It Speaks to Me: Richard Hawkins on Gustave Moreau’s “Salome Dancing Before Herod,” 1876, at the Hammer Museum

This is the most iconic painting of French Decadence. Cultural critics in the 1980s saw Salome as this symbol of the femme fatale when, in fact, there is so much more at play here: a darker, richer sort of perversity. Moreau is bringing back religious subject matter, but instead of, say, a crucifixion he chooses one of the strangest stories of the New Testament, as if he’s going for shock value. The work is filled with this confusion of architectural styles and symbols, like the multi-breasted statue of Cybele, the Roman goddess whose followers included a castration cult. Then there’s the painting’s surface— globules of pure paint encased under these layers and layers of glaze until they glisten, like semi-precious stones. At a time when the Impressionists’ quest for immediacy had led them to abandon their studios and leave their tins of varnish behind, this kind of lacquered density feels very contrary. Moreau’s going for an arcane, even Byzantine fantasy of what the past might’ve—or should’ve—been.

— Artist Richard Hawkins, as told to Jori Finkel

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Image: Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876. Oil on canvas. The Armand Hammer Collection at the Hammer Museum. Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation.

Comments

[Lisa Williams]

Salome danced before a room full of Herod's friends and cohorts. Where are they? She appears to be English -stiff without the flair and grace of a dancer in ancient Israel.

[william wray]

It speaks to me to. Thanks for the nice big scan!

[Donald Frazell]

Moreaus most certainly was NOT one of the academic perversions of the day. He was perhaps the greatest art teacher in history, no dogmas. Taught Matisse and Rouaoult and many others, the only teacher Moderns ever praised.
His color was not local and subjects not things to be possessed nor languid women ready to be ravished, but those who stood for themselves. Whether for good or bad, they were truly human all within a gilded environment of dazzling color.

Byzantine is far from decadent, its mosaics more profound and spiritual than the Western art of their age, and equal if not above the overrated later Renaissance.The Quatrocento fresco painters far more brilliant in light and color. The Italians handled oil badly, and became dark, dingy and decadent, ending up in the human cesspool known as Caravaggio. who so appropriately has been given an academic rebith in our own age of self indulgence.

Moreau created a magical space, a world of living walls and statues, where the humans are part of an environment not apart from it. Which todays contempt art so perfectly reveals, empty souls living seperate in their own minds and self absorbtion .

art collegia delenda est
Fine art academies must be destroyed.