For the sake of art Gustave Moreauvoluntarily isolated himself from society. The mystery with which he surrounded his life turned into a legend about the artist himself.
Life of Gustave Moreau (1826 - 1898), like his work, seems completely divorced from the realities of French life in the 19th century. Having limited his social circle to family members and close friends, the artist devoted himself entirely to painting. Having a good income from his canvases, he was not interested in the changes in fashion in the art market. The famous French symbolist writer Huysmans very accurately called Moreau "a hermit who settled in the heart of Paris."
Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)
Moreau was born on April 6, 1826 in Paris. His father, Louis Moreau, was an architect whose job it was to maintain the city's public buildings and monuments. The death of Moreau's only sister, Camille, brought the family together. The artist's mother, Polina, was attached to her son with all her heart and, having become a widow, did not part with him until her death in 1884.
From early childhood, parents encouraged the child's interest in drawing and introduced him to classical art. Gustave read a lot, liked to look at albums with reproductions of masterpieces from the Louvre collection, and in 1844, after graduating from school, he received a bachelor's degree - a rare achievement for young bourgeois. Satisfied with his son's success, Louis Moreau assigned him to the studio of the neoclassical artist François-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), where the young Moreau received the necessary preparation for entering the School of Fine Arts, where he successfully passed the exams in 1846
Saint George and the Dragon (1890)
Griffin (1865)
Education here was extremely conservative and mainly boiled down to copying plaster casts from ancient statues, drawing male nudes, studying anatomy, perspective and the history of painting. Meanwhile, Moreau was becoming more and more interested in the colorful painting of Delacroix and especially of his follower Theodore Chasserio. Having failed to win the prestigious Rome Prize (the School sent the winners of this competition to study in Rome at its own expense), in 1849 Moreau left the school walls.
The young artist turned his attention to the Salon - the annual official exhibition, which every beginner sought to get into in the hope of being noticed by critics. The paintings presented by Moreau at the Salon in the 1850s, such as the Song of Songs (1853), showed a strong influence of Chasserio - executed in a romantic manner, they were distinguished by piercing color and violent eroticism.
Moreau never denied that he owed a lot in his work to Chasserio, his friend, who passed away early (at the age of 37). Shocked by his death, Moreau dedicated the canvas "Young Man and Death" to his memory.
Salome dancing before Herod (1876)
However, admirers of Moreau's work perceived his new works as a call for the emancipation of fantasy. He became the idol of Symbolist writers, among them Huysmans, Lorrain and Péladan. However, Moreau did not agree that he was considered a Symbolist, in any case, when in 1892 Péladan asked Moreau to write a laudatory review of the Rose and Cross symbolist salon, the artist resolutely refused.
Meanwhile, the unflattering fame for Moro did not deprive him of private customers, who still bought his small canvases, painted, as a rule, on mythological and religious subjects. During the period from 1879 to 1883, he created four times more paintings than in the previous 18 years (the most profitable for him was a series of 64 watercolors created based on the fables of Lafontaine for the Marseille rich man Anthony Roy - for each watercolor Moreau received from 1000 to 1500 francs). And the career of the artist went up the hill.
Odysseus beating suitors (detail)
Moreau himself did not want to recognize himself as either unique, or divorced from time, and, moreover, incomprehensible. He saw himself as an artist-thinker, but at the same time, which he especially emphasized, he put color, line and form in the first place, and not verbal images. Wanting to protect himself from unwanted interpretations, he often accompanied his paintings with detailed comments and sincerely regretted that "until now there has not been a single person who could seriously talk about my painting."
Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra (1876)
Moreau always paid special attention to the works of the old masters, thus the "old wineskins" into which, according to Redon's definition, he wanted to pour his "new wine". For many years, Moro studied the masterpieces of Western European artists, and primarily representatives of the Italian Renaissance, but the heroic and monumental aspects interested him much less than the spiritual and mystical side of the work of his great predecessors.
