Art: Surrealism's Fathers

Like all history, the history of art must be constantly rewritten, for even in the most obscure artist, now forsaken or forgotten, an ancestor with a message for the present might be found. In its current big show,* Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art spotlights three new candidates for ancestorhood, three 19th century symbolists who drew their inspiration from dreams and fantasy at a time when their more powerful contemporaries, the realists and the impressionists, were in their different ways exploring nature.

Of the three—Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and Rodolphe Bresdin—only Redon is well known today, though more for his glowing flower pieces than for his excursions into eeriness. Moreau is a clouded memory, and if Bresdin is remembered at all, it is primarily as Redon's teacher. The exhibition links the three as fathers of surrealism.

La Belle Inertie. Unhappily, in the case of Moreau, the quest for ancestry gets a bit out of hand; his is a case in which a painter has been more ignored than unknown, since his work has long been embalmed in the musty, state-run Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris. Not until the Louvre, apparently at the instigation of Culture Minister André Malraux, put on a big Moreau show last summer (TIME, July 21) was the general public suddenly informed that Moreau should be remembered not only as the brilliant teacher of Matisse and Rouault but also as an artist with special pertinence today: alongside his stilted and sickly mythological scenes, Moreau also turned out years before anyone else color sketches that were abstract.

In the accompanying catalogue, one-time New York Times Critic Dore Ashton does her sympathetic best to sustain the Louvre thesis that Moreau was a kind of New Frontiersman of Abstraction. Like the thoroughgoing pro that he was, Moreau often did sketches before starting a large work, some being orchestrations of color without the trace of an image. These are Moreau's "abstractions," and much is made of the fact that he squeezed paint on canvas directly from the tube, used his palette knife instead of a brush, and left his fingerprints still visible. Was he the great "precursor" of 20th century abstraction? "There is no answer," says Dore Ashton, and a viewer may be tempted to wonder whether it really matters.

In the end Moreau still remains a mystery. His males are disconcertingly female; his females are almost invariably feline; the colors of his salon canvases—seasick green, hepatitis yellow, muddy brown—are faintly repellent. Moreau took as a principle something he called la belle inertie—a kind of suspended animation that seems less dreamlike than dead. Another Moreau doctrine was that of la richesse nècessaire. His big scenes from mythology and the Bible almost choke to death on their own bejeweled detail.