Mother complex

MOREAU was not interested in women in themselves.

WE are greeted at the opening of the Gustave Moreau (1826-98) exhibition by the man himself: a self-portrait in black ink on canvas, life-size, head-height and staring straight out at us in a way that is relatively unusual and rather disconcerting.

We see fine, sensitive features in the brow, eyes and nose and then that mask of bushy whiskers that covers the mouth and with it the unspoken or unspeakable inner life of the second half of the 19th century.

Moreau's inner life, although played out as though in endless brilliant charades in his mythological paintings, remains deeply mysterious. He was the son of a well-to-do family, of delicate health and largely taught at home by his learned and mercifully unwhiskered father, of whom there is a portrait, too. He was able to travel, study and work free from financial concerns. But in other respects his personal life seems to have remained fundamentally stunted.

The most important woman in his life was his mother, of whom there are several portraits. He stayed at home, living with her until her death in 1884, which left him shattered. She wasn't just a dear old lady; she ran the household and managed the money with a keen attention to detail. They adored each other and, in the style of the time, kept repeating this in effusive terms in their letters, although one suspects the almost inevitable presence of darker Proustian sentiments of possessiveness, suffocation and resentment.

His earliest success at the Salon was with a painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864). From our perspective the subject seems too close for comfort, but we have to remember that this was the pre-Freudian world: there was a certain innocence and at times even obtuseness about the pervasive presence of sexuality, which after Freud was replaced by an equal and opposite tendency to paranoid over-interpretation.

Although Aristotle had considered Sophocles's Oedipus Rex the pinnacle of Greek theatre, the subject is a rare one in modern art. The ancient tragedies were rediscovered and added to the reading list of educated people in the Romantic period, and the first modern attempts at re-creating ancient performance date from Moreau's lifetime (Sophocles's Antigone with music by Felix Mendelssohn in 1841). In painting, his prototype was Ingres's version of the subject, but Moreau has the Sphinx clinging on to Oedipus's torso while he prepares to answer her question; she could only support her weight in this position if her claws were actually sunk into his flesh, but Moreau has sidestepped this detail in a way that makes the whole thing strangely unreal, and at the same time betrays the fact that the work has, as it were, something to hide.

Apart from his mother, there was another woman in his life, Alexandrine Dureux, with whom he had a long relationship about which we know very little of any substance, because he burned all their letters. His desire for privacy is entirely understandable, but it leaves us unclear as to whether there was anything more than a platonic intimacy between them. This would hardly matter had Moreau been a flower painter, but his work is almost wholly concerned with women; nor are they pictured as chaste and good, like the two women he loved, but on the contrary as dangerous temptresses or predators. The man himself, meanwhile, neurasthenic and even something of a hysteric, may never have had a sexual relationship with anyone.

If the core of Moreau's being remains obscure, everything else is over-documented in the family home which, after his death, was set up in accordance with his wishes as a museum. It is the Musee Gustave Moreau, indeed, that has loaned the rich selection of work in Ted Gott's fine exhibition. The museum possesses thousands of studies, compositional drawings, colour studies and other sketches, as well as unfinished paintings, finished pictures and other material. In this exhibition alone we have examples in the many studies and variations for subjects as different as Helen of Troy, the Rape of Dejaneira or Salome and John the Baptist.

Moreau was unconventional in the way he painted, not in a full-bodied painterly manner, but in endlessly detailed drawing, glazing and colouring, resulting in the effect often likened to oriental miniatures rather than to the main tradition of oil painting, especially in its 19th-century form (he was attracted to the 15th-century Italians, especially Venetians such as Bellini and Carpaccio). But he was following classic procedure in working his way through compositional sketches and studies from the model; if anything, he went further in mocking up the tonal effect of the overall composition and in some cases blocking out the big chromatic areas in quasi-abstract daubs.

His whole method is clearly intended to lend his subjects -- usually presented as one or two figures dominating the composition, not as more elaborate narratives -- a kind of iconic or emblematic impact. To this end he searches for a composition that will be striking and memorable both in the treatment of figures and in tone and colour, and then takes great pains working up the texture of the paint and the ornamentation of the figures to give them a complex, richly coloured, jewel-encrusted finish. Purely in colour effect, some of the small studies are among the most beautiful things in the show; the bigger pictures are impressive in their co-ordinated use of different effects, although some are unfinished or in the process of being reworked.

