Les Chimères (painting)
| Les Chimères | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Gustave Moreau |
| Year | 1884 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 236 cm × 204 cm (92.9 in × 80.3 in) |
| Location | Musée national Gustave Moreau, Paris |
Les Chimères or The Chimaeras is an unfinished painting executed in 1884 by the French
The painting
Executed on a 2.36m by 2.04m canvas, Les Chimères is in the Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, Paris. The scene, like many of Moreau's other pieces, is in nature—a forest—but filled with figures that blend with and complete the scenery. While still adhering to Neoclassical conventions of form, Moreau fills the canvas with creations of his own imagination. A nude woman being courted by a centaur is the focal point, while other women and their respective chimères, here taken in the meaning of "fantasies" or "dreams,"[citation needed] not only literally, fill out the piece. The fact that the painting was abandoned means that many, if not most of these figures are only sketched out and not left a pale white, with the sky being the same white—this creates a haze in the middle of the piece and also gives the effect of Classical marble statuary to the various figures.
The Chimera
The theme of the chimera is originally from Classical mythology, where the chimera was a fearsome fire-breathing beast with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a dragon, the last one attached to its tail. The chimera romped about Lycia, spreading havoc, until slain by the hero Bellerophon on his winged steed, the Pegasus. In the Middle Ages, however, the chimera took a new meaning, representing the perverse forces of the Devil as in Dante's Inferno and, later, hypocrisy and fraud, as in the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa.[1] In France, une chimère had the additional idiomatic meaning of an illusion or delusion; all these various connotations no doubt influenced Moreau, who began no less than half a dozen paintings with variations on the theme.
Interpretation
Once criticized as being "too literary for a painter", Gustave Moreau was a proponent of painting as cosa mentale, or mental matter—that is, painting as a philosophical expression. According to his own writings, Les Chimères is a depiction of the internal, primitive nature of women. "[These] fantastic dreams enclose all the forms of the passions, the fantasy, the caprice of Woman, Woman in her first aspect, an unconscious being, a well of ... mystery, a spirit of evil under the form of perverse and Satanic seduction."[2]
The various fantastical images associated with the women in the painting are manifestations of the internal will and spirit of these women, a will and spirit that, for Moreau, was at the same time weak and mysterious, profound and susceptible to temptation. "The women mount chimeras that fly them into the void, from whence they fall again, dizzy and horrified."[
Artistic influences
Moreau, who traveled in Italy for nearly a decade, was influenced by, among other things,
In the thrust of his work, however, Moreau was thoroughly within the Symbolist school, and preceded certain parts of it. The Symbolist Manifesto, published by Jean Moréas two years after Moreau stopped working on Les Chimères, states that in the work of the Symbolist artist, "all ... real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals."[3] Les Chimères is exemplary of this idea of capturing the absolute Ideal through sensory description—the setting in nature, the presence of the mythological creatures, the sensuousness of the women, etc., are significant not in themselves but in so far as they capture and reflect the absolute Ideal of Woman as seen by Moreau and the mythological tradition, Woman as elemental, primordial, mysterious.
See also
Notes
References
- Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths Baltimore: Penguin, 1955, 1960.
- Grigorian, Natasha, "The Writings of J.-K. Huysmans and Gustave Moreau's Painting: Affinity or Divergence?" Nineteenth Century French Studies - Volume 32, Number 3&4, Spring-Summer 2004, pp. 282–297
- Lehmann, A.G., The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, 1968.
- Moreas, Jean, “Le Manifeste du Symbolisme,” Le Figaro, 1886