Room 2

The most important French symbolist painter was born in Paris and was a disciple of the eclectic Chassériau, whose paintings of sea goddesses impressed him deeply. He is well known for the eroticism of his oils and watercolours of mythological and religious subjects and for his enigmatic interpretations of figures from ancient history and mythology, such as Salome or Oedipus. He showed a growing interest in exoticism and violence; his luminous colours, like precious stones, are enhanced by dramatic lighting. He taught at the École des Beaux Arts and his classes became very popular; some of his students were later outstanding Fauvists, including Matisse and Rouault. He bequeathed his house and some 8,000 works to the French state; they now form the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris.

There are several versions of the same subject, dated 1867: two in oil on board (Wildenstein Collection and Cambridge Fogg Art Museum, USA) and one in gouache, from around the same year (formerly Collection Duruffé, exhibited in 1906); around 1879 he will add a circular watercolour. The composition will be repeated in a gouache and some enamels in the seventies and 1897. Moreau knew the Chimera of Arezzo, an Etruscan work in bronze. Instead of the monster made up of a lion, a goat and a dragon, it represents a winged centaur leaping into the void from a cliff with a woman hanging from his neck. In the fifities and sixties the artist has not yet become a creator of myths and this is one of his few works dominated by overflowing fantasy. The Chimera is a subject cherished by imagination in France because of its multiple symbolic and psychological meanings; it appears often in the 19th-century literature from Romanticism to Symbolism, but less so in art. Moreau’s interpretation is close to Théophile Gautier’s poem, although here it is a feminine symbol and for the painter a male character. This one drags the woman to destruction, as a note by Moreau on the dangers of fantasy reveals.

Born in Austin, Texas (USA). He graduated in Business Administration from Lamar University (Beaumont) and in Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York. Since 1985, when he participated in a group exhibition at the Kouros gallery, he has shown his work in museums and galleries in the USA, Italy, France and Germany. His work is both abstract and figurative, and he makes no distinction between the two. Far from the artistic trends in vogue, he was inspired by creators such as Goya, Bosch, Velázquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Pollock and Rauschenberg. In his words, “the present is connected with the past and becomes a projection into the future, where tradition meets innovation and the world is unblocked and becomes liquid and gaseous and forms are transformed into new forms”. After more than 30 years in New York, in 2014 he moved to Carbondale (Colorado). His works are now in MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Art Museum of Southwest Texas. In 2016 he was included in the exhibition Painting after postmodernism. Belgium-USA, at the Vanderborght of Brussels, the Episcopal Palace of Malaga and the Reggia di Caserta. Its title and conception allude to the work by Belgian James Ensor’s Entry of Christ in Brussels (1889), with its faces transformed in masks and his air of grotesque farce.

Sculptor, ceramist and miniaturist born in Lyon. In 1864 he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts with Augustin-Alexandre Dumont. He exhibited for the first time in the Paris Salons of 1879 and 1881. After seeing a sample of Japanese pieces at the 1878 International Exposition in Paris, he began making polychrome masks with terrifying grimaces. In 1892 he presented a large exhibition in Paris; the French Minister of Culture and a museum in Hamburg acquired his works. That year he was awarded a Legion of Honour. In 1893 he created Faune, his most famous sculpture.

The nun Marie-Anne Agnès Callamand, one of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, was born in 1810 and died en 1882 (so the bust would be a posthumous tribute) or in 1892. As a Mother Superior, she was in charge of the orphanage where Carriès, orphaned since he age of 6, and his sister and his two brothers lived. She took care of them and, seeing that Jean-Joseph had artistic talent, apprentised him with the sculptor Pierre Vermare, dedicated to the creation of devotional objects; later he would go to Paris. His sister, who became a nun, died at an early age. Carriès made a bust of her entitled La novice.

The exhibition Jean-Joseph Carriès, la matière de l`étrange, celebrated at the Petit Palais of Paris in 2007-08, dedicated a gallery to this early period in the artist’s life in Lyon; it contained another bust of the nun entitled La réligieuse (Musée de la Ville de Paris).

Born in Ostend (Belgium). His was self-taught; in his youth he drew scenes of daily life in rural areas of Belgium. His style was symbolist and expressionist; it would be characterised by dark tones, a nightmarish atmosphere and feelings of anguish and loneliness; revealing influences by artists such as Munch and Khnopff. He used watercolour, gouache, pastel and mixtures of techniques. In his later days, he painted the sea in more colourful works. He made, especially at the beginning of the 20th century, numerous self-portraits in tones that tend towards monochrome, like the majority of his productions, preserved mainly in the museums of Ostend and Brussels; he also has works in the Musée d’Orsay.

This strange work falls within the genre most cultivated by the artist after portraiture and landscape: still life. It would seem the it reproduces an image he would have seen occasionally and that would have shocked him because of the addition of what seems to be an ex voto or an offering, a heart-shaped pendant. We could venture an analysis in relation to his tendency to hallucinatory and uncanny things, which found expression in his enthusiasm for Poe, who, together with Nietzsche and Belgian Symbolist Maeterlinck, had a remarkable influence on him.    

This drawing includes a religious image similar to the Christ of the previous work; the atmosphere, enhanced by the light, is very calm and the silence it emanates is more placid than that of the other work, somewhat mysterious and disturbing. Beguines were a feminin secular order founded in the Netherlands in the 12th century; its members led lives of religious devotion but do not took formal vows and they were free to leave the community in order to marry. It was believed that its name derived from Lambert Bègue or Le Bègue, the stummerer, a priest from Liège. 

Born in Laken (Belgium). A painter, draughtsman and illustrator, he was considered to be the precursor of the Belgian Symbolist movement. He began working with Charles Albert, a painter and decorator; he trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, mainly with Jean-François Portaels. In 1870 he won the Rome Prize and went to study Renaissance painting (he was particularly fascinated by the Sistine Chapel and Carpaccio). He designed the 48 sculptures of the historical trades for the Petit Sablon in Brussels. Fernand Khnopff is the most distinguished of his disciples. His works can be found at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

An artist whose preferences favoured the representation of interiors, he excelled in those of church and convents, very suitable for his taste for collected, close and familar scenes, peopled by little calm figures, in both these works dedicated to their chores. In During the daily prayer it is striking that the only one that is facing us does not have a face, nor does crucified Christ, which, curiously, has greater corporeality than the flat figures of the nuns.