The Gustave Moreau Museum is a feast of eccentricity; the Nissim de Camondo needs to work on visitor experience.
I enjoy house museums, idiosyncratic as they are. Famous or not, people can disguise their defects when in public, but hiding them at home demands watchfulness and discipline. Living, lounging, and sleeping among artifice is the curse of kings and queens, who work 24/7. It’s not that house museums expose warts and all. A good house museum is where the veil on privacy and inscrutability is pulled back. Inside can be accretions over centuries, in the case of an old family house, or the work of one or two egos, preferably with good taste. And whether we realize it or not, our possessions define a big part of who we are.
The best look and feel as if the owners might have just left to do errands, with, of course, beds made, dishes washed, and spittoons emptied. So a house museum has to keep its authenticity as a home while playing its good-citizen role as a museum. As pickled in aspic as it might be, museum-quality lighting and interpretation are useful. And as a house museum, it needs to be static enough to keep faith with those who called it home but vivacious enough to draw repeat visitors.
Last month I went to two house museums in Paris, as a first-time visitor to both. The Gustave Moreau Museum is a studio, home, and, by the artist’s wishes, a museum honoring Moreau (1826–1898), the enigmatic, hard-to-classify artist who called himself “a worker and assembler of dreams.” It’s got to be seen to be believed, packed as it is with hundreds of Moreau’s paintings of muses, gods, saints, heroes, and sphinxes. Moreau’s rich father bought the Neoclassical townhouse on rue de la Rochefoucauld for the young artist in 1853, just as the neighborhood, called “New Athens,” was being developed on land that had been owned by a high-end convent before the 1793 Revolution. Moreau lived there for the rest of his life.
The Nissim de Camondo Museum is the home, or I should call it a mansion, of the banker Moïse de Camondo (1860–1935). It’s on the rue de Monceau. Camondo entirely rebuilt his father’s Second Empire house in 1911 as a home both for him and his two children — his wife left them for the stable master — and for his collection of 17th- and 18th-century French furniture, carpets, porcelain, and silver. Nissim de Camondo, Moïse’s only son, died in action serving France in the First World War. Both Moïse and Moreau bequeathed their homes and contents to the state. How well do these two places keep the flame?
Moreau’s house is all about Moreau, from his house as he left it down to the tiny bed on which he died, to walls packed with his work. He never married, saying that “marriage smothers an artist,” though he had a longtime and, I suspect, long-suffering mistress who lived with her parents. He lived there for so long that it has the stamp of a strong, distinct personality. He also intended his home to be a museum and installed it to be seen by the public, not during his lifetime but after his death, when he wouldn’t be discommoded.
Moreau is taught in art-history classes, if he’s taught at all, as a Symbolist and part of a big, messy fin-de-siècle movement of painters and writers who dealt in myths, dreams, and spirituality in contrast to Barbizon and Impressionist artists, whose work was “matter of fact description,” as the Symbolist Manifesto described it in 1886. Symbolism is a forerunner of Surrealism, headline art history tells us, but let’s look at Moreau as Moreau.
Jupiter and Semele, from 1895, is an opus in Moreau’s studio. At 46 by 84 inches, it makes a statement in size but also in labyrinthine density and intensity. Semele, a pretty young mortal, caught the eye of Jupiter. They became lovers, though no one can say how this actually operated since Jupiter visited her in the form of an eagle, and their romance was very much a nighttime thing. Juno, Mrs. Jupiter, always on the hunt for her husband’s infidelities, told Semele that her lover was the king of the gods.
As Jupiter’s lover (and by that time Semele was pregnant with Bacchus), Semele deserved to see Jupiter in all his godly splendor, with his regalia and splendid physique, and not as some big bird. So cunningly advised Juno. Semele then cooed and cajoled. Jupiter promised to grant her a wish. Semele said she wished to see Jupiter the god. Moreau depicts the moment when Jupiter grants her wish, so we’re seeing the god at his most awesome, no limits, no holds barred, and pulling no punches. Mortals who see the gods in their divine form must die, and we see this moment as well. Semele, white and droopy, is about to simultaneously combust.
The painting is bizarre enough to seem modern, as if Bosch got the Marvel action-movie treatment. Moreau, though, is painting in the spirit of Delacroix and Géricault, a packed amalgam of sex, violence, color, the encrypted, and the paranormal. Moreau wasn’t exactly a loner. He exhibited in most of the salons into the 1880s, taught at the École des Beaux Arts (among his students was Matisse), and was a presence in the establishment art world. Still, he’s very much from the Romantic era, enough of a loner and antiquarian that he kept pushing the Romantic vocabulary and vibe to an extreme.
