Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman and sculptor, but is known as a painter. Matisse is regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture; the intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves. Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917 he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form; when ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.
His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in Northern France, the oldest son of a prosperous grain merchant, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification, he first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he described it, decided to become an artist disappointing his father. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau, he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists, such as Édouard Manet, by Japanese art.
Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired. In 1896, Matisse, an unknown art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Vincent van Gogh—who had been a friend of Russell—and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse's style changed completely, he said "Russell was my teacher, Russell explained colour theory to me." The same year, Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state. With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre. Marguerite and Amélie served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Jules Flandrin.
Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, Cézanne's Three Bathers. In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac's essay, "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme", his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, completing The Slave in 1903. Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910; the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain.
Matisse's first solo exhibition was without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. In that year he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Calme et Volupté. In 1905 he travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure, his paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, using pointillism in a less rigorous way than before. Matisse and a group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne in 1905; the paintings expressed emotion with wild dissonant colours, without regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse showed Open Woman with the Hat at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on a lone sculpture surround by an "orgie of pure tones" as "Donatello chez les fauves", referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.
His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, passed
Musée National d'Art Moderne
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city, it is among the most visited art museums in the world and one of the largest for modern and contemporary art. In 1937, the Musée National d'Art Moderne succeeded the Musée du Luxembourg, established in 1818 by King Louis XVIII as the first museum of contemporary art created in Europe, devoted to living artists whose work was due to join the Louvre 10 years after their death. Imagined as early as 1929 by Auguste Perret to replace the old Palais du Trocadero, the construction of a museum of modern art was decided in 1934 in the western wing of the Palais de Tokyo. Completed in 1937 for that year's International Exhibition of Arts and Technology, it was temporarily used for another purpose, since the exhibition of national and foreign art indépendant was preferably held in the Petit Palais and the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Although due to open in 1939, construction was interrupted by the war.
But its real inauguration didn't take place until 1947, after World War II and the addition of the foreign schools collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume since 1922. In 1947 housed in the Palais de Tokyo, its collection was increased by its first director, Jean Cassou, thanks to his special relationship with many prominent artists or their families, such as Picasso and Braque. With the creation of the Centre Pompidou, the museum moved to its current location in 1977; the museum has the second largest collection of modern and contemporary art in the world, after the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with more than 100,000 works of art by 6,400 artists from 90 countries since Fauvism in 1905. These works include painting, drawing, photography, new media and design. A part of the collection is exhibited every two years alternately in an 18,500-square-metre space divided between two floors, one for modern art, the other for contemporary art, 5 exhibition halls, on a total of 28,000 m2 within the Centre Pompidou.
The Atelier Brancusi is located in its own building adjacent to the museum. The works displayed in the museum change in order to show to the public the variety and depth of the collection. Many major temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art have taken place on a separate floor over the years, among them many one-person exhibitions. Since 2010, the museum has displayed unique, temporary exhibitions in its provincial branch, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in a 10,000-square-metre space divided between 3 galleries and since 2015, in Málaga, 2018, in Brussels, Belgium. Many styles of modern art, including Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract art, Surrealism are represented with works by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet, Le Douanier Rousseau, Paul Signac, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Frida Kahlo, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Jacques Villon, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Georges Rouault, Max Beckmann, Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder, Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Kees van Dongen, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, Nicolas de Staël, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Jean Tinguely, Simon Hantaï, Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon.
Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Conceptual art and other tendencies or groups are represented with works by Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Dan Flavin, Eduardo Arroyo, Dan Graham, Daniel Buren, George Brecht, Arman, César, Bill Viola, Anish Kapoor, Wim Delvoye, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Yaacov Agam, John Cage, Cindy Sherman, Dieter Roth, Roy Lichtenstein, Burhan Dogancay, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Gilbert & George, David Hockney, Louise Bourgeois, Art & Language. Works of architecture and design include Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault. Since 2013: Bernard Blistène 2000 – 2013: Alfred Pacquement 1997 – 2000: Werner Spies 1992 – 1997: Germain Viatte 1991 – 1992: Dominique Bozo 1987 – 1991: Jean-Hubert Martin 1986 – 1987: Bernard Ceysson 1981 – 1986: Dominique Bozo 1973 – 1981: Pontus Hultén 1968 – 1973: Jean Leymarie 1965 – 1968: Bernard Dorival 1945 – 1965: Jean Cassou 1941 – 1944: Pierre Ladoué 1940: Jean Cassou Collection online Official website of the Museum Official website of the Centre Pompidou Official website of the Centre Pompidou-Metz provincial branch
Georges Braque
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, draughtsman and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso, their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso. Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Val-d'Oise, he grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902; the next year, he attended the Académie Humbert in Paris, painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Francis Picabia. Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style.
The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, home to Le Havre to paint. In May 1907, he exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants; the same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had died in 1906 and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism. Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective, he conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions.
In his village scenes, for example, Braque reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work with Pablo Picasso, developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.” Braque’s essential subject is the ordinary objects he has known forever. Picasso celebrates animation. Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque residents of Montmartre, Paris.
These artists were the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism. A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique. On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes". Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" after seeing a painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.
The term'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described Cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas." The Cubist style spread throughout Paris and Europe. The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness, he was trepanned, required a long period of recuperation. The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, if they were, no one would understand them anymore, it was like being roped together on a mountain. Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism.
He developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his e
Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by small, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s; the Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, soleil levant, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari; the development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
They constructed their pictures from brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner, they painted realistic scenes of modern life, painted outdoors. Still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio; the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors or en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration. Impressionism emerged in France at the same time that a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, Winslow Homer in the United States, were exploring plein-air painting; the Impressionists, developed new techniques specific to the style. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it is an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.
The public, at first hostile came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the subject, by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism is a precursor of various painting styles, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war—the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art; the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of style. Historical subjects, religious themes, portraits were valued; the Académie preferred finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of precise brush strokes blended to hide the artist's hand in the work. Colour was restrained and toned down further by the application of a golden varnish.
The Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of such artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille—met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre, they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. Following a practice that had become popular by mid-century, they ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air, but not for the purpose of making sketches to be developed into finished works in the studio, as was the usual custom. By painting in sunlight directly from nature, making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they began to develop a lighter and brighter manner of painting that extended further the Realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school.
A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists admired. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin. During the 1860s, the Salon jury rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, they condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting; the jury's worded rejection of Manet's painting appalled his admirers, the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists. After Emperor Napoleon III saw the rejected works of 1863, he decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, the Salon des Refusés was organized.
While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visi
Othon Friesz
Achille-Émile Othon Friesz, who called himself Othon Friesz, a native of Le Havre, was a French artist of the Fauvist movement. Othon Friesz was born in the son of a long line of shipbuilders and sea captains, he went to school in his native city. It was, he and Dufy studied at the Le Havre School of Fine Arts in 1895-96 and went to Paris together for further study. In Paris, Friesz met Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Georges Rouault. Like them, he rebelled against the academic teaching of Bonnat and became a member of the Fauves, exhibiting with them in 1907; the following year, Friesz returned to Normandy and to a much more traditional style of painting, since he had discovered that his personal goals in painting were rooted in the past. He opened his own studio in 1912 and taught until 1914 at which time he joined the army for the duration of the war, he resumed living in Paris in 1919 and remained there, except for brief trips to Toulon and the Jura Mountains, until his death in 1949. During the last thirty years of his life, he painted in a style removed from that of his earlier colleagues and his contemporaries.
