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1826 - 1898 • French • Painter • Symbolist
"o noble poetry of living and impassioned silence! How admirable is that art which, under a material envelope, mirror of physical beauty, reflects also the movements of the soil!, of the spirit, of the heart and the imagination, and responds to those divine necessities felt by humanity throughout the ages. It is the language of God! ... To this eloquence, whose character, nature and power have up to now resisted definition, I have given all my care, all my efforts: the evocation of thought through line, arabesque, and the means open to the plastic arts-that has been my aim!
Moreau painted scenes from the Bible, the classics, and other texts, and is sometimes called a "literary" SYMBOLIST. His style was eclectic, his figures assume theatrical rather than natural poses, and his scenes are elaborated with a multitude of detail. As the contemporary Symbolist painter REDON remarked, Moreau's inner life was veiled by worldly artifice. Moreau repeated a type of languid, androgynous male figure, sensitive but doomed, and destructive, sinister women-a convention known as the FEMME FATALE. A watercolor, The Apparition (Dance of Salome; 1876), illustrated a story popular with PRE-RAPHAELITES as well as Symbolists. In Moreau's picture Salome dances, barely clothed but lavishly bejeweled, while the halo-encircled, luminescent head of John the Baptist, gushing blood, is suspended in midair. She strikes an aggressive pose, pointing to but not looking at John. The colors are chilling-white, sapphire blue, and blood red. There is tension in Salome's frozen attitude-Moreau aspired to what he called "the beauty of inertia"in the profusion of ornamental detail and in the combination of decadence and beauty. The inspiration was one of Moreau's favorite books, Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo, published in 1863. (Moreau also painted the Salome theme in OIL.) Moreau's work was attacked when he sent it to the SALON in 1869, but by the 1890s it was well recognized, and he was an important teacher at the ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS. Moreau lived and worked in seclusion, but devoted himself to helping students develop their own styles and influence, ROUAULT and MATISSE among them. When a colleague commented "Isn't that the end?" about a SALON DES INDEPENDANTS that included the avant-garde work of TOULOUSE-LAUTREC and Henri ROUSSEAU, Moreau replied, "The end? No, it is only a beginning." On his deathbed Moreau said to Rouault, "I would leave my uniform of the Academy of Fine Arts to you, only you would burst all its seams."