Moro had the deepest respect for Leonardo da Vinci, who in the 19th century. considered the forerunner of European romanticism. Moreau's house kept reproductions of all Leonardo's paintings in the Louvre, and the artist often turned to them, especially when he needed to depict a rocky landscape (as, for example, on the canvases "Orpheus" and "Prometheus") or effeminate men, reminiscent of the created Leonardo image of Saint John. “I would never have learned to express myself,” says Moreau, already a mature artist, “without constant meditation in front of the works of geniuses: the Sistine Madonna and some of the creations of Leonardo.”
Thracian girl with the head of Orpheus on his lyre (1864)
Moreau's admiration for the masters of the Renaissance was characteristic of many artists of the 19th century. At that time, even such classic artists as Ingres were looking for new subjects that were not typical for classical painting, and the rapid growth of the colonial French empire aroused the interest of viewers, especially creative people, in everything exotic.
Peacock Complaining to Juno (1881)
The archives of the Gustave Moreau Museum show the incredible breadth of the artist's interests - from medieval tapestries to antique vases, from Japanese woodcuts to erotic Indian sculpture. Unlike Ingres, who limited himself exclusively to historical sources, Moreau boldly combined images taken from different cultures and eras on the canvas. His"Unicorns", for example, as if borrowed from the gallery of medieval painting, and the painting "The Phenomenon" is a real collection of oriental exotics.
Unicorns (1887-88)
Moreau deliberately sought to saturate his paintings with amazing details as much as possible, this was his strategy, which he called "the need for luxury." Moreau worked on his paintings for a long time, sometimes for several years, constantly adding more and more new details that multiplied on the canvas, like reflections in mirrors. When the artist no longer had enough space on the canvas, he hemmed additional strips. This happened, for example, with the painting "Jupiter and Semele" and with the unfinished painting "Jason and the Argonauts".
Diomedes Devoured by His Horses (1865)
However, Moreau's connections with modernism are much more complex and subtle than it seemed to the decadents who adored his work. Moreau's pupils at the School of Fine Arts, Matisse and Rouault, always spoke of their teacher with great warmth and gratitude, and his workshop was often called "the cradle of modernism." For Redon, Moreau's modernism consisted in his "following his own nature." It was this quality, combined with the ability to express themselves, that Moreau sought to develop in his students in every possible way. He taught them not only the traditional basics of craftsmanship and copying the masterpieces of the Louvre, but also creative independence - and the master's lessons were not in vain. Matisse and Rouault were among the founders of Fauvism, the first influential artistic movement of the 20th century, based on classical concepts of color and form. So Moreau, who seemed to be an inveterate conservative, became the godfather of the direction that opened up new horizons in the painting of the 20th century.
The last romantic of the 19th century, Gustave Moreau, called his art "passionate silence." In his works, sharp colors harmoniously combined with the expression of mythological and biblical images. "I never looked for dreams in reality or reality in dreams. I gave freedom to the imagination," Moreau liked to repeat, considering fantasy one of the most important forces of the soul. Critics saw in him a representative of symbolism, although the artist himself repeatedly and decisively rejected this label. And no matter how much Moro relied on the play of his imagination, he always carefully and deeply thought through the color and composition of the canvases, all the features of lines and shapes, and was never afraid of the most daring experiments.
Self portrait (1850)
Moreau's paradoxical work is at the crossroads of the art of the 19th century. Peter Cook at the end of a monographic work on Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) calls him a protosymbolist, less often a historical painter, but in general it is difficult to categorize him. The best of his intricate biblical and mythological paintings are etched in memory but difficult to decipher. Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism (Gustave Moreau: history painting, spirituality and symbolism) is an attempt to shed light on this highly idiosyncratic figure on the fringes of French art.