Moreau considered himself a history painter focusing on mythology and the days of the Romans, Greeks, and early saints. In his lifetime, his work was considered esoteric, “of an opium smoker with the hands of a goldsmith,” hermetic, and even reactionary. Émile Zola said Moreau hated realism. Zola said Moreau’s work could charm, even beguile, “but you leave with the desire to draw the first slattern you see on the street.” Ouch.
The Moreau Museum’s collection is only the work that Moreau never sold, and this was the artist’s intent. It’s a museum devoted to how he thought and how he developed his ideas. Jupiter and Semele is a finished painting and late in his career, so we can call it a valedictory. The museum shows dozens of big paintings like Hesiod and the Muses and The Muses Leave Their Father, Apollo, to Go Out and Light the World, both from the 1860s and both gauzier than the tightly finished things he sold. Moreau liked them too much to sell and was never short on cash, owing to his father. With a streak of death obsession and hypochondria, he thought about establishing a museum of his work long before he died.
These big things are displayed in Moreau’s studio, which is more an immense gallery than office, hovel, or workspace. He painted there and also received guests there, so it’s got a ceremonial purpose. A long, elegant spiral staircase goes to an exhibition gallery on the museum’s top floor, also part of Moreau’s design and showing more of his work. The staircase signals that we’re in a deluxe, high-style Art Nouveau house.
He’s an artist’s artist. Moreau, like all the best artists, drew from the Old Masters, though Moreau did so obsessively and deeply. His hundreds of small oil sketches on view often react to work by Mantegna or Titian that he saw in Italy. He copied not only Old Masters but illuminated manuscripts, looking for motifs he could use but also for technique and color. First-floor rooms are filled salon-style with his oil sketches. It’s very much a process place. Moreau’s private rooms, especially his bedroom, are filled with art that has sentimental meaning to him and lots of bric-a-brac. The look of the day was dense.
I loved the exhibition on view. Between 1879 and 1884, Moreau painted 64 watercolors illustrating a new, deluxe edition of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, originally published between 1668 and 1694. The Fables are an adaptation of Aesop’s work but draw from many other sources. La Fontaine wrote them for adults, but they became a children’s classic. Moreau’s watercolors stayed together until at least 1906 but, alas, were dispersed at some point after that. The exhibition unites 35 of them.
As a house museum, the place is more or less as Moreau conceived it, and he wasn’t thinking of temporary exhibitions. To show these watercolors, the museum built temporary walls blocking about 20 Moreau paintings in what used to be his studio. Awkward, I know, but I’m fine with it. I’d rather see a house museum improvise than build an addition and wreck its unity and scale and, worse, put it in the business of doing shows.
In The City Rat and the Country Rat, a rat in Paris invites his rural friend for a taste of the high life, courtesy of the master of the house’s larder.
Only picture, if you can
The delights they had in store.
Nothing lacked, not in the least,
Of soup or meat or sweet or wine.
But someone upset their feast
As the pair prepared to dine.
As food and wine sat on the table, servants kept coming in and out of the kitchen, reducing a princely feast to an anxious grab-and-go. After a raid or two, the country rat had enough.
Understand, it isn’t that
I don’t like luxury.
But where I come from life is quiet.
I eat at leisure, when I wish.
Fie! I say, on any diet
Where fear contaminates each dish.
Moreau’s watercolors are dazzling. Iridescent colors grab the viewer. Motifs look like stained glass. Most objects aren’t quite as defined as in his oil paintings, so they’re more suggestive than didactic. Moreau conveys plenty in sparkling piles while the main actors — scrambling rats and a servant interrupting the fun — are plain to see. I enjoyed seeing Moreau the charmer and Moreau the communicator.
Moreau is an acquired taste, to be sure, but melodrama never really goes out of style, and neither does weirdness. His dining room, office, and bedroom are time capsules showing how upper-middle-class people in Paris lived when Paris was the center of the art world and the premiere tastemaker.
I don’t doubt the Nissim de Camondo Museum has a supremely important furniture collection. Jean Henri Riesener’s chest of drawers from the late 1770s is fantastic. The Great Drawing Room has a carpet from the Savonnerie manufactory, made in 1678 for one of the grand galleries at the Louvre. Coincidentally, Aubusson tapestries in the Great Study depict La Fontaine’s Fables. Chinoiserie tapestries designed by François Boucher in the 1740s decorate the grand staircase. There’s a small gallery off the dining room for Moïse’s porcelain collection, the zenith of which is the Compte de Buffoon’s Sèvres porcelain service depicting illustrations from The Natural History of Birds, a forerunner of Audubon’s Birds of America.
