Gustave Moreau. The Middle Ages rediscovered

It is a syncretic Middle Ages, often fantasised but above all ornamental, that is revealed by the exciting exhibition at the Musée Gustave Moreau, which organises, with metronome regularity, intelligent explorations of parts - more or less known - of the artist’s work. Regularly reviewed in La Tribune de l’Art, the ’focused exhibitions’ at the house-studio on the rue de La Rochefoucauld are true models of their kind, despite the constraints of a fixed venue that skilful spatial arrangements are able to overcome by suggesting new and relevant ways of looking between the picture rails erected for the occasion and the works hanging on the walls. Visitors are invited to start in a highly didactic introductory room (ill. 1), although it is also possible to get to the heart of the matter (ill. 2).

1. View of the small room on the first floor
Photo: Musée Gustave Moreau

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2. View of the large room on the second floor
Photo: Musée Gustave Moreau

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Guided by a perfect tour booklet, practical if not indispensable in a museum such as this, we thus (re)discover an artist marked by the historicism of his century, a man of his time and a great reader but also an assiduous visitor to new institutions such as the Musée de Cluny, the Objets d’art department from the Louvre [1]. It is also the home of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée at the Palais du Trocadéro and the Musée du Louvre. The three curators, Marie-Cécile Forest and Emmanuelle Macé, worked in collaboration with Lilie Fauriac, who in 2019, under the direction of Pierre Wat, defende her doctoral thesis in art history, the title of which echoes the research carried out in the run-up to this exhibition: "Les Moyen Âge de Gustave Moreau: traces, fragmentations et réinventions" ("Gustave Moreau’s Middle Ages: traces, fragmentations and reinventions"). The foreword to his excellent catalogue opens with a quotation from Huysmans, who wrote…