Gustave Moreau

• 1. Introduction

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  Gustave Moreau left instructions that his death on the 18th of April 1898 was not to be announced in the press. His funeral was to be small and simple. Any flowers sent were to be placed not on his grave, but on the grave of Alexandrine Dureux, the woman he had quietly loved for more than thirty years. That final, tender deflection says something essential about the man. He spent his life resisting the usual terms of artistic fame: he seldom exhibited, often refused prestigious commissions, and was deeply reluctant to sell his paintings. Yet he produced over 15,000 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. He bequeathed nearly 1,200 of those paintings and watercolors, along with more than 10,000 drawings, to the French state. The townhome at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld where he had lived and worked for decades became the Musée national Gustave Moreau, and it opened to the public on the 14th of January 1903. What kind of painter builds a monument to his own reclusion? What drove a man so wary of the public gaze to preserve every trace of his inner life? And how did a figure largely forgotten for decades come to be claimed as a forerunner by the Surrealists, and as a master by Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault?

• 2. A Sheltered Formation

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  Moreau was born in Paris on the 6th of April 1826 into a cultured, upper-middle-class family. His father, Louis Jean Marie Moreau, was an architect who worked for the city of Paris through shifting political winds, sometimes dismissed and later reinstated as powers changed. The family spent several years in Vesoul before returning to Paris after the July Revolution of 1830. At about the age of eight, Moreau began drawing incessantly. When his older sister died at the age of thirteen in 1840, he was withdrawn from Collège Rollin and lived a sheltered life with his parents. His father insisted on a rigorous classical education; Moreau learned Greek and Latin, read widely in his father's library, learned piano, and was a capable tenor. A trip to Italy with his mother in 1841, when he filled a sixty-page album with drawings, set the course. He came home determined to be a painter. By 1844 he had entered the private studio of François-Édouard Picot, a member of the École des Beaux-Arts, to prepare for its entrance examinations. He was admitted to Picot's formal class in 1846 but left the school prematurely after failing to reach the final rounds of the Grand Prix de Rome in 1848 and again in 1849. The grand prize slipped from him, but the school's commitment to history painting never did.

• 3. Chassériau and Italy

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  Two artists living and working in Moreau's own neighborhood shaped his early vision: Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Chassériau. Chassériau had studied with the Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres from the age of ten, spent time at the French Academy in Rome, and then broke toward Delacroix and romanticism in his late teens. Moreau rented a studio near his, and the friendship deepened into a mentorship. When Chassériau died suddenly in 1856 at the age of thirty-seven, Moreau was shattered. Delacroix noted in his journal on the 10th of October 1856, after Chassériau's funeral procession, that he had seen "the young Moreau" and that he "quite liked him." Moreau's grief drove him out of Paris entirely. He left in October 1857 with his friend, the artist Frédéric Charlot de Courcy, sailing from Marseille to Civitavecchia and then on to Rome. He treated the trip as a period of extended study, a compensation for his early departure from the École des Beaux-Arts. For the better part of two months in the Sistine Chapel, he copied figures from the ceiling seven or eight hours a day. At the Villa Medici he worked from live models and met other Parisians studying in Rome, including Élie Delaunay, Henri Chapu, and a young composer named Georges Bizet. He also met Edgar Degas there, for whom Moreau would become something of a mentor. In Venice he developed a particular fascination with Vittore Carpaccio, then a little-known artist, and copied several of his works. The Second Italian War of Independence broke out in the spring of 1859, making a summer stay in Naples and Pompeii tense. Moreau and his parents returned to Paris in September 1859 carrying several hundred drawings and paintings.

• 4. The Salon Years

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  Back in Paris, Degas painted a small portrait of Moreau in 1860 that hung in Moreau's studio for the rest of his life. Their friendship began to drift as Degas moved toward impressionism under the influence of Édouard Manet, while Moreau stayed committed to history painting. Moreau once said to Degas, "You pretend to be able to renew art through ballet?" Degas replied, "And you think you will be able to do it by jewelry?" The exchange captured a real divide. Oedipus and the Sphinx, shown at the Paris Salon of 1864, won a medal and established Moreau's reputation. Its firm outlines and detailed modeling drew on his study of Carpaccio, Mantegna, and Giovanni Bellini in Italy. One critic compared the painting to "a pastiche of Mantegna created by a German student who relaxes from his painting by reading Schopenhauer." The painting is now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Moreau continued exhibiting through the 1860s, gradually building a loyal group of collectors. His painting Prometheus received a medal at the Salon of 1869, but criticism in the press was harsh enough that he did not return to the Salon until 1876. That year he completed Salome Dancing before Herod, which announced the more painterly style that would define his later work. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1875. After permanently withdrawing from the Salon in 1880, he largely retreated from the public exhibition world altogether.