His classical compositions in oils depict figures in isolated light areas, surrounded by large dark areas, colored patches of color that give these grottoes and throne rooms a jeweled appearance. The facial expressions of his characters are restrained, and their gestures are unnatural and solemn. Clothing and architecture are covered with intricate decorations that give the paintings a pseudo-organic appearance. By the end of the Second Empire, salon history painting was becoming an exercise in sensationalism and tickling the nerves. It is hard not to see Moreau as willingly torturing himself with a tradition of history painting, whose days he suspected were numbered. His work lies between the neoclassical approach to history painting and the emerging Symbolist movement, which Moreau felt was not significant enough. In the extremely complex and eclectic worldview of the artist, devotion to art was combined with pantheistic mythology and Catholic mysticism. Moreau's position as an anti-realist was a consequence of his attachment to idealism. His political views were extremely monarchist and nationalist.
Cook suggests that the negative response to Moreau's salon works after the success of his Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) was due to the confusion of styles and the difficulty of interpreting pictorial narratives. He used neoclassicism as the basis of his approach, but included both the emotional coloring of romanticism and the ornamentalism of the Far Eastern and Islamic art. Cook compares Moreau's paintings with others exhibited at the Salon of the same year. This is instructive, since many of those paintings were painted by little-known artists and have been lost or ended up in the vaults of provincial museums.
The mixed reception of his salon works contributed to the fact that Moreau began to consider himself an unheeded prophet. Wanting to secure his position in the next generations, he passed on his principles to numerous students. And he worked on paintings, which, according to the artist's intention, were to be in a posthumous museum dedicated to his work. And if none of the students became his follower, then the Parisian house-museum of Moreau turned out to be a more lasting legacy. Moreau created copies of his successful canvases so they could be stored here.
As a teacher at the Higher School of Fine Arts, Moreau was in contact with a generation of artists who later created modernism. Students Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Charles Camoin formed the backbone of the Fauvist movement, opposed to the ideals of the teacher. Cook shows that Moreau was a benevolent mentor who recommended copying a wide range of works and made a positive impression on the students. But of all the greatest students of Moreau, only Georges Rouault became an allegory artist and a consistent opponent of realism. Moreau was the last champion of a tradition from which later artists finally turned away. His work is very attractive and subtle enough to deserve the belated attention that Cook paid to him.
Text: Alexander Adams
Gustave Moreau 1826-1898- French symbolist artist, whose work has been called strange on countless occasions. But this "strangeness" should be considered exclusively in a positive way: his canvases are filled with a subtle meaning and a new subtext that is not familiar to the viewer, which is not so easy to understand.
A characteristic feature of Moreau was a sincere and unshakable love for his art, faith in its correctness and beauty. He never wrote for the masses and did not seek to be understood by the crowd. The artist focused on a small part of the audience, the elite of society, and deliberately did not simplify his paintings and their subjects. Let few understand him - but he himself was pleased with what he depicted on canvas, was true to his thoughts and adhered to his style.
One of the first paintings by Moreau to gain fame is Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864). Almost everything in it seems special: the main characters, the sharp-sided, harsh landscape, and the gloomy gray sky covered with clouds. They seem to be as heavy and tangible as the mountains, rocks and stones depicted on the canvas. The viewer seems to find himself in a closed space with a limited amount of air: he is surrounded on all sides by clouds and stone masses.
The tension of the atmosphere is also emphasized by the main characters. The Sphinx, a creature with bird wings, the body of a lion and the head of a girl, clung to Oedipus with both its claws and its seemingly hypnotizing gaze. But the face of Oedipus does not express any emotions, he is, as if half asleep, frozen between the worlds.
Moreau wrote on both biblical and mythical subjects. Women in his paintings most often resemble goddesses: such perfection and beauty are unlikely to occur in reality. The heroines of the master are always feminine, beautiful, majestic... and unreal. But symbolism did not need objectivity, and symbolist artists left the opportunity to truly display the world to representatives of other directions.
Very often Moreau portrayed wonderful elusive muses. In the painting "Hesiod and the Muse" (1891), the fragile, uprooted creature looks like it is woven from tiny jewels. It is light and amazing, its presence will make any creator happy, and without it, creativity seems to fade. But the muse cannot be caught and put on a chain - she is capricious and appears when she wants to.
