Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream. - Review - book review

GENEVI[grave{E}]VE LACAMBRE, ed et al.

Paris: R[acute{e}]union de Mus[acute{e}]es Nationaux;

Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999 308 pp 162 color ills., 129 b/w $60

As any visitor to the slightly bizarre Mus[acute{e}]e Gustave Moreau in Paris can attest, the artist's oeuvre approachs as something of a revelation: beneath all the accretions and the heavy-duty symbolism lies an artist of ferocious color and flexible draftsmanship. [1] Perhaps as abundant as those of any 19th-century artist, Moreau's paintings--eclectic, literary, and excessive-- make angryed the sensibilities of modernists. Critics begrudgingly noted Moreau as the teacher of Henri Matisse ("he must have done something right?"). on the contrary his works insistently failed to accord with high modernist lordships Moreau's paintings, for instance, are all about sumptuous surface. Already in his possess lifetime, critics often compared his paintings to works in other media: stained glass, encaustic, and, greatest in quantity frequently, enamel or jewelry. Edgar Degas claimed that Moreau tried "to make us believe that the the omnipotents wore watchchains." [2] What repell purist modernists is precisely what we at the extremity of the century find for a like reason appealing about Moreau--his play with the materiality of painting, his exotic reading of history and myth, his lapse into dreamy nostalgia, indeed, his actual decadence. Like that kindred spirit Edward Burne-Jone whose large retrospective occupied the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of recent origin York, for most of the summer of 1998 Moreau now achieves his chance at redemption. The exhibition appeared at three venues: the Grand Palais, Paris (September 29 1998 from one side January 4, 1999); the Art Institute of Chicago (February 13 end April 25, 1999); finishing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (June 1 from one side August 22, 1999). The exhibit was a fruitful collaboration of French and American curators, including Genevi[grave{e}]ve Lacambre, Douglas W Druick, Larry J Feinberg, Susan Alyson Stein, Rebecca A. Rabinow, and Marie-Laure de Contenson

Like a painterly alchemist, Moreau mixed together myths and fictitious storys of the past into a heady prepare by fermentation In his paintings, with their air-spun castles and close rocky crags, presented in thick, hazy, heavily impastoed surfaces, the world is far and ever retreating. During his lifetime, Moreau was widely celebrated for his "Byzantine" mode of speech and unrepressed sensuality, most readily apparent in his Salom[acute{e}] paintings. Indeed, with their burnished, smoldering palettes, his paintings have the appearance to reek of some exotic [i]bouguet[/i] However, in a period in which artists divided into strict artistic camps--naturalism, Realism, Impressionism, academicism--Moreau malicious between the cracks. His art is marked by the agency of paradox; it is at one time ideal, literary, and mystical, notwithstanding his most celebrated defender, the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, waxed poetic upon the physicality, the material material of his paintings. [3] And while sharing his contemporaries' elitism and withdrawal from the public, Moreau left his life work to public scrutiny.

by means of his last years, despite his withdrawal from the Salon after 1880 Moreau was vindicated: he was seen as an idealist hero in fin de si[grave{e}]cle France, a political division now in the full rage of the Dreyfus affair (and perhaps more than at any time in need of a timeless escapism). In the 20th hundred however, aside from an enthusiastic reception by means of Andr[acute{e}] Breton and the Surrealists, Moreau ferocious into the vast heap of outmod literary painters until midcentury. The artist's career came in for a revival with a large retrospective at the Mus[acute{e}]e du Louvre Paris, in 1961 which l to a gust of wind of exhibitions in the 1960 [4] and a (faulty) rereading of Moreau as a missing father of abstraction. [5] The 1974 exhibition devot to the artist held at the looks Angeles County Museum of Art curated by means of Jules Kaplan, who wrote the accompanying catalogue, [6] was far more be of importance toed with situating Moreau in a late 19th-century connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts exploring his connections with the philosophical a whole s of the period, such as Posi tivism and Neoplatonism (in this Kaplan followed in the tracks of Jean Cassou, whose Louvre catalogue tied the plodding, deliberate art of Moreau to the bourgeois audience he largely painted for). The retrospective held at the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1986 continued this trend: Moreau was repeatedly referr to in the exhibition catalogue as a "child of his time." [7]

The 1999 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum uncloseed with two wall placards. individual was devoted to the Mus[acute{e}]e Gustave Moreau (from whose vast holdings came the majority of works in the display with a few choice holdings from the Armand Hammer Collection). The other body gave a brief outline of the artist's life, wearied largely in seclusion during his last sum of two units decades. The text assures us that Moreau was "able to dedicate himself to his art without be of importance to for money." In contrast, however, the pair wall text and catalogue entries present detailed information on who bought what, when they purchased it, and by what means much they paid.