Art Criticism - The State University of New York

the decadent literati, the evidence appears conclusive. However I would suggest
that, unlike the cultivated decadence of many of these writers, the decadence
of Moreau's art was an unconscious side effect of his effort to imbue his
art with a generalized expression of "universal appeal." This was not decadence
for the sake of decadence.
Moreau believed that he had a divine duty to illuminate through his
art the souls and minds of his audience. His religious beliefs are evident in his
following profession of faith: "Do you believe in God? I believe in him alone. I
believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I believe only in what I do not see
and only in what I feel. My brain and reason seem to me ephemeral and of a
doubtful reality; my inner feeling alone seems to me eternal and indubltably
certain."38 His painting mirrors this tendency, in its rejection of external reality
and in its attempt to convey an atmosphere or idea, instead of exact historical
narrative. Moreau rarely painted historical scenes, preferring the realm of myth
. or the imagination. One of his primary intentions was "to render visible, as it
were, the inner flashes of insight, which one cannot connect with anything,
which have something divine in their apparent meaninglessness and which, as
conveyed by the wonderful effects of pure painting, open up really magical, I
may say, even sublime horizons."39 His dreamlike visions appealed tremendously
to Andre Breton, who considered him a forerunner of the Surrealists.
While Moreau's debt to past masters is evident in his work, this is not the
result of a lack of personal painting direction, but out of reverence, as a means
of invoking the timeless, the universal. And apart from such lofty motives, it
was indeed quite common for artists at the time to emulate the art of the Renaissance,
especially as this tradition was both taught and favored by the French
Academy and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Such imitation, far from being interpreted
as a sign of decadence, was actively encouraged. In fact, innovation or
stark individualism most often met with rejection; critics openly scoffed at the
initial Impressionist exhibitions. As previously intoned however, Moreau only
looked to those elements of High Renaissance art, that would further his artistic
aims, and not for popular appeal. He eschewed traditional Romantic heroism
and narrative in favor of a depiction of the mysterious and the private experience
of the individual.40
Moreau's mystical images were worlds away from the growing urbanization
and industrial progress of the latter half of the 19th century. He deplored
the materialism and the increasing reliance upon and belief in the magical
powers of science, which were becoming so commonplace. He felt that
these new values threatened the very foundations of great art and abhorred
the decay in standards of behavior and art he perceived in his surroundings:
"but when proud materiality, when the low soul of the greedy and sensual
wants to take precedence in this new civilization over the soul and thought, I
feel only contempt and hatred in my heart."41 Kaplan writes that: "Because
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