Moreau's Use Of Symbolism In Les Fleurs Du Mal

The last decades of the 19th century saw the rise of new painting techniques in Western Europe, that challenged the Classical approach that the arts had acquired and denominated what was considered a work of art or not. One of such movements was Symbolism, which began as a literary movement in France with Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal written in 1857.
It is often considered a definite break from Classical painting, as it emphasizes symbols and ideas through the use of forms, lines, shapes and colors; fighting the representational nature of the former. Even though both are opposite tendencies, this didn’t stop emerging artists from combining them to reach new levels of expressions, as is the case with Gustave Moreau, a French painter

It cannot go unmentioned, that during his time as a student with Théodore Chasseriau, he became fully immersed in the major movements that were happening at the time. As a child, he had a Neoclassical education thanks to his father, Louis Moreau, who was an architect. It was because of this reason, that he would foster a passion for recreating old master copies at the Louvre. Moreau had the idea of his father as someone highly important in his life and his death would be a significant event in his life, leaving him with this obsession of death that is reflected in most of his paintings. It was however, his ambition to use his academic background to create art that was grand and according to Pierre Mathieu, he “…wanted to convey a message to the spectator and make his work a kind of bond…”. This desire, he decided, wasn’t approachable through the sole use of history painting and thus he created an aesthetic that would help achieve this personal goal. Not only that, but Moreau viewed said genre to be exhausted by mid-century and so this new approach to it would at the same time renew the convention of what was a history