The legendary Greek prince Oedipus confronts the malevolent Sphinx, who torments travelers with a riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Remains of victims who answered incorrectly litter the foreground. (The solution is the human, who crawls as a baby, strides upright in maturity, and uses a cane in old age.) Moreau made his mark with this painting at the Paris Salon of 1864. Despite the growing prominence of depictions of everyday life, he portrayed biblical, mythological, and imagined stories. His otherworldly imagery inspired many younger artists and writers, including Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde.
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Title:Oedipus and the Sphinx
Artist:Gustave Moreau (French, Paris 1826â1898 Paris)
Date:1864
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:81 1/4 Ă 41 1/4 in. (206.4 Ă 104.8 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of William H. Herriman, 1920
Accession Number:21.134.1
The Painting: In a rocky mountain pass, a heroic male nude encounters a figure with the head and pointed bare breasts of a woman, the ornate blue feathered wings of a bird, the clawed arms and legs of a lion, and the tail of a serpent. The male figure holds a long, ornate spear with his left hand, and a chalice decorated with a snake and four griffons sits atop a pedestal beside him. An enigmatic hand, foot, and human bone riddle the foreground. While such a scene may seem foreign today, nineteenth-century viewers of Gustave Moreauâs (French, 1826â1898) painting were quite familiar with the subject.
The picture shows the famous confrontation between the adventurer Oedipus and the mythic predatory monster, the Sphinx, memorably told by the great Greek tragedian, Sophocles (498-406 BC). The creature plagued the city of Thebes, accosting travelers and killing everyone who could not answer her riddle: "What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?" Oedipus defeated the Sphinx by answering the riddle: it is man, himself, who crawls as an infant, rises to two feet as an adult, and often requires the aid of a walking stick as a "third leg" in old age, the "evening" of life. In responding correctly, Oedipus saved his own life and all of Thebes, and became the cityâs king. Moreau painted the subject several times. This first version, from 1864, was shown in the Salon of that year, where it made Moreauâs name by winning a medal, spawning much discussion in the press, and finding an immediate purchaser in Prince Napoleon. The artist returned to the subject on multiple occasions in the 1880s.
Moreauâs interpretation of the mythological theme relied heavily on that of his predecessor, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780â1867), in his Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx (see fig. 1 above). Moreau would have seen Ingresâs version of the scene when it was exhibited in Paris in 1846, the year Moreau was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at age twenty and when he was studying with the Neoclassical painter François Edouard Picot (1786â1868). Most likely, Moreau would have seen the picture again when Ingres exhibited it in his large retrospective at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. About 1860 Moreau made four small drawings on the back of a page in a book he owned that shift compositionally from Ingresâs Oedipus to his own. (The cartoon after Ingres is reproduced in Holten 1957.) Both painters depicted the moment when Oedipus confronts the monster on a mountainside outside Thebes. But whereas Ingres included the foot of a dead victim and the skull and ribs of a prior contender at solving the Sphinxâs riddle at bottom left, in his final oil Moreau was more extreme in his inclusion of morbid details, reveling in the green, rotting flesh of her prior victimâs foot and dirty toenails, an earlier victimâs ribcage, and the representation of a hand with grimy fingernails that clutches a rock as if holding on to the last gasps of life. Where Ingresâs Oedipus self-confidently dominates the encounter, Moreauâs Oedipus remains still as the Sphinx lunges aggressively toward him, her long, curved claws scratching Oedipusâs chest. Where Ingresâs hero displays naturalistic muscularity, Moreauâs Oedipus presents his long legs and the muscular ridge where his abdomen meets his hip in a classic contrapposto pose that highlights the thin ideal body type common in later nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture. Although Moreauâs Oedipus leans away from the monster, he courageously stares her down.
Dorra proposed the following iconographic associations for objects in the painting: the crown and purple cloth as emblems of political power, the golden laurel as representative of official academic honors, the fig tree at the left of the Sphinx as a traditional symbol of sin, and the jewelry of the Sphinx as a symbol for material wealth. Kaplan (1982) associated the butterfly near the ornate chalice with the soul and the snake coiled around the pedestal with death, noting that the butterflyâs escape from the snake echoes the laurel as a symbol of victory.
