Gustave Moreau

̶  On ancient Greek vases she’s an incubus—lion’s body, woman’s head, eagle’s wings and serpent’s tail.
̶  Like on the cover of the album?
̶  Yes. And what do you see in it?
̶  In Moreau’s painting?
̶  Yes.
̶  Well, it’s very erotic. You feel the attraction.

The syncopation of her speech, the accent of her English: Is it only because we’ve just made love that I find her voice hovers between music and language?

̶  Yes. And that’s far more interesting than the fight between hero and monster.
̶  Because of the enigma?
̶  Yes. The enigma substitutes for the fight. And the fight, of course, is already a substitute for fucking.
̶  And the second enigma?
̶  ‘Who are the two sisters who bring each other into being?’
̶  The night and the day! Where does that come from?
̶  It’s not in Sophocles. It’s a later addition.
̶  You use it brilliantly, that sun and moon motif.
̶  Masculine-feminine. Everything derives from that.

Gustave Moreau must be the central figure in any discussion of Symbolist art. In comparison with his contemporaries, Moreau emerges as an artist of a very special and distinctive kind. As Mario Praz points out in The Romantic Agony, ‘Moreau followed the example of Wagner’s music, composing his pictures in the style of symphonic poems, loading them with significant accessories in which the principal theme was echoed until the subject yielded the last drop of its symbolic sap.’ We may also apply to Moreau’s work a comment made by the American critic Victor Brombert on Flaubert’s Salammbô. He remarks on the ‘immobilization of life and animation of the inanimate’ to be found in that work: ‘As a result of this double tendency, the distinction between the organic and the inorganic vanishes, and being and becoming tend to merge.’

His earliest work shows the very pronounced influence of Delacroix. In 1850 he met and was much influenced by Chassériau, whose taste for spangled, jewelled colour had a great influence on the formation of Moreau’s style. In 1856 he followed a long-established tradition among French artists by making a visit to Italy. He remained there for four years, and was especially attracted by the Primitive painters, archaic vases, early mosaics and Byzantine enamels. In 1864, he made his first real impact in the official Salon with his Oedipus and the Sphinx. Already his work was gaining a reputation for being eccentric and odd; one commentator said it was ‘like a pastiche of Mantegna created by a German student who relaxes from his painting by reading Schopenhauer’.

It was, however, at the Salon of 1880 that Moreau seems to have attracted the attention of J. K. Huysmans, then a moderately well-known novelist. In his account of the exhibition, Huysmans reserved the best of his enthusiasm for Moreau’s work. ‘Gustave Moreau’, he wrote, ‘is a unique, an extraordinary artist. After having been haunted by Mantegna, and by Leonardo whose princesses move through mysterious landscapes of black and blue, Moreau has been seized by an enthusiasm for the hieratic arts of India. From the two currents of Italian and Hindu art he has—spurred on by the feverish hues of Delacroix—brought forth an art peculiarly his own, an art personal and new, one whose disquieting flavour is at first disconcerting.’ This was, in fact, the first trumpet-blast of Symbolist enthusiasm, and Moreau’s special position in the Symbolist pantheon was to be confirmed when, four years later, Huysmans included descriptions of his work in his novel, A Rebours.

In writing about Moreau’s work in A Rebours, Huysmans naturally selected those aspects of it to which he felt most akin by temperament, and which best suited his own artistic purposes. The novel’s hero, des Esseintes (and by implication Huysmans himself), saw Moreau as the creator of ‘disquieting and sinister allegories made more to the point by the uneasy perceptions of an altogether modem neurosis’, as someone ‘forever sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman perversities and superhuman loves’. What fascinated des Esseintes/Huysmans was Moreau’s treatment of the Salome theme. A watercolour version of The Apparition, in which the severed head of the Baptist appears in a vision to the young Judaean princess, is the subject of pages of ecstatic description in A Rebours.

Each work was based upon an elaborate programme. Of his Jupiter and Semele, for example, Moreau noted: ‘It is an ascent towards superior spheres, a rising up of purified beings towards the Divine—terrestrial death and apotheosis in Immortality. The great Mystery completes itself, the whole of nature is impregnated with the ideal and the divine, everything is transformed.’

Detail, indeed, was a kind of trap to Moreau. The conception of his works gave him no difficulty, but the elaboration frequently did. He was a genuinely visionary artist in that his first idea seems to have presented itself to his mind’s eye complete in all its main outlines. It was when he tried to fill in these outlines, using material taken direct from nature, or even from other works of art, that he ran into trouble, as Théophile Gautier noted. Moreau’s earliest sketch for a composition often comes closer to the final version than any intermediate stage.

At the same time we must concede his power to fire men’s imaginations. Huysmans was inspired by him; the Sâr Péladan worshipped him despite the fact that Moreau was deeply suspicious of Rosicrucian hocus-pocus. Later, André Breton, pope of the Surrealist movement, was to haunt the Musée Gustave Moreau at a time when scarcely anybody else bothered to visit it. Looking at a work such as the Mystic Flower, with its tumescent forms, it is easy to understand Breton’s fascination with a painter who seems to have been very much the prisoner of his own unconscious.

The Neoplatonic idea of the androgyne was to exercise a powerful fascination over late nineteenth-century critics and aestheticians, but it was Moreau who gave form to this idea in paint upon canvas.

In The Suitors, we witness the massacre of beautiful effeminates—our sympathy goes out to them, rather than to Ulysses, whose house they have invaded.

His fairies, for instance, are never the frail, fluttering creatures of early Romanticism, but personages who are both powerful and, for all their beauty, sinister. They seem, like much of his other imagery, to be part of a powerfully imaginative celebration of male fears of castration and impotence.

Moreau sought the theme of satanic beauty in primitive mythology and treated it in his pictures of the Sphinx series. This began with the painting which was the success of the 1864 Salon, in which the cruel beast with the face of an imperious woman plants her claws on the breast of the languid youth Oedipus [see second image from top of page]. It ended with the watercolour The Victorious Sphinx, in which the Sphinx reigns supreme over a promontory bristling with bleeding corpses.

Moreau’s figures are ambiguous; it is hardly possible to distinguish at first glance which of two lovers is the man, which the woman. All his characters are linked by subtle bonds of relationship, as in Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon. Lovers look as though they were related, brothers as though they were lovers; men have the faces of virgins, virgins the faces of youths. The symbols of Good and Evil are entwined and equivocally confused. There is no contrast between different ages, sexes or types. The underlying meaning of Moreau’s paintings is incest; its most exalted figure is the Androgyne, its final word is sterility.

The favourite theme of Moreau is that of fatality, of evil and death incarnate in female beauty. It is in his painting, at the same time sexless and lascivious, that the spirit of the Decadent movement is most vividly expressed.

One has the impression in Moreau, as in Swinburne, of an ambiguous, troubled sexuality.