The Flowers of Evil

The Apparition by Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau is a French painter, who is known to be one of the first to use symbolism in their paintings,  becoming known for his erotic paintings of mythological and religious subjects. Works such as Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) and Dance of Salome (1876) have often been described as decadent. Inspired by Romantic painters such as Delacroix, his art showed the spirit of the mal-du-siecle, and end-of-the-century tendency toward profound melancholy or soul sickness, often expressed in art and literature through morbid subject matter. (Arnason)

So, hearing about The Apparition (1876) by Gustave Moreau, I was slightly disturbed by the back story. So apparently the story revolves around the biblical legend of Salome, the young princess who danced for her stepfather Herod, demanding in return the execution of St. John the Baptist. The fact that he asked, as well as her agreeing to it, just to get a St’s johns head in a platter, it’s just disturbing. For decades , Salome was represented by many male artists as the archetype of a castrating female who embodied all that is corrupt, using her sexuality and beauty. The bloody head of the saint is like a gross hallucination, especially with exotic detail combined with jewel-like color and rich paint texture. (Arnason)

The concept of the painting is femme fatale or “deadly women.” Propelling this theme of sexually alluring, yet dangerous women was generalized disorientation arising from changing social and gender roles in the late 19th and early 20th century. It “expresses woman’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm” (Paglia, 1992). As more women sought and achieved political and economic enfranchisement, long-held assumption about women’s physical and mental shortcomings were exposed as myths

The concept as an erotic and destructive force was fostered by Baudelaire’s great series of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) (1857) and the mid-century pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Baudelaire believed that beauty can be fueled by sin. He describes the two subjects between two worlds, “spleen” and the “ideal.” The spleen is supposed to symbolize everything that is terrible with the world such as despair, murder, disease, and solitude. On the other hand, the “ideal” represents superiority over the harsh reality of the spleen, “where love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy.” In the case of The Apparition, the beauty of Salome represents the ideal. When she danced for the father, in return for the saint’s head on a platter, can be represented as the “spleen.”(Sparknotes)

Arnason, H. Harvard. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1968. Print.

Paglia, Camille (1992). Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays ISBN 978-0-679-74101-5, p. 15.

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Flowers of Evil.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.