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SALOME DANCING BEFORE HEROD 
I
cannot look at this painting without thinking it is an unintentional portrait
of the artist's subconscious. As in a dream, all the characters are Moreau; he
is the half dead king Herod trapped in a fantasy Hindu castle, as intricate as
the human brain, but where light enters only faintly. Salome is the artist's
chaotic, repressed, self, and it is really his own head, not John the
Baptist's, he wants her to cut off in order to free his mind of the clutter of
signs and symbols that have mummified his creative energy. He wants Salome to
break the mental chain of logic so that emotional light can pour in. Salome is
the merciful angel of his subconscious, whom he loathes and adores, fears and
admires, and he has loaded her down with jewels until she drowns in a sea of
excess. She carries the Lilly, a Buddhist symbol of perfect unity and the
Catholic symbol of rebirth, although Moreau only saw it as the flower of death. The
painting is tragic, and its victim is the artist himself. It is about the
frustrated cry of the artist who wanted what all Symbolist artist and poets of
his time wanted: to be devoured by the feminine, by mystery, emotion, and the
unknown, so that for a moment, the artist might transcend into the magic realm
of imagination and pure sensation. |