In a world of pure imagination
A MERE reaction against the modern world’ was the dismissal levelled by Émile Zola, 19th-century realist writer and naturalist proselyte, at his contemporary and countryman Gustave Moreau (1826–98). Yet Moreau’s art—categorised as symbolist on account of its apparently escapist retreat into imaginative fantasy—frequently engaged with concerns that both he and Zola would have considered all too ‘modern’, including relations between the sexes and the fine dividing line between conscious and unconscious desire.
On the surface, Moreau’s luscious visions of a jewelled neverland suggest deliberate historicism, his subject matter drawn from Bible stories, mythology and legend. Probe a little deeper and more
