His contemporaries called him a sorcerer, a poet and a magician. To celebrate the centenary of Gustave Moreau's death, the Grand Palais is holding the first major retrospective in 37 years of the symbolist painter's work, which will run until January 4th, 1999.
Throughout the century of realism and impressionism, Moreau followed a solitary path, indulging in mythical, biblical and oriental fantasies that influenced his students Rouault and Matisse, and later the surrealists.
As a young man, Moreau travelled to Italy with Degas and copied the paintings of Leonardo and Raphael. His classical education and the influence of the Italian Renaissance are visible in such early works as Orpheus, where Eurydice sadly contemplates the face of her dead lover.
Although he painted ancient or biblical subjects, Moreau's work was marked by the violence and decadence of the reign of Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. This tension is palpable in his first successful painting, shown at the 1864 Salon. In Oedipus and the Sphinx, the monster with a female face and bosom and the body of a winged feline claws the ancient hero's clothing and stares into his eyes. We see a similar contest of wills in Hercules and the Hydra, from the 1876 Salon.
David, on loan from the Armand Hammer Collection in Los Angeles, shows the ancient King of Israel. In a letter to his deaf mother, Moreau wrote that David represented "the sombre melancholy of the past age of tradition . . . weeping over the decomposition of modern society".
With his great painting of Salome dancing before King Herod, also shown at the 1876 Salon, Moreau reached the apogee of his style and talent. The painter was influenced by Indian art and mysticism, and Herod's palace could be mistaken for a maharajah's.
The canvas is encrusted with gold, and the rich, jewel-like colours show the lasting influence of Delacroix. In a watercolour version of the same painting, The Apparition, we see the blood-clotted, severed head of John the Baptist floating above Salome. Art critics mistakenly attributed the hallucinatory quality of Moreau's paintings to opium use. His Galatea is a beautiful woman adorned with coral and sea anemones, while a brooding ogre looms behind her. Some of Moreau's paintings, such as The Unicorns and The Peacock Complains to Juno are more cheerful, but the power of fantasy still permeates them.
When Lorenzo Lotto died around 1557, "a restless genius of the Renaissance" was forgotten. He was rediscovered at the end of the 19th century by the US art critic, Bernard Berenson. The Italian public became familiar with his work through a series of exhibitions on Venetian painters in 1953. But until now, no French exhibition had been devoted to him.
All of the 51 paintings shown at the Grand Palais from October 16th until January 11th, 1999 are portraits or Biblical scenes.
During his lifetime, Lotto was an itinerant painter - something unusual for the period - moving back and forth between his native Venice, Treviso, Rome, Bergamo, Ancona and Loretto. Art historians believe he left Venice because artistic life in the city was so dominated by the great Titian that it was impossible for other painters to succeed there.
Lotto's spirituality suffuses his religious paintings. He would join the Franciscan community in Loretto for the last years of his life, and his innocence and gentle awe of nature in paintings such as Allegory of Chastity remind one of Giotto, two centuries before him.
As he wandered across Italy, Lotto sold paintings to monasteries, wealthy burghers and aristocratic families. His excellent portraits show a rare grasp of human psychology. In Portrait of a Lady with an Image of Lucrezia, one of the well-to-do ladies whom he often painted is dressed in a richly textured red and green satin dress. She is not beautiful, but strongly built and defiant under her beribboned, white headdress.
In the Portrait of Febo da Brescia, the sitter appears introspective, morose. Lotto recorded a payment of 30 ducats for the pair of portraits of da Brescia and his wife, Laura da Pola. The provincial noble couple were pleased with the paintings, for they gave him a gift of two golden peacocks. Lotto nonetheless complained that for the amount of time he had spent, he should have earned 40 ducats.
As befits a nomadic artist, Lotto's works were scattered wide, and it would take months to see all of the paintings gathered in Paris for this exhibition. Museums in Edinburgh, Cracow, Bucharest, St Petersburg, London, Vienna, Ottawa, four cities in the US and eight in Italy all loaned paintings.
The exhibition Picasso, Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at Paris's musee Picasso from October 22nd until January 25th, also gives museumgoers a chance to compare similar works which normally reside on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
The Metropolitan has lent 10 paintings and 15 drawings done by Picasso between 1901 and 1909. Arranged chronologically in four rooms alongside works from the musee Picasso, they demonstrate the influence of other artists on the young painter, and his progression - in just nine years - through three important phases: the blue and rose periods and Cubism.
In the first room hangs the magnificent Harlequin, surrounded by drawings and gouaches from the Saltimbanque series of circus acrobats from the rose period. The Harlequin, painted just after Picasso arrived in Paris in 1901 at the age of 20, shows the influence of the symbolists, art nouveau and Barcelona modernists.
Picasso had assimilated impressionism and post-impressionism, and he borrowed the theme of absinthe drinkers from Manet, Degas and Lautrec.