• 5. Private Life, Private Grief

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  Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux was born on the 8th of November 1835 in Guise. Moreau met her soon after returning from Italy, and their relationship, conducted with great discretion, lasted more than thirty years. He subsidized an apartment for her on Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, just a few blocks from the townhome he shared with his parents. He produced many drawings and watercolors of her over the years, as well as playful caricatures of the two of them walking on clouds together. His mother was aware of the relationship and fond of Alexandrine; her will included an annuity for Alexandrine should Gustave die first. Moreau's mother, Adèle-Pauline, lost her hearing in her later years, and Gustave communicated with her by writing notes on slips of paper, often including his thoughts on the paintings he was working on. His assistant Henri Rupp saved many of those notes, which are now archived at the museum. When his mother died at the age of eighty-two in 1884, Moreau fell into deep despair. For a time he could not spend nights alone in the family townhome and took refuge at Alexandrine's apartment nearby. The room where his mother died was left unchanged and became a kind of shrine he never entered again. Six years later, Moreau was at Alexandrine's bedside when she died on the 28th of March 1890, after five months of declining health. He bought back several watercolors he had given her over the years and placed some of her furniture in a room of his house in her memory. Both deaths deepened his isolation and turned his work toward a more pronounced melancholic register.

• 6. The Atelier and Its Rebels

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  Moreau was elected to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1888 but declined a professorship for years. When his close friend Élie Delaunay, whom he had met in Rome during those formative Italian years, asked on his deathbed that Moreau succeed him, Moreau reluctantly agreed. He took over the atelier on a temporary basis in October 1891 and accepted a permanent appointment as professor and atelier director in January 1892, at the age of sixty-five. About 125 students passed through his studio between 1891 and 1898. Among them were Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Henri Evenepoel, and Georges Rouault. As early as 1896, the critic Roger-Marx wrote that the fires of insurrection had been lit at the very heart of the École des Beaux-Arts, with students gathering under the shield of Moreau. Moreau made no attempt to impose his own style. He took students to the Louvre to study the masters, something previously unheard of at the school. Matisse said, "It was an almost revolutionary attitude on his part to show us the way to the Museum." Matisse had been denied admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but Moreau saw him drawing in the public courtyard and invited him to join the class without an entrance examination. Henri Evenepoel, one of the students, left a detailed account of visiting Matisse's studio with Moreau, describing the teacher sitting in an armchair, spending a delightful hour discussing art and music without a trace of pedantry. Rouault, who always held Moreau in the highest esteem, still spoke of him with the same veneration half a century later. Albert Marquet noted that as early as 1898, he and Matisse were already working in what would later be called the fauve manner, in Moreau's own atelier.

• 7. Surrealism and Rediscovery

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  André Breton wrote in 1961 that his discovery of the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris when he was sixteen years old shaped his likes and loves for the rest of his life. In his Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton listed Moreau alongside Picasso and de Chirico as artists who could pass for Surrealist. Salvador Dalí was a regular visitor to the museum and recommended it to those he loved as a "twilight world where, risen from the gulf of erotic and scatological obsession, constellations of precious stones float like so many promises of archangelical redemption." In 1970 it was at the Musée Gustave Moreau that Dalí, holding a wax replica of his own head on a silver platter, publicly announced his plans to open the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueras, Spain. Georges Bataille also wrote enthusiastically of Moreau as a precursor of Surrealism, and Max Ernst used reproductions of Moreau's work to make collages. Despite this advocacy, Moreau and Symbolism drifted into wider obscurity after World War I. Between 1918 and 1958, there was only a single notable exhibition of his work in Paris, in 1926, centered on Moreau and his pupils. The turning point came when Breton sponsored a show of Symbolist drawings at the Dateau-Lavoir Gallery in Paris in 1958. Small as it was, the exhibition reached the right curators. In 1961, both the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art mounted exhibitions of Moreau's paintings. A landmark exhibition in Brussels in 1962, Le Groupe des XX et son temps, followed. By the 1970s, exhibitions and monographs on Moreau were appearing regularly. The Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, known for Final Fantasy, Angel's Egg, and Vampire Hunter D, has said that when he was first experimenting to find his own style, he tried to mimic Moreau's work.

• 8. A Museum Built from Within

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  Moreau began worrying about the fate of his life's work as early as the 1860s. He started an inventory of his paintings around 1884, and the death of Delaunay in 1891 sharpened his sense of what could become of an artist's estate. He arrived at a plan: leave the house to the state as a museum. In 1895 he remodeled the townhome at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, expanding the small studio on the top floor into a much larger exhibition space. The government was initially hesitant; artist house-museums were rare at the time and unprecedented in France. His assistant Henri Rupp was instrumental in organizing the estate and persuading the state to accept it. Art collector Anthony Roux had commissioned Moreau in 1879 to produce watercolors illustrating Jean de La Fontaine's Fables; Moreau completed 25 pieces, more than any other artist in the project, and was judged far superior to the rest. He alone was commissioned to continue the series. In 1886 he exhibited 64 watercolors from the series at the Goupil & Cie Gallery, where Théo Van Gogh was then manager. After Roux died in 1914-63 of the watercolors were sold to a single collector who did not exhibit them for well over a hundred years. Nearly half of those paintings later disappeared during the Nazi period and have not resurfaced. Moreau died of stomach cancer on the 18th of April 1898 and was buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre in his parents' tomb. The museum that opened on the 14th of January 1903 placed his former student Georges Rouault in the role of first curator, a thread connecting teacher to legacy in the most direct possible way.