Gustave Moreau is an artist whose work is "not tied" to real time. For stories, he went hundreds of years ago, where he made a "change" and went to the "final" - to the sublime and subtle, amazing and immense other world. His characters are mysterious, his canvases make you think and peer into every detail. He lived and worked according to his convictions, without looking back at the tastes and preferences of the general public.
He can be called a happy person - after all, he received recognition for what, in fact, he did for himself.
Gustave Moreau (fr. Gustave Moreau) (April 6, 1826, Paris - April 18, 1898, Paris) - French artist, representative of symbolism.
Gustave Moreau was born in 1826 in Paris to an architect's family. Moreau was a student of Théodore Chasserio at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. In 1849 Moreau exhibited his work at the Salon. During two trips to Italy (1841 and from 1857 to 1859), he visited Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, where Moreau studied the art of the Renaissance - the masterpieces of Andrea Mantegna, Crivelli, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. In 1862, the artist's father dies. In 1868, Moreau was appointed chairman of the jury for the Grand Prix de Rome. In 1875, Gustave Moreau received the highest award of the French Republic - the Order of the Legion of Honor. In 1884, the artist's mother dies.
In 1888, Moreau was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1891 he became a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, replacing Delaunay in this place. His students include Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Odilon Redon, Gustave Pierre. In 1890, his life partner Alexandrine died.
Moreau died in 1898 and was buried in the Montmartre cemetery. Since 1903, the Gustave Moreau Museum has been located in his former studio in the IX arrondissement of Paris. Moreau's canvases are also in Neuss.
His canvases, watercolors and drawings were devoted mainly to biblical, mystical and fantastic themes. His painting had a huge influence on Fauvism and Surrealism. Moreau was an excellent connoisseur of old art, an admirer of ancient Greek art and a lover of Oriental luxury goods, silk, weapons, porcelain and carpets.
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During two trips to Italy (1841 and from 1857 to 1859), he visited Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, where Moreau studied the art of the Renaissance - the masterpieces of Andrea Mantegna, Crivelli, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.
Desdemona, Gustave Moreau
After two years in the studio of François Picot, Moreau abandons his stagnant academic studies to work independently in the footsteps of Delacroix ( "The Legend of King Canute", Paris, Gustave Moreau Museum). In 1848, Moro began a friendship with Chasserio, whom he loved for his taste for arabesques and poetic elegance. The early work of the artist is marked by the strong influence of Chasserio ( "Sulamit", 1853, Dijon, Museum of Fine Arts). Chasserio was the only mentor Moreau, to which he referred all the time; after his death in 1856 Moreau spends two years in Italy, where he studies and copies the masterpieces of Italian painting. He is attracted by the works of Carpaccio, Gozzoli and, especially, Mantegna, as well as the tenderness of Perugino, the charm of the late Leonardo, the powerful harmony of Michelangelo. He does not forget the Florentine linear style and the mannerist canon. Upon his return to Paris, Moreau exhibits his paintings at the Salon ("Oedipus and the Sphinx", 1864, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; "Young Man and Death", 1865; and the famous "Thracian girl with the head of Orpheus" , 1865, Paris, Musee d'Orsay). From now on, critics and intellectuals become his admirers; however, his work caused ridicule of the uncomprehending opposition, and Moreau refuses to permanently participate in the Salons. However, in 1878 many of his paintings were exhibited at the World Exhibition and were highly appreciated, in particular "Dance of Salome"(1876, New York, Huntington Hartford collection) and "Phenomenon"(watercolor, 1876, Paris, Louvre). In 1884, after a severe shock caused by the death of his mother, Moreau devotes himself entirely to art. His illustrations for La Fontaine's Fables, commissioned by the artist's friend, Anthony Roux, in 1881, were exhibited in 1886 at the Goupil Gallery.