From the moment he came to Paris, Picasso copied Lautrec's cafe concert scenes, and it seems fitting that the French aristocrat died four months after Picasso's arrival. The bright colours of the Harlequin also show the influence of Gaugin.
But by bleaching the Pierrot face of expression, and by distorting the size of the performer's hands, Picasso nonetheless gave the painting the stamp of his own personality.
At the end of 1901, Picasso entered his blue period, which is represented in the second room of the exhibition by two paintings of mothers with children. The Blind Man's Meal, one of three paintings Picasso did in Barcelona in 1903, shows the influence of El Greco in the elongated figure, and that of Velasquez in the sober still-life of pitcher, bowl and bread which the hungry blind man can "see" only with his fingers.
In the third room, La Coiffure (1906) is an elegant painting showing the influence of primitive art on Picasso. The following year, Picasso would break with traditional, figurative art to invent Cubism. In the last room of the exhibition, we see Cubist gouaches and oil paintings of men's heads and nudes. The forms are geometric, and are painted as if seen simultaneously from several angles.
How hauntingly they stare at us, with their huge brown eyes and solemn expressions: if the "Fayoum portraits" seem difficult to place - at once modern and ancient, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian - this is as it should be. For these men and women lived and died at the crux of several civilisations. They were pagans in the first centuries of Christianity, Egyptian subjects of the Roman Empire when the Romans were enamoured of things Greek.
The Louvre has assembled 30 "Fayoum portraits" from British and French museums, and is exhibiting them until January 4th, 1999, along with funeral masks, shrouds, sarcophagi, vases and stelae from Egyptian death rituals of the first to fourth centuries AD. The funerary art of the period shows how Egyptians mixed their own protective amulets and ancient gods with those of the Greeks and Romans. Collective burial by families or associations, like the monuments placed over funeral vaults, were Roman innovations.
These portraits are known as "Fayoum" because so many were found in the town of that name, north of Cairo. The British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie first discovered them in the 19th century, and spirited hundreds back to London. More than 800 are known to exist today. The paintings, done on wood with wax polish, are believed to have been used throughout the Roman empire. Yet only the Egyptian portraits survived, preserved by the climate and the mummy bandages wrapped around them.
The Egyptians began embalming their dead 3,000 years before Christ, but the practice was reserved for royalty. After the Romans began their military occupation of Egypt in 55 BC, funeral rites became more democratic. Undertakers did a flourishing business around necropolises and even middle-class Egyptians could afford mummification - the path, they believed, to eternal life and deification.
Gold was considered "the flesh of the gods" and during the Roman period it was used to decorate the masks and portraits set on top of mummies' faces and shoulders. But because the gold was meant to meld divinity with the dead person's earthly identity, it was never applied on the face - only on the background of the painting, or to the hair or throat. The portraits are believed to have been painted while the subjects lived, for use after their demise. Rich Egyptians had more expressive, stylised portraits, while the less wealthy contented themselves with generic, mass-produced images.
Vincent Van Gogh first visited Paris in May 1875, five months after the death of Jean-Francois Millet, a painter he never met, but whom he would consider his master. Millet was "the father," Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "the guide and counsellor in all things for young painters".
The exhibition "Millet/Van Gogh", at the Musee d'Orsay until January 3rd, 1999, shows what a decisive influence Millet had on Van Gogh. Paintings and drawings have been loaned from around the world, but especially from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Van Gogh decided to become a painter in 1880, at the age of 27, and committed suicide 10 years later. From the beginning he copied his first drawings from photos and engravings of Millet's paintings of peasants. Van Gogh was the son of a Calvinist pastor and he believed that labourers represented piety and virtue. His discovery of Millet's work was an almost religious experience. "I felt something like `take off your shoes, for you are walking on holy ground'," he wrote. "He paints the doctrine of Christ. He alone manages to express, through scenes of country life, the religious dimension of nature and of those who live with her and through her."
In The Hague, where he settled briefly in 1882, Van Gogh read and re-read a biography of Millet by the dead painter's friend and agent, Alfred Sensier. Millet was portrayed as a simple country man who shunned industrialisation and modernity - in fact, he lived in considerable ease in Barbizon, south of Paris. Death and the Woodsman, a painting particularly loved by Van Gogh, had been rejected by the Salon in 1859 and the Dutch painter mistakenly believed his idol was poor and misunderstood.
During his 1886-1888 stay in Paris, Van Gogh frequented impressionist painters such as Lautrec, Signac and Gauguin. He permanently abandoned the sombre palette he had modelled on Millet's. But after discarding the themes of planting, harvest and the seasons, he returned to them in Provence, painting the fields outside the asylum where he was hospitalised.
The exhibition shows both Van Gogh's and Millet's versions of a man sowing wheat, a peasant couple sleeping at noon on a haystack, crows in a winter field, a farmer's child taking its first steps towards its father. The same theme and composition have an amazingly different effect when treated with Van Gogh's brilliant, emotionally charged palette and forceful brushstrokes.