“A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome”
Salome Dancing before Herod” (1874-1876), by Gustave Moreau. The Armand Hammer Collection. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer 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…
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