"Phenomenon"(watercolor, 1876, Paris, Louvre)
Helena Illustrious Gustave Moreau
During these years devoted to solitary searches, Moreau was elected a member of the Academy of Arts (1888), and then received the title of professor (1891), replacing Elie Delaunay in this post. Now he had to give up seclusion and devote himself to his students. While some of them (Sabatte, Milsando, Maxence) follow the traditional path, others show new trends. The symbolism of René Pio, the religious expressionism of Rouault and Devaliere owe much Moreau. Despite their revolutionary spirit, the young Fauvists - Matisse, Marche, Mangen - also absorbed his coloring lessons. Humanity and a heightened sense of freedom brought Moreau universal love. All his life Moreau tried to express the inexpressible. His skill is very confident, but his numerous preparatory pencil sketches are cold and overly rational, since the observation of a live model seemed boring to him, and he considered nature only as a means, not an end. The texture of his paintings is smooth, with the effects of enamel and crystal glaze. Colors, on the other hand, are carefully refined on the palette to achieve sharp tones: blues and reds, shining like gems, pale or fiery golds. This precise set of colors was sometimes covered with wax ( "St. Sebastian", Paris, Gustave Moreau Museum). In his watercolors, Moreau freely plays with chromatic effects, which allows the artist to get blurry shades. But Moreau, the colorist, was also preoccupied with the intellectual and mystical search for the legendary and divine. Fascinated by religious and literary antiquity, he seeks to understand its essence. At first, he is fond of the Bible and the Koran, then Greek, Egyptian and Eastern mythology. He often mixes them up, combining them into universal extravaganzas - so, in "Dance of Salome" Babylonian scenery and Egyptian lotus flowers appear. Sometimes his lyricism escalates ( "Rider", 1855, Paris, Gustave Moreau Museum; "The Flight of Angels for the King of the Magi", ibid.). Sometimes he accentuates the hieratic immovability of his characters (standing in uncertainty "Elena", ibid.; perched on the tower" travel angel", ibid.). Only Christian works demonstrate greater severity of expression ("Pieta", 1867, Frankfurt, Shtedel Art Institute). Moreau sings of the hero and poet, beautiful, noble, pure and almost always incomprehensible ("Hesiod and the Muses", 1891 , Paris, Gustave Moreau Museum) He is trying to create his own myths ( "Dead Lyres", 1895-1897, ibid.). A deep misogyny is felt in his paintings, which manifests itself in ambiguous and sophisticated female images with a cruel and mysterious charm. Insidious "Chimera"(1884, Paris, Gustave Moreau Museum) bewitch a yearning man, disarmed by seven sins, and a dissolute girl "Salome"(1876, sketch, ibid.) is lost in arabesques full of enchanting excitement. "Leda" (1865, ibid.) softens in the symbol of the unity of God and Creation. But Moreau is constantly faced with the impossibility of accurately transferring his visions and impressions to the canvas. He starts many great works, leaves them, and then is accepted again, but cannot complete due to disappointment or impotence. His overly intricate picture "Pretenders"(1852-1898, ibid) and composition "Argonauts"(1897, not finished, ibid.), with symbolism as complex as a rebus, testify to this constant dissatisfaction with oneself. Striving for apotheosis, Moreau is defeated. But he completes the amazing picture "Jupiter and Semele"(ibid) and creates a series of sketches, trying to find the exact poses of the characters. These sketches are always delightful, as the artist creates fantastic scenery in them, ghostly palaces with marble colonnades and heavy embroidered curtains, or landscapes with shattered rocks and twisted trees that stand out against the backdrop of bright distances, like at Grunewald.
The artist loved the shimmer of gold, jewels and minerals, and fabulous flowers. Phantasmagoria Gustave Moreau fascinated symbolist poets who were searching for parallel fantasies, such as Mallarmé and Henri de Regnier; they also attracted André Breton and the Surrealists. They were supposed to excite aesthetes like Robert de Montesquieu and writers like Jean Lorrain, Maurice Barres or I. Huysmans. All of them saw in the luxurious and mysterious dreams of the artist a reflection of idealistic thought and sensitive, exalted individuality. Peladan even tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to attract Moreau to the Rose and Cross circle. But Moreau was less ambivalent, in contrast to his reputation. Rather modest, he expressed his ideas only in painting and desired only posthumous fame.