Context: The context for Ingresâs and Moreauâs versions of the scene differed substantially. According to Rosenblum (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, New York, 1967, p. 80), Ingresâs picture conformed to "the growing Romantic taste for the grotesque and the sublime that, in France, was to reach its climax in the works of Gericault and Delacroix." Moreauâs painting, produced nearly forty years later, has been seen to relate to a growing fear of socially and politically powerful women among the French populace at mid-century. (See Heller 1981, pp. 8â9, 11â13 and Mathews 1999, pp. 98, 107â11, 113â14, 259 n. 27, among others.) Politician and philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhonâs (1809â1865) anti-feminist writings, ranging from the late 1840s until the 1875 posthumous publication of his unfinished treatise La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, cautioned that men must subordinate women, or cultural degeneracy would follow. Moreauâs picture may allude to the same concerns.
Moreau, himself, described the subject of the painting in his private notebook with commentaries on his paintings, emphasizing the ultimate victory of man over female monster: "The painter imagines man as having attained the serious and momentous hour of his life and finding himself in the presence of the eternal enigma. She clutches him in an embrace with her terrible clawsâbut the pilgrim, noble and calm in his moral power, regards her without trembling. She is the earthly chimera, vile as all matter and attractive nonethelessârepresented by this charming head and the wings of the ideal, but with the body of a monster, of the carnivore who rips apart and annihilates. But the strong and firm soul defies the monsterâs bestialities. Man, [strong] and firm, defies the enervating and brutal blows of matter. With his eyes fixed on the ideal, he proceeds confidently towards his goal after having trampled her under his feet." (Moreau, Notebook II, III, 21, in Kaplan 1974, p. 142, translated in Heller 1981) Elements such as the snake and the fig tree placed in proximity to the female Sphinx link women and temptation; similarly, a bit later in the century, the "New Woman," the freshly independent woman anathema to conservative French society, was often represented as Medusa, with snakes in her hair.
Moreauâs interest in mythology as a powerful means of conveying ideas through symbols and emblem-laden figures has been discussed extensively by Lacambre (1999), Cooke (2003), Allan (2008), and Larson (2015). Larson argued that the present painting "functions as allegory, with Oedipus, representing the soul of man, treading over the corpses of the material world, all the while resisting the temptations of its seductive side, represented by the female Sphinx. According to this interpretation, Moreauâs figures correspond to specific ideas." Larson noted that this interpretation was steeped in a theory of correspondences between material objects and spiritual ideas that was common in the later nineteenth century. Lacambre also contended that the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx encapsulated the opposing forces of good and evil, man and woman, and spiritual and material. Similarly, Allan discussed Moreauâs "emblematizing the equation Matter=Woman=Evil" in the Sphinx (a role that the femme fatale would inhabit soon in Symbolist art), pointed out that several period critics harped on the Sphinxâs "sexually predatory" nature, and termed Moreauâs reading of the myth "misogynistic."
Still other interpretations of the picture have included psychological readings. Paladilhe (1971), in a Freudian reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx, notes that Moreauâs father died just a few months before he began the painting, and argues that the artist projected onto the theme his unconscious desire to exorcise the castrating influence of his mother. It has also been suggested that this work symbolizes Moreau's struggle in choosing the life of an artist and giving up sensual gratification, and, similarly, that it presents an allegory of the artist âs own spiritual refusal of material temptations in his pursuit of idealism (Kaplan 1974; Allan 2008).
New York. Museum of Modern Art. "Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin," December 4, 1961âFebruary 4, 1962, no. 175.
Art Institute of Chicago. "Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin," March 2âApril 15, 1962, no. 175.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Gustave Moreau," July 16âSeptember 1, 1974, no. 28.
San Francisco. California Palace of the Legion of Honor. "Gustave Moreau," September 14âNovember 3, 1974, no. 28.
Philadelphia Museum of Art. "The Second Empire, 1852â1870: Art in France under Napoleon III," October 1âNovember 26, 1978, no. VI-93 (lent by the estate of Germain Seligman, New York).
Detroit Institute of Arts. "The Second Empire, 1852â1870: Art in France under Napoleon III," January 15âMarch 18, 1979, no. VI-93.
Paris. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. "L'art en France sous le Second Empire," May 11âAugust 13, 1979, no. 261.
Paris. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. "Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream," September 29, 1998âJanuary 4, 1999, no. 28.
Art Institute of Chicago. "Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream," February 13âApril 25, 1999, no. 28.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream," June 1âAugust 22, 1999, no. 28.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "The Masterpieces of French Painting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800â1920," February 4âMay 6, 2007, no. 45.
Berlin. Neue Nationalgalerie. "Französische Meisterwerke des 19. Jahrhunderts aus dem Metropolitan Museum of Art," June 1âOctober 7, 2007, unnumbered cat.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Rodin at The Met," September 16, 2017âFebruary 4, 2018, no catalogue.
