Gustave Moreau, the Painter Who Turned Myth into Enigma

Oedipus and the Sphinx, Salome and The Apparition, the Paris house-museum: the symbolic world of Gustave Moreau, teacher of Matisse and Rouault.

At number 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld, in Paris, stands one of the most unusual house-museums in Europe. Gustave Moreau, born in 1826 and died in 1898, transformed it in his final years into a large studio intended to preserve thousands of his paintings, watercolours and drawings after his death. Opened to the public in 1903, the museum brings back the world of a painter who made myth into a precious, esoteric language.

Oedipus, the Sphinx and mystery

Success came at the Salon of 1864 with Oedipus and the Sphinx, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The winged creature, with a lioness's body and a woman's face, clings to the hero's chest and stares at him from a few centimetres away, while the remains of her victims lie at his feet. The picture turned an episode of the Theban myth into a silent confrontation between man and the riddle, between knowledge and death.

Moreau loved subjects in which myth takes on spiritual meanings: Orpheus, Prometheus, Jason, the Muses, Leda, Jupiter and Semele. In the late canvas Jupiter and Semele, of 1895, kept in his museum, the god appears enthroned amid a glory of architecture and symbolic figures, while the mortal woman is annihilated by the vision of his true nature.

Salome and The Apparition

At the Salon of 1876 Moreau presented two works devoted to Salome: an oil painting of the dancer before Herod and a large watercolour, The Apparition, now in the Louvre, in which the head of John the Baptist hangs in mid-air, surrounded by a halo, before the young woman who points at it. The architecture recalls at once Indian temples, mosques and basilicas, and the surface is covered with a dense web of decoration as fine as engraving.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his 1884 novel Against Nature, described at length the two Salomes owned by his protagonist, the aesthete Des Esseintes, making Moreau the painter par excellence of refined decadence. From then on Symbolists, poets and fin-de-siècle occultists regarded him as a master, although he always remained reserved and aloof from fashionable circles.

The teacher of Matisse and Rouault

From the early 1890s Moreau taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had very different pupils, such as Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault. He gave them great freedom, urging them to study the masters in the Louvre and to develop their own imagination instead of imitating a style. Rouault later became the first curator of the museum his teacher had planned.

That some protagonists of modern art emerged from his studio is no paradox. Moreau taught that colour and form can have an autonomous value, able to speak to the soul even before the eye. His last oil sketches, almost abstract, kept in the museum, show how far he himself had pushed this research in his mature years.

Moreau joined no esoteric order, yet his painting speaks the language of initiation: motionless figures, ornaments that look like formulas, myths chosen for their capacity to allude to hidden truths. This is why he is regarded as the most important forerunner of French Symbolism and a bridge between the academic tradition and the avant-gardes of the twentieth century.