Having abandoned the lively arabesques and brilliant colors of his Fauve years, Friesz returned to the more sober palette he had learned in Le Havre from his professor Charles Lhuillier and to an early admiration for Poussin and Corot. He painted in a manner that respected Cézanne's ideas of logical composition, simple tonality, solidity of volume, distinct separation of planes. A faint baroque flavor adds vigor to his landscapes, still lifes, figure paintings. Othon Friesz died in Paris, he is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. His pupils included the painter Marthe Rakine. Jean Cocteau, Bertrand Guégan.
Val-d'Oise
Val-d'Oise is a French department, created in 1968 after the split of the Seine-et-Oise department and located in the Île-de-France region. In local slang, it is known as "quatre-vingt quinze" or "neuf cinq", it gets its name from the Oise River, a major tributary of the Seine, which crosses the region after having started in Belgium and flowed through north-eastern France. Charles de Gaulle Airport, France's main international airport is located in Roissy-en-France, a commune of Val d'Oise; the original departments of France were established in 1790 when the French National Assembly split the country into 83 departments of the same size and population. They were designed as sets of communes, when better maps became available, certain revisions had to be made. After defeat by the Prussians in 1871, certain territories were ceded to them and some rearrangements made. In 1955 and 1957, some departments changed their names. In 1964, it was determined to divide up the departments of Seine-et-Oise.
Val-d'Oise was one of the new departments so formed, was created from the previous department of Seine-et-Oise. Val-d'Oise is part of the region of Île-de-France. To the south of the department lies the department of Hauts-de-Seine, to the southwest lies Yvelines, to the west lies Eure, to the north lies Oise, to the east lies Seine-et-Marne and to the southeast lies Seine-Saint-Denis; the official préfecture of the department is the commune of Pontoise, situated in the suburbs of Paris some 28 kilometres northwest of the centre of the city, but the préfecture building and administrative offices are in the neighbouring commune of Cergy. The River Oise is a right tributary of the River Seine, flows through the province from northeast to southwest; the eastern part of the department is part of the Pays de France, an area of fertile plain traditionally used for agriculture based on its fine silty soils. This part is progressively diminishing in size. Part of Charles de Gaulle Airport falls in this eastern region, while other parts are in the departments of Seine-et-Marne and Seine-Saint-Denis.
The southernmost region of the department forms part of the Seine Valley and occupies the whole of the small Vallée de Montmorency. These parts are urbanised, but the ancient Roman road, the Chaussée Jules César, which linked Paris and Rouen, passes through the latter; the central and southwestern parts of the department are largely urbanised and part of the greater Paris sprawl. The western part of the department forms part of the historic county of Vexin français, a verdant agricultural plateau, its capital was Pontoise on the eastern extremity of the county. This commune is now combining with the neighbouring commune of Cergy to form the new town of Cergy-Pontoise; the Vexin area remains rural, across the whole department, one fifth is covered with trees. The economy of Val-d'Oise relies on two different themes; the northern and western parts are fertile areas of agricultural land producing large quantities of corn, sugar beet, other crops. The urban parts to the south are dormitory towns, used by people working in the greater metropolitan area of Paris.
The presence of Charles de Gaulle Airport and its associated TGV station provides access by rail to all parts of France. The department has nine business zones designated for high-tech industries; the department has a rich archaeological and historical heritage, but is not a region visited much by tourists being overshadowed by the French capital. Places of interest include the following sites. There is a branch of the Académie de Versailles in the city. Royaumont Abbey, founded by St. Louis in the thirteenth century, is another important site. There are two areas of national park in the department, the Parc naturel régional du Vexin français and the Parc naturel régional Oise-Pays de France. Argenteuil is the second most populous of Paris' suburbs, it is in a scenic location by the River Seine and has been much-painted by Claude Monet, Eugène Delacroix, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred Sisley and Georges Braque. It has a local museum. Cantons of the Val-d'Oise department Communes of the Val-d'Oise department Arrondissements of the Val-d'Oise department Website of the General council Prefecture website Val d'Oise Economic Expansion Committee Website Comity of Tourism and leisure in Val d'Oise
Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau was a major figure in French Symbolist painting whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist artists, he is recognized for his works that are influenced by exoticism. His art work was preserved in Paris at the Musée Gustave Moreau, he was born in France, at 6 Rue des Saints-Peres. He came from a middle-class family, his father, Louis Jean Marie Moreau, was an architect for the city of Paris and his mother, née Adele Pauline Desmoutier, was an accomplished musician. Gustave Moreau lived a sheltered life growing up. Having visited Italy at age 15 he began his love for art. At age 18 he entered École des Beaux-Arts to study under the guidance of François-Édouard Picot and left in 1850, he began to study art under his new mentor Théodore Chassériau, whose work influenced his own. Moreau participated in the Salon for the first time in 1852. Moreau had a 25-year personal romantic relationship, with Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux, a woman whom he drew several times.