All of the subjects in the exhibition are women, and most of them, as already mentioned, are dangerous and destructive. One can't help imagining Gustave coming down to dinner from the studio in the evening. The accounts show that cutlets were usually on the menu; Mme Moreau was obviously more interested in good housekeeping than gastronomic experiments, and perhaps her cook enjoyed the predictable routine. She asks him what he has been painting. Just another man-eating harlot, mother; ah, lamb cutlets again, my favourite. And haricots verts too, of course.

The most harmless of these temptresses is Galatea, although she is still a heartbreaker. Theocritus imagined her as the hopeless love of Polyphemus in the prequel he wrote (Idyll XI) to the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey, and which is about poetry and music as consolation for unrequited love. Moreau would have known it in the sensational retelling by Ovid, in which Galatea is having sex with her lover Acis when she sees, over his shoulder, that the enraged Polyphemus has spotted them. None of this appears in Moreau, and it is a good example of how sex, in these paintings which are all about women, is constantly sidestepped or elided. Galatea is just a beautiful flower-like creature and Polyphemus stares at her in impossible longing.

Dejaneira, the wife of Heracles, is even more innocent in intent, although more inadvertently destructive. When the centaur Nessus tries to rape her, Heracles shoots him with an arrow tipped with the Hydra's poison; feigning repentance, Nessus urges Dejaneira to save some of his blood as a love potion in case her husband's passion should ever wane. Eventually she does use the potion, although without evil intent -- this is the subject of Sophocles's great tragedy Trachiniae -- and causes the death of Heracles. Once again, Moreau's interest is in the girl as the object of desire and the simultaneity of desire and death in the wounded centaur; he works and reworks the motif in an effort to discover its definitive form as a kind of dream-image.

There is a clear tendency to imagine the female as ostensibly passive while wreaking havoc and causing intense suffering all around her, and this image is perfected in the figure of Helen, whose betrayal of her husband Menelaus for the Trojan prince Paris is the official justification of the Trojan war; this was still the subject of dispute between Greeks and Persians in the time of Herodotus. There is a famous scene with Helen on the walls of Troy in Book III of the Iliad, but Moreau's Helen stands on the walls of an already devastated city, surrounded by the dead and dying but entirely unmoved.

Omphale, with whom Heracles became so enamoured that he indulged in cross-dressing, is the image of a dominant woman, here shown wearing his lion-skin and holding his famous club in what is evidently, in the context, a phallic symbol. Treacherous castrating harlots are represented in the shape of the biblical figures Delilah, who betrayed Samson, and Salome, who caused John the Baptist to be beheaded. Messalina, the wife of Claudius, is a straightforward whore and murderess in whom Moreau saw the personification of a female propensity to debauchery. The most benign of all his women, perhaps -- if we exclude the slightly improbable virgins taming unicorns -- is Sappho, another favourite. Moreau also painted Orpheus, the magical singer who was torn apart by maddened Bacchants in Thrace, his severed head (more castration) nailed to his lyre and thrown out to sea, where it floated across the Aegean to the island of Lesbos, still singing. The Lesbians gave it an honourable burial, for which reason, as an ancient poet writes, Lesbos became the most musical of islands, and later the birthplace of the most famous woman poet not only in antiquity, but probably in the history of literature.

A beautiful painting of 1865 shows a girl of Lesbos holding the head and lyre that she has rescued from the waters, but Moreau was even more interested in the story of Sappho herself. It was never any secret in antiquity that her most passionate love poems were addressed to girls, but Ovid invented a male lover for her called Phaon, for the purpose of including her in the Heroides, a series of laments by celebrated women abandoned by their men. Ovid's literary prestige ensured that this fiction became the best-known episode of Sappho's life.

The story that Sappho threw herself off a cliff to her death in despair evidently appealed to Moreau, who returned to it several times. It is certainly significant that he shows no interest in her lesbianism, which fascinated Baudelaire and others as the embodiment of the mysterious otherness of woman. But Moreau was perhaps not really interested in women in themselves, or not at least in their sexual experience, which was excluded from his domestic life; up in the studio, meanwhile, real women had been replaced by a fantasy cast in which the unattainable beauty alternated with the temptress, the dominatrix, the castrating bitch and the beautiful heartbroken poet who would die for an imaginary love.