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Gustave Moreau
Self-portrait of Gustave Moreau, 1850
Born 6 April 1826(1826-04-06)
Paris
Died 18 April 1898 (aged 72)
Paris
Nationality French
Field Painting
Training François-Édouard Picot
Movement Symbolism
Influenced by Théodore Chassériau

Gustave Moreau (6 April 1826 – 18 April 1898) was a French Symbolist painter whose main focus was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas rather than visual images, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists, who saw him as a precursor to their movement.

Contents

Biography

Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie Moreau, was an architect, who recognized his talent. His mother was Adele Pauline des Moutiers. Moreau studied under François-Édouard Picot and became a friend of Théodore Chassériau, whose work strongly influenced his own. Moreau carried on a deeply personal 25-year relationship, possibly romantic, with Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux, a woman whom he drew several times.[1] His first painting was a Pietà which is now located in the cathedral at Angoulême. He showed A Scene from the Song of Songs and The Death of Darius in the Salon of 1853. In 1853 he contributed Athenians with the Minotaur and Moses Putting Off his Sandals within Sight of the Promised Land to the Great Exhibition.

Oedipus and the Sphinx, one of his first symbolist paintings, was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. Over his lifetime, he produced over 8,000 paintings, watercolors and drawings, many of which are on display in Paris' Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14, rue de la Rochefoucauld (IXe arrondissement). The museum is in his former workshop, and was opened to the public in 1903. André Breton famously used to "haunt" the museum and regarded Moreau as a precursor to Surrealism.

He had become a professor at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts in 1891 and counted among his many students the fauvist painters, Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault.

Moreau died in Paris and was buried there in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Gallery

Pietà (1852).

Orpheus (1865).

Prometheus (1868).

Europa and the Bull (1869).

Salomé (1876).

Hesiod and the Muse

Jupiter and Semele

Oedipus and the Sphinx

References

  1. ^ Kaplan, Julius (1974). Gustave Moreau. Little Brown & Company. pp. 7, 55. ISBN 0821206281.  

External links


Quotes

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikiquote

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

Gustave Moreau (6 April 1826 – 18 April 1898) was a French Symbolist painter, famous for his illustration of biblical and mythological figures.

Contents

Sourced

  • I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.
I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it.

Gustave Moreau (1972)

Quotes from Gustave Moreau (1972) by Jean Paladilhe and Josbe Pierre as translated from the French by Bettina Wadia.
  • I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art.
    • p. 32
  • No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...
    • p 62
  • This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied. This woman, walking nonchalantly in a vegetal, bestial manner, through the gardens that have just been stained by a horrible murder, which has frightened the executioner himself and made him flee distracted.... When I want to render these fine nuances, I do not find them in the subject, but in the nature of women in real life who seek unhealthy emotions and are too stupid even to understand the horror in the most appalling situations.

Unsourced

Quotes about Moreau

I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.
  • One would have to coin a word for the occasion if one wished to characterise the talent of Gustave Moreau, the word colourism for example, which would well convey all that is excessive, superb and prodigious in his love for colour. … It is as if one were in the presence of an illuminator who had been a jeweller before becoming a painter and who, having yielded to the intoxication of colour, had ground rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, opals, pearls and mother of pearl to make up his palette.
  • Moreau's figures are ambiguous; it is hardly possible to distinguish at the first glance which of two lovers is the man, which the woman; all his characters are linked by subtle bonds of relationship... lovers look as though they were related, brothers as though they were lovers, men have the faces of virgins, virgins the faces of youths; the symbols of Good and Evil are entwined and equivocally confused.
I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance...
  • My discovery, at the age of sixteen, of the Gustave Moreau museum influenced forever my idea of love... Beauty and love were first revealed to me there through the medium of a few faces, the poses of a few women.
  • He believed that, in order to produce art that signifies at the exalted level he envisaged, the painter must develop the "eyes of the soul and spirit as well as the body." Moreau associated this inner vision with the predominant role of the imagination; following current ideas, he apparently connected this faculty with "psychological penetration" and the unconscious.... Moreau wrote that his "greatest effort" was devoted to directing his imaginative energies, to channeling "this outpouring of oneself."
    • Douglas W. Druick, in "Moreau's Symbolist Ideal" an essay used in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream (1999).


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