Hamburg. Hamburger Kunsthalle. "Femme Fatale: GazeâPowerâGender," December 9, 2022âApril 10, 2023, no catalogue.
LOAN OF THIS WORK IS RESTRICTED.
Gustave Moreau. Letter to EugĂšne Fromentin. October 18, 1862 [published in Barbara Wright, "Correspondance d'EugĂšne Fromentin," Paris, 1995, vol. 2, pp. 1266â67], states that he has been working seriously on this painting for fifteen days.
Ernest Chesneau. "Beaux-arts: Salon de 1864." Le constitutionnel 49 (May 3, 1864), unpaginated, extols the painting's appearance at the Salon of 1864 at length.
Hippolyte Briollet. "Quatrains pour lâexposition des beaux-arts." Le tintamarre 23 (May 15, 1864), p. 4.
Georges Lafenestre. "La peinture et la sculpture au Salon de 1864." Revue contemporaine, 2nd ser., 13 (May 15, 1864), pp. 348â50, notes it has the merit of arousing serious artistic discussion; see a strange disparity between its modern, original conception and its primitive, imitative execution; contrasts its emphasis on the enigma of the Sphinx to Ingresâ version; admires the dramatic confrontation between the two figures; compares the execution of Oedipusâs anatomy and drapery to Venetian and Florentine masters of the 15th century, specifically Mantegna and Bellini; critiques the artist for not treating the subject in a more personal, sincere style drawn from nature.
Jean Rousseau. "Salon de 1864." Le figaro 11 (May 19, 1864), pp. 3â4, describes the picture at length.
Edmond About. "Salon de 1864, XIV." Le petit journal no. 477 (May 22, 1864), pp. 2â3 [reprinted in About 1864], complains of a certain servility in the execution and of the wooden quality of the figure of Oedipus; appreciates Moreau's departure from tradition in unseating the sphinx from her plinth, but remarks that she is as stiff and expressionless as the seated Egyptian type; comments that Moreau has chosen for the face of the Sphinx the features of a Huret doll; mentions that the landscape was inspired by Moreau's trip to Italy and questions the necessity of the Etruscan vase in the foreground.
Edmond About. Salon de 1864. Paris, 1864, pp. 137â42 [reprint of About 1864].
Saturnin. "Lettres dâun gardien du palais de lâindustrie sur le Salon de 1864." Le nain jaune 2 (June 1, 1864), pp. 4â5, states that only the paying public, rather than those who attended the Salon on a free day, paid particular attention to it; describes it as Florentine in form and Venetian in color; notes the artist obviously followed Pontormo and Giorgione; praises the artist for his brilliant imagination and rare vigor; states he prefers this âOedipe fantastico-moyen-Ăągeâ (fantastic medieval Oedipus) to Ingreâs âOedipe provincial et blafardâ (provincial and pale Oedipus).
Maxime du Camp. "Le Salon de 1864." Revue des deux mondes, 2nd per., 34 (June 1, 1864), pp. 706â711 [reprinted in Camp 1867], praises both the content and the execution, and finds Moreau's interpretation more spiritual than that of Ingres.
Alfred Nettement. "Salon de 1864: III." La semaine des familles 6 (June 11, 1864), pp. 587â88, discusses the subject at length; notes that the painting incites mixed but passionate reactions; praises its âsentiment d'horreur mysteÌrieuse qui en fait la beauteÌâ (feeling of mysterious horror which makes it beautiful); states that it is âune oeuvre âsui generisâ qui n'en rappelle aucune autreâ (a unique work which recalls no other) and that it invites contemplation.
Jules Delpit. "Expositions des beaux-arts en province: Bordeaux." Les beaux-arts 10 (April 15, 1865), pp. 238â39, notes that it was displayed in a place of honor; compares Oedipus to Saint John the Baptist.
Ernest Chesneau. "Beaux-Arts: Salon de 1865." Le constitutionnel 50 (May 9, 1865), unpaginated [p. 2], notes its success at the previous yearâs Salon and compares it to âJasonâ.
Maxime du Camp. "Le Salon de 1866." Revue des deux mondes 36 (June 1, 1866), pp. 705â6, states that it remains his best work.
Maxime du Camp. Les beaux-arts Ă l'exposition universelle et aux salons de 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866 & 1867. Paris, 1867, pp. 109â19 [reprint of Camp 1864].
