Situated in one of the many hearts of Paris, the Musée Gustave Moreau was the family home and studio of the painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), and it contains some 14,000 watercolors and drawings, plus 1,000 paintings. It was bequeathed to the French nation one year before Moreau’s death, and this reviewer well remembers the rainy afternoon he spent there, mostly on his hands and knees, in the fall of 1986.
Moreau defined himself as an “assembler of dreams,” but these are dreams that depict the glamour of gloom or reflect la belle inertie, the beautiful inertia. Something of a late Romantic and an early Symbolist, Moreau shadowed Mallarmé’s dictum that the artist evoke the effect of an object rather than elucidate the object itself. Thus we have an oeuvre that alludes and suggests, that offers us glimpses that often bring forward the indistinct forms from their dark hiding places. As Edmund Wilson wrote in Axel’s Castle, “to approximate the indefiniteness of music was to become one of the principal aims of Symbolism,” and we have that here with “Salome Dancing before Herod,” which is not only one of Moreau’s finest works (painted between 1874 and 1876) but also one of the Hammer Museum’s better-known paintings.
The Musée Gustave Moreau contains 80 drawings that relate to the Salome painting, or rather paintings since there are close variations in oil and watercolor. Well, they don’t actually have 80 now, because approximately 50 of them are included in the one-room exhibition, “A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome,” on view at the Hammer. For this we can thank Marie-Cécile Forest, waving to us from Paris, and curator Cynthia Burlingham of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts.
The subject of “Salome Dancing before Herod” – brought to life in the 1907 opera by Richard Strauss, based on Oscar Wilde’s play – was tailor-made for the Symbolist and Decadent era, which aesthetically elevated hedonism, depravity, self-indulgence, and a dangerous femme fatale kind of sensuality.
Herodias, formerly married to the murdered brother of Herod, but now married to Herod himself, connives to have her daughter dance seductively before her stepfather (and her uncle), who in turn agrees to grant her one wish. That one wish – and we have Herodias to thank for this – is for the head of John the Baptist.
Why the head of John the Baptist and not, say, piano lessons or a year’s pass to the local amusement park? That’s because John the Baptist wouldn’t keep his mouth quiet about this incestuous marriage and how it came to be.
The Moreau painting is so lavish in its details that it nearly drips off the canvas. Salome herself is like a living jewel or a tropical insect. Painter Richard Hawkins, in a one-page contribution to the catalogue, remarks on “all the little amber rivulets and cobalt ravines down the front of the dancer’s fripperies, mantle, and sash.”
Moreau was meticulous, and the exhibition reveals a few of the books and prints that served as sources for the elaborate costumes, jewelry, and architectural decor.
The title of the show, “A Strange Magic,” comes from a lavishly evocative sentence in the novel Á rebours (Against the Grain) by Joris-Karl Huysman. Moreau and his work also lighted the inner lamps of Baudelaire and Proust.
Odilon Redon once said, “I do not paint what I see, but what I have seen; the camera will never be able to rival painting as long as it is impossible to use it in Heaven and Hell.” Gustave Moreau takes us into mysterious lands, ones not accessible by way of a Nikon, Leica, or Canon.
A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome is on view through Dec. 9 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., at Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles. Hours, Tues. to Fri., 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays and closed on Thanksgiving. Admission, $10 adults, $5 seniors; free for students, youths 17 and under, etc. Free on Thursdays for everyone. Parking, under the museum, is $3 for three hours with museum validation. (310) 443-7000 or go to hammer.ucla.edu.