His first painting was a Pietà, now located in the cathedral at Angoulême. He showed A Scene from the Song of Songs and The Death of Darius in the Salon of 1853. In 1853, he contributed Athenians with the Minotaur and Moses Putting Off his Sandals within Sight of the Promised Land to the Great Exhibition. Oedipus and the Sphinx, one of his first Symbolist paintings, was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. Moreau gained a reputation for eccentricity. One commentator said Moreau's work was "like a pastiche of Mantegna created by a German student who relaxes from his painting by reading Schopenhauer." The painting resides in the permanent collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. On 28 March 1890, Alexandrine Dureux died, her death affected Moreau and his work after this point contained a more melancholic edge. She was buried at the same cemetery. Moreau became a professor at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts in October 1891. Among his many students were fauvist painters Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault.
Jules Flandrin, Theodor Pallady and Léon Printemps studied with Moreau. Moreau died of stomach cancer and was buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris in his parent's tomb, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur in 1875 and was promoted to an Officier de la Legion d'honneur in 1883. The death of Chasseriau in 1856 caused Moreau in his grief to stop painting and withdraw from public life. Concerned about his condition, Moreau's parents suggested. Living in Italy from 1857 to 1859 he found a new love for art, he gained inspiration from the artists of the Italian Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. In 1864 Moreau won a medal at the Salon with his painting Oedipus and the Sphinx, the style of which revealed his close study of the work of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, its firm outlines and detailed modeling are typical of the works that brought him success with critics and the public for the remainder of the decade. In the 1870s, disturbed by criticism that his work had become formulaic, he stopped exhibiting for a few years while he concentrated on renewing his art.
In 1876 he completed Salome Dancing before Herod, which announced a more painterly style that would characterize his works. Gustave Moreau's education in classical drawing did not stop him from experimenting with different styles of art. By traveling to other countries such as Italy or Holland and reading publications Moreau was able to develop his unique form of art; the most important publications Moreau owned were The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, Le costume historique by August Racinet, Le Costume by Frederick Hottenroth. All these influences led Moreau to draw not only animals and architectural monuments. Moreau started his career drawing classical art, but by incorporating exotic images he developed a mysterious and unique form of art. During his lifetime, Moreau produced more than 8,000 paintings and drawings, his work influenced the next generation of Symbolists Odilon Redon and Jean Delville, a leading figure in Belgian Symbolism in the early part of the twentieth century. Many of Moreau's works are on display in Paris' Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld.
The museum is in his former workshop, began operation in 1903. André Breton famously regarded Moreau as a precursor of Surrealism; the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, known for works such as Final Fantasy, Angel's Egg, Vampire Hunter D, was inspired by Moreau's style. Amano said in an interview that when he was first experimenting with styles to try to find his own, he would try to mimic the works of Moreau. Gustave Moreau's works L'Apparition Les Chimères Musée National Gustave-Moreau Ten Dreams Galleries Brief biography at the Artchive.com Moreau at Boston College Moreau links at the Artcyclopedia
,_oil_on_canvas,_64.5_x_80_cm.jpg)