In 1908 Moreau bequeathed to the state his workshop, located at 14 La Rochefoucauld Street, and all the works that were there. The most significant works were included in private collections and collections of many foreign museums, but his workshop, where Gustave Moreau Museum and where unfinished large canvases, delicate watercolors and countless drawings are stored, allows a better understanding of their author's sensitivity and his aestheticism, characteristic of the art of the end of the century.
The life of the artist, like his work, seems completely divorced from the realities of French life in the 19th century. Having limited his social circle to family members and close friends, the artist devoted himself entirely to painting. Having a good income from his canvases, he was not interested in the changes in fashion in the art market. The famous French symbolist writer Huysmans very accurately called Moreau "a hermit who settled in the heart of Paris."
Moreau was born on April 6, 1826 in Paris. His father, Louis Moreau, was an architect whose job it was to maintain the city's public buildings and monuments. The death of Moreau's only sister, Camille, brought the family together. The artist's mother, Polina, was attached to her son with all her heart and, having become a widow, did not part with him until her death in 1884.
From early childhood, parents encouraged the child's interest in drawing and introduced him to classical art. Gustave read a lot, liked to look at albums with reproductions of masterpieces from the Louvre collection, and in 1844, after graduating from school, he received a bachelor's degree - a rare achievement for young bourgeois. Satisfied with the success of his son, Louis Moreau assigned him to the studio of the neoclassical artist François-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), where the young Moreau received the necessary preparation for entering the School of Fine Arts, where he successfully passed the exams in 1846.
Saint George and the Dragon (1890)
Education here was extremely conservative and mainly boiled down to copying plaster casts from ancient statues, drawing male nudes, studying anatomy, perspective and the history of painting. Meanwhile, Moreau was becoming more and more interested in the colorful painting of Delacroix and especially of his follower Theodore Chasserio. Having failed to win the prestigious Rome Prize (the School sent the winners of this competition to study in Rome at its own expense), in 1849 Moreau left the school walls.
The young artist turned his attention to the Salon - the annual official exhibition, which every beginner sought to get into in the hope of being noticed by critics. The paintings presented by Moreau at the Salon in the 1850s, such as the Song of Songs (1853), showed a strong influence of Chasserio - executed in a romantic manner, they were distinguished by piercing color and violent eroticism.
Moreau never denied that he owed a lot in his work to Chasserio, his friend, who passed away early (at the age of 37). Shocked by his death, Moreau dedicated the canvas "Young Man and Death" to his memory.
The influence of Theodore Chasserio is also evident in the two large canvases that Moreau began writing in the 1850s, in The Suitors of Penelope and The Daughters of Theseus. Working on these huge, with a lot of details, paintings, he almost did not leave the studio. However, this high demands on himself subsequently often became the reason why the artist left the work unfinished.
In the autumn of 1857, seeking to fill a gap in education, Moreau went on a two-year tour of Italy. The artist was fascinated by this country and made hundreds of copies and sketches from the masterpieces of the Renaissance masters. In Rome he fell in love with the works of Michelangelo, in Florence - with the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Angelico, in Venice he passionately copied Carpaccio, and in Naples he studied the famous frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum. In Rome, the young man met Edgar Degas, together they went out to sketch more than once. Inspired by the creative atmosphere, Moreau wrote to a friend in Paris: "From now on, and forever, I'm going to become a hermit ... I am convinced that nothing will make me turn off this path."
Peri (Sacred Elephant). 1881-82
Returning home in the autumn of 1859, Gustave Moreau began to write with zeal, but changes awaited him. At this time, he met a governess who served in a house not far from his workshop. The young woman's name was Alexandrina Dure. Moreau fell in love and, despite the fact that he categorically refused to marry, was faithful to her for more than 30 years. After the death of Alexandrina in 1890, the artist dedicated one of the best paintings to her - Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice.
Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice (1890)
In 1862, the artist's father died, never knowing what success awaits his son in the coming decades. Throughout the 1860s, Moreau painted a series of paintings (curiously, they were all vertical in format) that were very well received at the Salon. Most of the laurels went to the painting "Oedipus and the Sphinx", exhibited in 1864 (the painting was purchased at auction by Prince Napoleon for 8,000 francs). It was the time of the triumph of the realist school, which was headed by Courbet, and critics declared Moreau one of the saviors of the genre of historical painting.
The Franco-Prussian War that broke out in 1870 and the subsequent events of the Paris Commune had a profound effect on Moreau. For several years, until 1876, he did not exhibit at the Salon and even refused to participate in decorating the Pantheon. When, finally, the artist returned to the Salon, he presented two paintings created on the same subject - a canvas, difficult to perceive, painted in oil, "Salome" and a large watercolor "Phenomenon", met with criticism.
However, admirers of Moreau's work perceived his new works as a call for the emancipation of fantasy. He became the idol of Symbolist writers, among them Huysmans, Lorrain and Péladan. However, Moreau did not agree that he was classified as a Symbolist, in any case, when in 1892 Peladan asked Moreau to write a laudatory review of the Rose and Cross symbolist salon, the artist resolutely refused.
Meanwhile, the unflattering fame for Moro did not deprive him of private customers, who still bought his small canvases, painted, as a rule, on mythological and religious subjects. During the period from 1879 to 1883, he created four times more paintings than in the previous 18 years (the most profitable for him was a series of 64 watercolors created based on the fables of Lafontaine for the Marseille rich man Anthony Roy - for each watercolor Moreau received from 1000 to 1500 francs). And the career of the artist went up the hill.
In 1888 he was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1892 the 66-year-old Moreau became the head of one of the three workshops of the School of Fine Arts. His students were young artists who became famous already in the 20th century - Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet.
In the 1890s, Moreau's health deteriorated, and he considered ending his career. The artist decided to return to unfinished works and invited some of his students to help, including Rouault, his favorite. At the same time, Moreau embarked on his latest masterpiece, Jupiter and Semele.
The only thing the artist now aspired to was to turn his house into a memorial museum. He was in a hurry, enthusiastically marked the future location of the paintings, arranged, hung them - but, unfortunately, did not have time. Moreau died of cancer on April 18, 1898 and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in the same grave as his parents. He bequeathed to the state his mansion, together with a studio where about 1,200 paintings and watercolors, as well as more than 10,000 drawings, were kept.
Gustave Moreau always wrote what he wanted. Finding inspiration in photographs and magazines, medieval tapestries, antique sculptures and oriental art, he managed to create his own fantasy world that exists outside of time.
The Muses leaving their father Apollo (1868)
Viewed through the lens of art history, Moreau's work may seem anachronistic and strange. The artist's predilection for mythological subjects and his whimsical manner of writing did not go well with the heyday of realism and the birth of impressionism. However, during the life of Moreau, his paintings were recognized as both bold and innovative. Seeing Moreau's watercolor "Phaeton" at the World Exhibition of 1878, the artist Odilon Redon, shocked by the work, wrote: "This work is able to pour new wine into the skins of old art. The artist's vision is fresh and new ... At the same time, he follows the inclinations of his own nature."
Redon, like many critics of that time, saw Moreau's main merit in the fact that he was able to give a new direction to traditional painting, to bridge the gap between the past and the future. The symbolist writer Huysmans, author of the cult decadent novel The Contrary (1884), considered Moreau to be a "unique artist" with "neither real predecessors nor possible successors."
Not everyone thought the same, of course. Salon critics often called Moreau's manner "eccentric". Back in 1864, when the artist showed "Oedipus and the Sphinx" - the first painting that really attracted the attention of critics - one of them noted that this canvas reminded him of "a potpourri on the themes of Mantegna, created by a German student who rested while working at reading Schopenhauer.
