Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote that "Gustave Moreau is an extraordinary, unique artist ... a mystic, locked away in his Paris cell, where the buzz of contemporary life cannot reach him ... Lost in ecstasy, he sees splendid magical visions, the gory apotheoses of other ages."
The Paris cell about which Huysmans wrote is now the Gustave Moreau Museum after Moreau converted his family home into a museum for his work and left it to the State in his will. The Museum opened in 1903 with Moreau's pupil from the Fine Arts School, Georges Rouault, becoming its first curator.
Moreau was a great Symbolist, as Huysman's indicates, and does create wonderfully vivid and beautiful other worlds in his classical and mythic works. It is a moot point then as to what Rouault, the only one of his pupils (which also included Matisse, Marquet and other future Fauves) allowed into his studio during his lifetime, learnt from him. One of the great benefits of the Museum is that it shows the range of his work. His friend and follower George Desvallières described his first sight of Moreau's studio when an inventory was being made for the estate: "The large rooms that are now the museum were crammed with more than a hundred easels, covered with canvases; others were piled untidily about the room. They were feverish sketches, cold preparatory drawings, ornate details meticulously transferred onto delightful paintings, decorating forms jostled by the ardour of a brush stroke or plastered by a palette knife."
In the considerable variety of his work, Moreau was an early expressionist in his preparatory studies (in much the same way that Constable was essentially an early impressionist in his preparatory studies). Rouault, while much of his work developed in opposite directions to that of his teacher, undoubtedly drew on this aspect of Moreau's work in the Fauvist/Expressionist style which he developed.
Although Moreau is known primarily for his classical and historical work, again the Museum's collection shows us a broader picture, which includes many Biblical narratives. Moreau, together with Huysmans, Rouault, Desvallières and others, then needing to be seen in the context of the French Catholic Revival.
Fauvism begins the survey of Modern Art able to be viewed at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where currently one of Rouault's images of an accused man questions the judgements routinely made in court and where an image of Pierrot suggests that it is in the nature of humanity to wear a mask and play a part. Rouault's compassionate social comment was continued in the Misererie series of mixed-media intaglio prints, a selection of which are on permanent display in a side chapel at Saint Severin Paris (where abstract stained glass by Jean Bazaine can also be seen).
It has been argued that "Rouault’s representation of the human condition" is as a “human comedy” "marked by uncertainty and misapprehension" where "outward appearances misrepresent and betray deeper realities." The "act of judgment is central in Rouault’s work": "'Who among us does not wear a mask?' he famously asks in one image reproduced several times. 'Are we not slaves ... believing ourselves to be kings?' he asks in another." "Such dark reflections are redeemed for Rouault by the human masque’s qualifier—“mystic”—which points to the centrality of Christian iconography for the artist ... Rouault’s human comedy is simultaneously a divine comedy."
Also frequently comedic while drawing simultaneously on darker strands of human behaviour is the work of Marc Chagall which can also be found at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as well as the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. The collection at the latter highlights "the Jewish cultural renaissance in Germany and Russia and also looks at the contribution of Jewish artists, including Chagall, to the art of the early 20th century by painters of the School of Paris: Lipchitz, Soutine, Marcoussis, Krémègne, Kikoïne, Pascin, Chana Orloff, Kisling, Modigliani, etc. By the diversity of their individual artistic development and above all through their confrontation with modernity, this collection suggests that these artists exemplify the transition towards a new, no longer exclusively religious Jewish identity."
"The Jewish artists of the School of Paris came from various backgrounds, rich and poor, orthodox and liberal. They varied in artistic style, and, with the exception of Marc Chagall and Mané-Katz, didn’t paint Jewish themes. But modernist influences did not negate their personal heritage. Most thought of themselves as both artists and Jews. They met at cafés and in studios. A great camaraderie grew among these artists and the vibrant group of poets, critics, dealers, and collectors who converged in Montparnasse.
Chagall explained why he came to Paris: "I aspired to see with my own eyes what I had heard of from so far away: this revolution of the eye, this rotation of colors, which spontaneously and astutely merge with one another in a flow of conceived lines. That could not be seen in my town. The sun of Art then shone only on Paris.""
On this trip to Paris, in between the usual sightseeing, I aimed to see artworks that I had not previously seen and, in addition to the Moreau's, Rouault's and Chagall's, particularly enjoyed the radiant Bonnards, vivacious Delaunays, and striking Buffets at the Musee de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris plus works by Maurycy Gottlieb, and Lesser Ury at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, the abstract stained glass windows by Jean Bazaine at Saint Severin and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation by Georges-Henri Pingusson on Île de la Cité.
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Francis Poulenc - Suite Francais.
