Art Criticism - The State University of New York

mounted and framed, implying that they were not simply preparatory sketches
but complete works within themselves. Moreau's innovation is also evident in
his use of the medium of watercolor. Unlike most other nineteenth century
painters, he painted watercolors for their own sake, not as preparatory sketches
for oil paintings. He even exhibited The Apparition, a watercolor, in the Salon
of 1876, and his only one-man exhibition was of watercolors.46 It is true that
Moreau cannot be credited with a great birth or even the blossoming of an art
form. However, he was far from a pure imitator, and through his marvelous use
of color and his vivid imagination, he gave his traditional borrowings an air of
freshness and novelty, which make his paintings an absolute pleasure to behold.
A decadent art implies decay or death, the impending demise of a
style. As if to hammer the last nail into the coffin, Moreau's paintings deal
predominantly with themes directly connected with loss, decay, and death.
Pierre Louis Mathieu labels Moreau "the last of the Romantic painters."47 He
does not categorize Moreau with the Symbolists, regarding him at most as a
precursor to this movement. Rather than dreams (and that is the key word of
the Symbolist aesthetic), it was on the imagination that Moreau relied, and
imagination controlled by the thinking mind.48 Although he may have been
unique in pursuing his particular goals, "he is one of those painters who mark
the end of an art form, in his case history painting, to which he gave a final
luster at the very time when it was exhausting itself in barren repetition."49
Baudelaire expressed similar sentiments, intoning that the Dandy's brand of
elitism is a last gasp in a world were aristocracy is stumbling but democracy
has not completely taken over.50 Like a captain who does not abandon his
ship, the decadents of the fin-de-siecle could not help but be drawn to the
themes and images painted by that artist, who himself shunned modern existence.
But Moreau's intentions were of themselves anathema to the elitism of
the decadents, for Moreau desired to express his ideals in a universal language,
which would be understood by all and throughout the ages. Through
his painting he hoped to reach out to the masses, whereas the decadents
intended their literature to appeal only to a select few. Indeed, J.K. Huysmans
was somewhat dismayed by the general popularity of Against the Grain, a
book which he had intended to find favor among only some very few close
contemporaries. Far from wallowing in self-indulgent narcissism, Moreau endeavored,
albeit in his personal solitary manner, to reach out through his painting
to his fellow man. The decadents interpreted his art to suit their own refined
tastes, for they were attracted by the rare, the exotic, and the bizarre. The great
attraction of Moreau's work is however, that it is open to a multitude of differing
interpretations. The Surrealist Andre Breton was fascinated by the allure of
Moreau's women when he first visited the Moreau Museum as a sixteen-year
old.51 This is a definite case of decadence in the eye of the beholder. Moreau's
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