Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau’s visionary paintings speak to an obsession with the otherworldly, the macabre, and the life of the imagination which resonates across recent centuries. Guided partly by his unusual religious faith stressing the imperfection and impermanence of the physical world, Moreau set about capturing the products of his imagination on canvas with photographic accuracy. He believed that by so doing, he was allowing divine vision to speak through his brush. Moreau’s paintings, normally depicting moments from biblical or mythic narratives, are populated with ambiguous visual symbols with divine and mortal beings locked in conflict, and with strange visions of sex and suffering. His art predicts not only subsequent movements such as Symbolism (of which he was a forerunner) and Surrealism, but also the peculiar concerns of our own era, seen to have given free rein to the darkest and most submerged impulses of the human mind. (The Art Story)