Description:
Nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Moreau's (1826-1898) epic paintings, filled with rich imagery culled from mythology, history, and his own vivid imagination, are well known to today's art viewers. Yet this painter, who is still popular more than a century after his death and was a powerful member of the art world of his day, was in fact obsessively private about his artistic vision. Moreau's solitary pursuit of a painting style that he termed peinture épique ("epic painting") stood in opposition to contemporary trends of academic naturalism and impressionism. The artist carefully researched the elements in each of his paintings, but was motivated too by a quest for "the infinite" in art--that which cannot be put into words, the sublime. His use of brilliant, jewel-like colors, sensitively rendered gestural drawing, and complex compositions helped him both to depict an ideal world and explore the salient issues of his times--morality and the foibles of earthly existence among them. Between Epic and Dream was published in conjunction with the first full retrospective of Moreau's work, presented during the spring and summer of 1999 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after the centennial of his death. Three informative essays investigate the painter's interest in Indian and Persian culture as well as other historical eras such as the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. A fourth essay examines Moreau's relationship to the symbolist movement, upon which his work would have a profound influence. At a substantial 308 pages, this stunning cloth-covered hardback displays over 200 of Moreau's masterpieces and lesser-known works in 162 color plates and 129 duotone images. --A.C. Smith
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