naked in front of a thicket of tall trees surrounded by the nine Muses and the sacred swans of Apollo. Behind him is Pegasus, the winged horse, symbol of poetic inspiration.
This introductory painting also gives us a clue to modernity’s dismissal of Moreau’s work. Halfway through this century critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, dismissed Moreau as academic and illustrative and charged him with bringing painting to an “all-time low.” Greenberg went on to refer to Moreau’s work as “a realistic illusion in the service of sentimental and declamatory literature.” But the fact is, we materialist and prosaic moderns can no longer grasp the meaning of inspiration, because it’s a concept that belongs to the intellect and not to the senses. We have become suspicious of anything we cannot see or touch and have therefore lost the ability to distinguish between inspired poetry and good but mechanical versification.
Oedipus and the Sphinx, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the center of one of two “dossier” rooms; that is, it’s surrounded by the artist’s preparatory sketches and studies in pen and ink, chalk, and watercolor. Another brilliant curatorial decision, it gives us a glimpse into the experience of the Moreau museum in Paris and carries out Moreau’s intention not to exhibit the work in isolation but in the context of the developing thought behind it.
Salome, the sorceress, dances as if in a trance; she seems to represent the triumph of the spiritual over the limitations of the physical, for otherwise how could she move forward on the tip of one big toe, as she appears to do in this painting? King Herod sits in his throne at the center; Herodias, barely visible, observes from the left; and the executioner at right prefigures the beheading of John the Baptist.
In our century we’ve turned our backs on the ancient world. We no longer read the classics because we no longer believe they have any relevance for us. Painting has been reduced to the self-expression of isolated individuals. And the lone individual can represent his emotions, his feelings, or his psychology only in a vacuum–a self-absorbed and mawkish occupation.
