Péladan and the Salons de la Rose+Croix: When Art Became Initiation
Sâr Péladan, the Catholic Order of the Rose-Croix, the rules of the 1892-1897 Salons, Khnopff, Delville, Hodler and the music of Erik Satie.
In March 1892 Parisians entering the Durand-Ruel gallery were greeted by music composed for the occasion by Erik Satie. This was the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, conceived by the writer Joséphin Péladan, who called himself Sâr, a title of Mesopotamian origin that he claimed for himself. For six editions, until 1897, those exhibitions were the most conspicuous showcase for the idealist and mystical art of the fin de siècle.
The Sâr and the Rosicrucians
Péladan was born in Lyon in 1858 into a fervently Catholic family and made his name in 1884 with the novel The Supreme Vice, the first of a long cycle devoted to Latin decadence. In 1888 he took part with Stanislas de Guaita and Papus in founding the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, but soon left it over doctrinal differences. In 1891 he founded his own order, the Catholic and Aesthetic Rose-Croix of the Temple and the Grail, with the aim of restoring the cult of the ideal in art.
The rules of the Salon
The rules of the Salon were strict and programmatic. Excluded were contemporary history painting, military and patriotic subjects, scenes of modern life, unstylised portraits, still lifes and most landscape. Welcome instead were myth, legend, allegory, dream and Catholic and mystical subjects. By Péladan's choice, moreover, women were not allowed to exhibit, a rule that reveals the limits of his idealism. The works had to meet a single criterion: beauty understood as a reflection of the divine.
The poster for the first edition was designed by the Swiss Carlos Schwabe and shows a young woman dressed in white climbing a staircase towards the light, leaving behind her a figure immersed in murky water. The image summed up the programme: art as spiritual ascent, matter as a weight to be overcome, the painter as a guide leading the soul upwards. Schwabe was also an exhibitor, and his illustrations for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1900, prolonged that atmosphere.
The artists of the Rose-Croix
Painters from several countries took part in the exhibitions. The Belgian Fernand Khnopff showed at the first edition, while his compatriot Jean Delville became one of the most regular exhibitors. French artists also took part, such as Alexandre Séon, author of a famous portrait of Péladan, Armand Point, Alphonse Osbert and Edmond Aman-Jean, as did the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler. Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whom Péladan regarded as masters, declined to participate.
Music played an important role. Erik Satie, then a young pianist in the cabarets of Montmartre, was for a short time the order's official composer and wrote the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, brief solemn pieces with static harmonies. The relationship soon ended in a break, and Satie founded a church of his own of which he was, in effect, the only member.
Péladan's extravagances, from his cloaks to his Assyrian-style beard, drew the irony of the newspapers, and the Salons closed in 1897. Yet they remain a decisive chapter for understanding Symbolism: rarely had an artistic movement presented itself so explicitly as an initiatory enterprise, with an order, a ritual and a doctrine. Many of the artists who passed through those rooms later contributed to the spiritual quests of the early twentieth century.