Gustave Moreau

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the work of Gustave Moreau . . . des Esseintes saw, realized at last, the strange and superhuman Salome he had dreamed of . . . the accursed Beauty, marked out from all others by the catalepsy which stiffened her flesh and hardened her muscles; the monstrous Beast, indifferent, unresponsive, unfeeling and, like Helen in antiquity, poisoning everyone who came near her. . .

Perhaps no living painter has ever been thrust into such notoriety by a novel as Moreau was by the publication of J.K. Huysmans' manifesto of decadence, A Rebours, in 1884. Moreau was then 58, a Parisian born and bred, praised in the salon, an officer of the Legion of Honor, a mature and respected figure with a strong academic bias. The fictional hero of A Rebours, that absurd purple monster des Esseintes, was described as owning two of his paintings. One was the elaborate Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876 (see color page).

Ideal Somnambulism. At one stroke, Moreau was canonized as a patron saint of dandyism and decadence, the father of symbolist art. His canvases, exotic in their spurts and blooms of color, are populated by pale androgynous youths and languid women encased, like scarab beetles, in glittering carapaces of emerald and embroidery. Such pictures were hailed as setting the tone of an entire sensibility--the same cast of imagination that in literature ran from Flaubert's Salammbo to Swinburne and Wilde, heavy with allusions to enigmatic and castrating Fatal Women. Moreau's own work was rich in homosexual overtones, though in fact he kept up a continuous liaison with a woman named Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux for 25 years.

Moreau felt he was lionized for the wrong reasons. "One has never seen such a mania for the invisible," he jotted grumpily, "such exclusive addictions to dream, mystery, mysticism, symbolism and the undefined." Under the circumstances it seems ironically right that three-quarters of a century after he died of stomach cancer in Paris, Moreau should now be having his first American retrospective in that breeding pool of every psychic fad, Southern California. Composed of 88 oils, water-colors and drawings, it has been assembled by Art Historian Julius Kaplan for the Los Angeles County Museum.

Moreau was Matisse's teacher, but he is not an artist who fits into the formalist canons of "modernism." Indeed, for 50 years it has been de rigueur to reject his work as florid and sickly, despite its demonstrable influence on surrealism and its frequently astonishing beauty. That beauty, however, is not in the structure; his nymphs have a way of looking like Delacroix houris, but boned, and one may look in vain--except in the hundreds of tiny and miraculously spontaneous oil sketches and color notes that fill the Musee Moreau in Paris--for that dynamism that animated Moreau's romantic predecessors, Delacroix and Chasseriau. Rather, it is a delight of surface. To fix it, Moreau resorted to what he called the "beauty of inertia." He noted of Michelangelo, whom he adored: "All these figures seem fixed in a gesture of ideal somnambulism; they are unconscious of the movements they make." Once immobilized, the figures in his allegorical paintings--Oedipus, Salome and the like--could then be loaded with accessories, encrusted with redundant decoration.

So his work became, as Kaplan stresses, a curious synthesis of extravagant, imaginative decor with an almost pedantic spirit of academic research. Of this synthesis, Salome Dancing Before Herod is the masterpiece. Perhaps it is not, in formal terms, a great painting. But it is quite unforgettable, suffused by apprehension. Salome is less a dancing girl than a priestess, absorbed in her solipsistic gesture, gliding on point across the inlaid floor. In the brooding Herod, the standing executioner, the vista of Moorish arches and sifting gloom, one sees the apex of the kind of sensibility that in the hands of a Cecil B. DeMille would be coarsened to death. Every inch of the surface glitters with an enameled vitality, rigid and sparkling. Moreau's favorite theme, that of fatality and evil incarnate in women, was also one of the pathological obsessions of the 19th century; but it never received a more final expression than here. .Robert Hughes

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