"The Great Solitary"

Of all this summer's art exhibitions, none are more curious than the large retrospective at the Louvre of the 19th century painter Gustave Moreau. For the past 63 years, his paintings have hung in snug obscurity inside the dusty old house where Moreau once lived on Paris' Rue de La Rochefoucauld. He himself willed his paintings to the state, and now the house is a museum, though days go by without a single visitor. Until the current show, Moreau was remembered primarily as a teacher; his own work seemed as exotically decadent as illustrations from a very old book of fairy tales. But last week, with the blessings of Andre Malraux, 145 of Moreau's works had their own gallery at the Louvre. Some critics have hooted, others have applauded, but none have been able to ignore Moreau.

In his own day he was famous, a constant exhibitor at the salons, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, an officer of the Legion of Honor. Appropriately, it was his work and not his person that was known; for Moreau so coveted his privacy that he would not allow any painting or photograph of himself to be shown. He never married, lived for years with his deaf old mother in the house on the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. He hated to discuss his paintings, but for her he wrote elaborate, poetic explanations.

Across the Desert. Young painters flocked to him, and he had a sharp eye for talent. One day he spotted a 23-year-old copying classical statues at the School of Fine Arts, was so impressed that he invited the young man to join his studio as a pupil. Thus began the career of Henri Matisse. Another pupil was the intense and lonely Georges Rouault, for whom Moreau had a special affection, although he predicted: "You will cross the desert without food or baggage, unable to do anything but affirm your particular vision. My poor child, I see you with your whole nature, your desperate eagerness. I see you more and more solitary."

Moreau's own work was dominated by a principle he called la richesse necessaire. The great masters, he insisted, were the enemies of "impoverished art. They put into their paintings whatever was the most rich, most glittering, most strange." Because of his worship of color, the fauves declared him a father; he did pioneering abstractions, and his obsession with symbol, myth and dreams became in turn the obsession of the surrealists. "I am the bridge over which some of you will pass," he told his students, but his paintings had a stamp no one has copied. He painted gods and unicorns, saints and angels of death--anemic, attenuated figures so embellished with detail that they look like the work, not of a painter, but of a jeweler gone wild.

Applied Calligraphy. Degas could not bear this sort of thing: "He put watch chains on the Olympian gods." Cezanne got so angry at the mere mention of Moreau's name that he smashed his wine glass, crying that Moreau should get outdoors for once and take a look at nature. Today the controversy rages on.

To Surrealist Poet Andre Breton, Moreau is "the great solitary of the Rue de La Rochefoucauld who carried farthest the power of evocation." U.S. Abstractionist Mark Tobey said of his work: "There are 200 years of painting here." Other observers might feel more inclined to agree with the art critic of Lettres Franc,aises: "I don't believe there is a public in 1961 that could lay claim to being drawn to this parade of dandies, she-animals, androgynes and all the comics of mythology. The form is thin, compromised by heavy preoccupation with detail. The landscapes are artificial and the nudes ambiguous. As for the design --applied calligraphy."

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