I paid a visit today to the Musée Gustave Moreau, which was the Symbolist painter's family house (and his own house) before being converted into a museum in 1895, a few years before his death. I wasn't too sure what to expect, except for some vague idea that it was the artist's house-museum, a fortunately fresh condition to be in as a visitor. This tight Parisian house expands as one moves up, both spatially and in terms of the displays, so that moving through it is akin to penetrating a mind.
The angled stair brought me to a constrained hall on the first floor, part of the preserved Moreau family house, a hall that was nonetheless dominated by a few very large drawings, including Moreau's sexually-charged interpretation of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The reception room comes across as a rather respectable nineteenth-century man's office, all leather chairs and book-lined shelves, but the display case full of little antique objects, mostly elegant little pitchers and jugs (whose vaguely erotic profiles are somehow more apparent when grouped together), hints at the owner's interests. The little family apartment elsewhere on the first floor was obviously intended by the artist as a kind of biographic condenser; the crowding of objects everywhere became slightly less banal for me when I saw how many framed images were little photos and reproductions of Moreau's own works or those of other artists he admired, as well as the requisite portraits of family and friends. The Palissy ceramics in the dining room (hideous, but with the odd presence of frozen life) added to the uncanny feeling here. The little boudoir was the most intense room in the apartment, the walls covered with a mixture of figurative images, landscapes and stern photos of family members. The museum card in the boudoir also mentioned a somewhat mysterious woman who was probably Moreau's lover and of whom he spoke longingly for much of his life; her evoked presence among the Moreau family, faraway landscapes and other illustrations started to resonate in this room like the (deceptively) random fragments of a life both lived and imagined, the snatches of imagery that variously swirl together into dreams of what is most deeply cherished.
Back to the hall and up another staircase to the upper-floor ateliers built for the museum, which made for a surprising contrast to the poky house below. The second floor is a large space filled with enormous paintings and studies, the wall height accommodating two paintings. The displayed work consists of unfinished versions or studies of many of Moreau's best-known paintings. His vividly fantastic representations of ancient and mythical events tend here to have a different quality for their lack of colour, appearing sometimes more sculptural than their final versions, other times partly mute, like a laryngitic voice or music barely carrying across a windswept field. This atelier is dominated at one the end by the strange and decadent vision of The Pretenders. At the other end, a conspicuous and distinctive spiral staircase leads up... to yet another tall atelier! Again, it is filled with unfinished paintings as though we've been invited to turn back the clock on the finished works and get a taste for the artist's process. But this top-floor room is dominated not by another huge Moreau work, but by a copy of Carpaccio's exotically Renaissance Saint George, suggesting it is a key inspiration or guiding masterwork. If the Moreau apartment below, and the boudoir in particular is like peeking around inside the artist's psyche, then these ateliers are like the airy, half-coalesced world of his imagination.
On one side of each atelier, below the windows, short curtains can be pulled back to reveal little cabinets of hinged panels, one behind the other, with Moreau's smaller sketches. In one such "booklet," a few drawings study some sort of three-eyed monster, the third eye in the middle of the forehead and wide open, often drawn with an especially heavy line as though it were not an organ of sight but an orifice revealing the brain. Moreau's house-museum comes across as a similar invention.
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