Odysseus beats suitors (1852)
Moreau himself did not want to recognize himself as either unique, or divorced from time, and, moreover, incomprehensible. He saw himself as an artist-thinker, but at the same time, which he especially emphasized, he put color, line and form in the first place, and not verbal images. Wanting to protect himself from unwanted interpretations, he often accompanied his paintings with detailed comments and sincerely regretted that "until now there has not been a single person who could seriously talk about my painting."
Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra (1876)
Moreau always paid special attention to the works of the old masters, thus the "old wineskins" into which, according to Redon's definition, he wanted to pour his "new wine". For many years, Moro studied the masterpieces of Western European artists, and primarily representatives of the Italian Renaissance, but the heroic and monumental aspects interested him much less than the spiritual and mystical side of the work of his great predecessors.
Moro had the deepest respect for Leonardo da Vinci, who in the 19th century. considered the forerunner of European romanticism. Moreau's house kept reproductions of all Leonardo's paintings in the Louvre, and the artist often turned to them, especially when he needed to depict a rocky landscape (as, for example, on the canvases "Orpheus" and "Prometheus") or effeminate men, reminiscent of the created Leonardo image of Saint John. “I would never have learned to express myself,” says Moreau, already a mature artist, “without constant meditation in front of the works of geniuses: the Sistine Madonna and some of the creations of Leonardo.”
Moreau's admiration for the masters of the Renaissance was characteristic of many artists of the 19th century. At that time, even such classic artists as Ingres were looking for new subjects that were not typical for classical painting, and the rapid growth of the colonial French empire aroused the interest of viewers, especially creative people, in everything exotic.
Peacock Complaining to Juno (1881)
Moreau deliberately sought to saturate his paintings with amazing details as much as possible, this was his strategy, which he called "the need for luxury." Moreau worked on his paintings for a long time, sometimes for several years, constantly adding more and more new details that multiplied on the canvas, like reflections in mirrors. When the artist no longer had enough space on the canvas, he hemmed additional strips. This happened, for example, with the painting "Jupiter and Semele" and with the unfinished painting "Jason and the Argonauts".
Moreau's attitude to paintings was reminiscent of his great contemporary Wagner's attitude to his symphonic poems - it was most difficult for both creators to bring their works to the final chord. Moro's idol Leonardo da Vinci also left many works unfinished. The paintings presented in the exposition of the Gustave Moreau Museum clearly show that the artist was not able to fully embody the conceived images on the canvas.
Over the years, Moreau increasingly believed that he was the last custodian of traditions, and rarely spoke with approval of modern artists, even those with whom he was friends. Moreau believed that the painting of the Impressionists was superficial, devoid of morality and could not but lead these artists to spiritual death.
Diomedes Devoured by His Horses (1865)
However, Moreau's connections with modernism are much more complex and subtle than it seemed to the decadents who adored his work. Moreau's pupils at the School of Fine Arts, Matisse and Rouault, always spoke of their teacher with great warmth and gratitude, and his workshop was often called "the cradle of modernism." For Redon, Moreau's modernism consisted in his "following his own nature." It was this quality, combined with the ability to express themselves, that Moreau sought to develop in his students in every possible way. He taught them not only the traditional basics of craftsmanship and copying the masterpieces of the Louvre, but also creative independence - and the master's lessons were not in vain. Matisse and Rouault were among the founders of Fauvism, the first influential artistic movement of the 20th century, based on classical concepts of color and form. So Moreau, who seemed to be an inveterate conservative, became the godfather of the direction that opened up new horizons in the painting of the 20th century.
The last romantic of the 19th century, Gustave Moreau, called his art "passionate silence." In his works, sharp colors harmoniously combined with the expression of mythological and biblical images. "I never looked for dreams in reality or reality in dreams. I gave freedom to the imagination," Moreau liked to repeat, considering fantasy one of the most important forces of the soul. Critics saw in him a representative of symbolism, although the artist himself repeatedly and decisively rejected this label. And no matter how much Moro relied on the play of his imagination, he always carefully and deeply thought through the color and composition of the canvases, all the features of lines and shapes, and was never afraid of the most daring experiments.
Scottish rider