There are three things I didn’t like. First, and this surprises me the most, the ambiance is not shattered but certainly compromised by stretches of rolled-up carpet and furniture clumped to make passages for visitors. It looks like Moving Day. Second, there are too many aggressive vitrines. How can mere sheets of plexiglass turn fierce and overbearing? When they needlessly surround a magnificent silver soup tureen commissioned in 1770 by Catherine the Great. The vitrine smothers it. The object sits on a large dining room table separated from the public by a wooden barrier. Between the tureen and its stand, we’re looking at hundreds of ounces of silver, so the object isn’t something to be stuffed in a raincoat pocket. Barriers block views of parts of rooms and panels telling the viewer what’s on display. Third, the lighting is terrible.
I felt I wasn’t visiting a living, breathing home but a warehouse of specimens. I think a tough visitor-experience audit is necessary. The place looks that forlorn. The museum is part of the Museum of Decorative Arts, which, in turn, is part of the Louvre. I’ve been to the decorative arts museum many times. It’s a snazzy place celebrating good design. Moïse’s museum seems like a stepchild no one really wants.
The voyeur in me likes bedrooms in historic houses. Moïse’s has an unusually gaudy, even trashy, nude above his bed. Nissim’s was left as an untouched shrine after he died in 1917. Moreau’s kitchen isn’t on view, and since his house isn’t a mansion, it probably wasn’t much to see. Moreau was a bachelor, mistress aside, and an introvert, so he wasn’t giving big dinner parties. The Nissim de Camondo kitchen is open, with the stove and the oven separate and each the size of a tank.
Last year I wrote a story about the Jewish Museum’s exhibition of art and ephemera visualizing Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes, the story of a Jewish Viennese family’s descent from power and wealth to penury in the years leading to the Holocaust. I like the book a lot and the exhibition less, though it was up to the Jewish Museum’s very high standards. The book, so evocative and heavily illustrated, stands on its own and gains little from visualization in a museum.
When I got to Paris, I hadn’t read Letters to Camondo, de Waal’s short book, published in 2021, about the Camondo family. The Camondo family, I learned, lived on the same street in Paris as Charles Ephrussi, the connoisseur, critic, and collector whose great wealth came from the Paris branch of de Waal’s family — also, like the Camondos, in the banking business and Jewish. Charles, who died in 1905, is a protagonist in The Hare with the Amber Eyes. The Camondos were part of Ephrussi’s social if not his intellectual circle. The convergence intensified my interest in Moïse’s museum.
This isn’t a book review. Letters to Camondo is evocative and beautifully written but a trifle. It’s composed of letters that de Waal writes to the dead Moïse. Letters to the dead are, of course, one-sided. An author doesn’t have to be too wily to intuit the responses he wants. I think the book is opportunistic and contrived. Moïse’s story is indeed a sad one. His only son is killed in a war defending France. Only a bit more than 20 years later, Moïse’s only daughter and his two grandchildren died in a Nazi concentration camp. De Waal takes a tragic story and makes it weepy.
House museums are, by their nature, given to little change. We visit and enjoy them to see how dead people lived, and the dead don’t redecorate. The Moreau Museum does small exhibitions, assembling and dismantling those temporary walls, and it sometimes does bigger, landmark shows like the one displaying the watercolors for the La Fontaine book. The Moreau Museum and the Nissim de Camondo Museum are like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in that changes are barred by the will of the dead donors. There’s wiggle room here and there, but Moïse and Moreau wanted the place to look the way they left it.
Moreau’s art is wacky, baffling, outré, and moonstruck enough to get return visitors and visitors of all stripes. Moïse’s art, though, is the stuff of connoisseurs, and it’s a house museum that gathers and interprets art that’s hundreds of years old. How to make it vivacious, to use my earlier term? Imbedding de Waal’s ceramics, which are beautiful works of art, doesn’t do it.
Recognizing the currency of Letters to Camondo, the museum is displaying about 20 of de Waal’s works in spots throughout the rooms of the house. “Opening the museum to contemporary art is a singular challenge,” Olivier Gabet, the director, writes.
The problem is that de Waal’s art, inspired as it is by Song Dynasty China, Edo-period Japan, and the Bauhaus, is too different. It’s not that de Waal’s and Moïse’s art don’t play well together. They don’t play at all. They come from different planets and don’t communicate. Juxtaposing one against the other doesn’t augment either. They don’t challenge or question each other. I’ve done what curators call interventions before. They’re fun, provocative, and revealing where the living artist and his or her art click with art from the past. Here, it gets the gong.
