Staircase. Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris
Stairway to Heaven: Life After Death for the Mysterious Gustave Moreau
For Gustave Moreau his greatest work may have been his death. He did not exhibit widely in his lifetime, and mostly stayed in solitude at his parents’ home on the Rue de la Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Yet the symbolist artist planned an entire posthumous museum that would only open after he had departed this world.
Moreau died of stomach cancer on April 18, 1898, but he still feels very present in the Musée Gustave Moreau. From the salmon-painted walls to the salon-style assemblage of unfinished work, it is almost exactly as he intended it to be experienced.
When Moreau met his end, he bequeathed not just all the art in his home, including over 4,000 drawings, 1,200 paintings, and hundreds of watercolors, to France, but all the objects in it as they were. Lodged in heavy wood frames all over the walls are wide-eyed unicorns, otherworldly biblical scenes, mystical symbolism, and roaming classical gods. The art is both mesmerizing and arcane, and almost all halted mid-thought. Backgrounds are blank, figures are half-formed. You can flip through whole cabinets of drawing studies, where feathers, snakes, bodies, and symbols are sketched in careful detail, but never finished. He’d decided on establishing these fragments as a museum in 1892, and what’s left is a collision of family heirlooms and priceless art.
Moreau’s father was an architect, and in designing the museum he collaborated with Albert Lafon to add two “grand ateliers” to the top floor, linked by a strange and stunning spiral staircase.
The staircase seems like a miracle, reminiscent in its shape of the spiral staircase at Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That American architectural oddity dates to 1878, and still is an unknown in how it was built with no central support, from a wood non-native to the area, and two 360 degree twists in its 20 feet. Moreau’s on the other hand is cast iron. With its tongue-like shape that slopes out of the ceiling it appears to have recently unraveled down to the floor.
On January 13, 1903, the Musée Gustave Moreau opened to the public for the first time. Gustave himself called it a ”small sentimental museum,” yet it feels like an artist, who was enamored with the esoteric, finding his own myth for himself in death.
Text taken from
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stairway-to-heaven
Photo taken in May 2022
Happy Every Day Is Stairs Day 👍
Staircase. Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris
Stairway to Heaven: Life After Death for the Mysterious Gustave Moreau
For Gustave Moreau his greatest work may have been his death. He did not exhibit widely in his lifetime, and mostly stayed in solitude at his parents’ home on the Rue de la Rochefoucauld in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Yet the symbolist artist planned an entire posthumous museum that would only open after he had departed this world.
Moreau died of stomach cancer on April 18, 1898, but he still feels very present in the Musée Gustave Moreau. From the salmon-painted walls to the salon-style assemblage of unfinished work, it is almost exactly as he intended it to be experienced.
When Moreau met his end, he bequeathed not just all the art in his home, including over 4,000 drawings, 1,200 paintings, and hundreds of watercolors, to France, but all the objects in it as they were. Lodged in heavy wood frames all over the walls are wide-eyed unicorns, otherworldly biblical scenes, mystical symbolism, and roaming classical gods. The art is both mesmerizing and arcane, and almost all halted mid-thought. Backgrounds are blank, figures are half-formed. You can flip through whole cabinets of drawing studies, where feathers, snakes, bodies, and symbols are sketched in careful detail, but never finished. He’d decided on establishing these fragments as a museum in 1892, and what’s left is a collision of family heirlooms and priceless art.
Moreau’s father was an architect, and in designing the museum he collaborated with Albert Lafon to add two “grand ateliers” to the top floor, linked by a strange and stunning spiral staircase.
The staircase seems like a miracle, reminiscent in its shape of the spiral staircase at Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That American architectural oddity dates to 1878, and still is an unknown in how it was built with no central support, from a wood non-native to the area, and two 360 degree twists in its 20 feet. Moreau’s on the other hand is cast iron. With its tongue-like shape that slopes out of the ceiling it appears to have recently unraveled down to the floor.
On January 13, 1903, the Musée Gustave Moreau opened to the public for the first time. Gustave himself called it a ”small sentimental museum,” yet it feels like an artist, who was enamored with the esoteric, finding his own myth for himself in death.
Text taken from
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stairway-to-heaven
Photo taken in May 2022
Happy Every Day Is Stairs Day 👍