Paul Mantz. "Les beaux-arts Ă l'exposition universelle." Gazette des beaux-arts (October 1867), p. 330.
Ernest Chesneau. Les nations rivales dans l'art. Paris, 1868, pp. 181â99, 203, 206â7, calls it an ideal work because each element of the composition has been thought out and perfectly realized; remarks that it is one of the best pictures in the Salon.
Claude Phillips. "Gustave Moreau." Magazine of Art 8 (1885), p. 230, comments that the sphinx is too small and resembles a wild cat rather than a lioness, but that she has the head of a classical beauty; remarks that the figure of Oedipus suggests not the study of Mantegna or Pollaiuolo but the influence of the Greek canon; mentions that there is a noticeable mannerism in the rendering of the figures that detracts from the "pictorial qualities of the design".
Ary Renan. "Gustave Moreau." Gazette des beaux-arts, 2nd ser., 28 (May 1, 1886), p. 378.
Jules Breton. Nos peintres du siĂšcle. Paris, [189?], p. 178, comments that the nervous and subtle execution of parts of the landscape recalls Fromentin.
[Jules] Castagnary. Salons (1857â1870). Paris, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 196â202, condemns its literary quality and criticizes the details, calling it a pastiche of the Italian Renaissance.
G. W. The Pageant. London, 1897, pp. 5, 13â14, ill.
Ary Renan. Gustave Moreau, 1826â1898. Paris, 1900, pp. 27, 45, 49â52, 131, 133, reproduces an engraving after it.
Odilon Redon. Letter to Mme de Holstein. January 29, 1900 [reprinted in Redon 1923, p. 38], recalls the deep impression this painting made on him at the Salon of 1864.
Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony. London, 1933, pp. 295â96, remarks that it is the first painting in Moreau's Sphinx series dealing with "the theme of satanic beauty in primitive mythology".
Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 70.
Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony. 2nd ed. London, 1954, pp. 295â96.
Bettina Polak. Het Fin-de-SiĂšcle in de Nederlandse Shilderkunst: De symolistische beweging 1890â1900. The Hague, 1955, pp. 38â39, discusses it in a study of the sphinx in the art and literature of the nineteenth century.
Ragnar von Holten. "Oedipe et le sphinx: Gustave Moreau genombrottsverk." Tidskrift för Konstvetenskap: Symbolister 32 (1957), pp. 37â50, ill., mentions that the posture of the Sphinx may be derived from a poem by Heinrich Heine in the "Buch der Lieder".
Ragnar von Holten. L'art fantastique de Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1960, pp. 2â9, 13, fig. 6, remarks that for Moreau, the subject represents not only the fight between good and evil, but also between the sexes; agrees that this painting is eclectic, but comments that in Moreau's search to express his way of thinking, he has completely broken with the academic tradition of Ingres.
Dore Ashton. Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1961, pp. 113, 115, 179, no. 175, ill., comments that the transfixed gaze of Oedipus and the Sphinx is characteristic of Moreau "who again and again suggests an ambiguous mirror-image, two aspects, two abstract entities that confront each other and recognize each other all too well"; mentions that mountains commonly threaten the characters in Moreau's mythology and believes that here they have been transformed into towers or thrones, and seem to "symbolize an ideal of ascension".
Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, XIXâXX Centuries. New York, 1967, pp. 1â5, ill., mention that Moreau made careful preparations for it, including more than thirty sketches, ten of which are studies of a large bird's wing, which served as a model for the wing of the sphinx, and that there are also two large cartoons; remark that after the Salon Moreau repeated the composition in a number of watercolors and in two paintings that have the appearance of sketches, but are dated May 1864.
Jean Paladilhe. Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1971, pp. 95, 97, 99, 102, 110â11, 137, ill.
Philippe Jullian. Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s. New York, 1971, pp. 165, 252, cites Moreau's unpublished notes describing the Sphinx in the picture.
Julius Kaplan. Gustave Moreau. Exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles, 1974, pp. 22â24, 26, 32â33, 41, 53, 80, 129â30, no. 28, ill., remarks that Moreau conceived Oedipus and the Sphinx in terms of a conflict between moral idealism and sensual desire; notes that Moreau supplemented Ingres's prototypes with classical and Persian scenes of confrontations between man and beast; suggests that Moreau borrowed from Michelangelo the static figures whose staring expresssions suggest they are lost in thought or dream; finds the style to be reminiscent of Carpaccio and the synthesis to be influenced by Poussin.
Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Gustave Moreau: With a catalogue of finished paintings, watercolors and drawings. Boston, 1976, pp. 14, 18, 28, 70, 81â85, 94, 110â11, 128, 130, 197, 241, 257, 269 n. 312, pp. 284, 305, no. 64, ill. (color and black and white), discusses a series of watercolors and drawings made for it.
Peter Hahlbrock. Gustave Moreau oder Das Unbehagen in der Natur. Berlin, 1976, pp. 29, 49â54, 91â92, 101â3, 108, 121, 143, 153, 171â72, 174â75, 180â81, no. 36 (overall and detail).
Hans H. HofstĂ€tter. Gustave Moreau: Leben und Werk. 1978, pp. 24, 70â72, 81, colorpl. 9.
Reinhold Heller. The Earthly Chimera and the Femme Fatale: Fear of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Art. Exh. cat., David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago. Chicago, 1981, p. 12.
Julius Kaplan. The Art of Gustave Moreau: Theory, Style, and Content. PhD diss., Columbia University. Ann Arbor, 1982, pp. 35â44, 183 n. 6, p. 184 nn. 16, 18, 29, 30, pl. 10, discusses the picture, its sources, and studies for it at length.
Roy McMullen. Degas: His Life, Times, and Work. Boston, 1984, p. 107.
GeneviĂšve Lacambre inGustave Moreau: Symboliste. Ed. Toni Stooss and Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Exh. cat., Kunsthaus ZĂŒrich. ZĂŒrich, 1986, p. 16.
Pierre-Louis Mathieu inGustave Moreau: Symboliste. Ed. Toni Stooss and Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Exh. cat., Kunsthaus ZĂŒrich. ZĂŒrich, 1986, pp. 21, 30, 32â33, 37, 39, 325.
Toni Stooss inGustave Moreau: Symboliste. Ed. Toni Stooss and Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Exh. cat., Kunsthaus ZĂŒrich. ZĂŒrich, 1986, pp. 11, 70â102, 124â25, no. 19, ill. (color).
Gustave Moreau: Symboliste. Ed. Toni Stooss and Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Exh. cat., Kunsthaus ZĂŒrich. ZĂŒrich, 1986, p. 300.
Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Tout l'Ćuvre peint de Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1991, pp. 5, 8â9, 68, 87, no. 105, fig. 105, colorpl. VIII, states that Moreau began working on the composition in 1860, but mistakenly remarks that the earliest studies for it date from 1861.
Pierre-Louis Mathieu. Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1994, pp. 9, 48, 72â79, 81, 83, 90, 110â11, 132, 139, 191, 264â65, 269, 277 n. 5â6, p. 278 nn. 24â30, p. 280 n. 60, p. 287 n. 63, p. 288 n. 15, 292, ill. (color), states that it is difficult to establish whether Heine's poem from the "Buch der Leider" was a source of inspiration because of the dating of the preparatory sketches.
Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 437, ill.
Michael Fried. Manet's Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s. Chicago, 1996, pp. 10, 164, 308â12, 314â17, 577 nn. 125â26, p. 578 nn. 129, 133, colorpl. 14, observes that it was criticized for its "hard, detailed, linear style of Mantegna and other fifteenth-century Northern Italian masters," but also notes that it may have been the most highly-praised picture at any Salon of the 1860s; mentions that, in the alphabetically arranged Salon, it was in the same room as Manet's "The Dead Christ and the Angels" (MMA 29.100.51) and thus they were compared critically.
Julius Kaplan inThe Dictionary of Art. Ed. Jane Turner. Vol. 22, New York, 1996, p. 89.
GeneviĂšve Lacambre. Gustave Moreau maĂźtre sorcier. Paris, 1997, pp. 44â45, 108â9, states that a small pencil sketch after Ingres's version of the subject in one of the books in Moreau's library confirms Moreau's knowledge of Ingres's picture.
Peter Cooke. "Gustave Moreau from 'Song of Songs' (1853) to 'Orpheus' (1866)." Apollo 148 (September 1998), pp. 39â42, 44â45 nn. 26â27, 29â30, 32â33, 36, fig. 6, discusses the picture's strong impact on the critics at the Salon of 1864; notes that it represented the first time in his mature oeuvre that Moreau found a symbolic form for his inner struggle.
GeneviĂšve Lacambre. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream. Exh. cat., Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris. Chicago, 1999, pp. 2, 16, 75, 77â83 n. 17, p. 84 nn. 20â22, 27, pp. 92, 94, 99, 106, 108, 127, 196, 222, 282, no. 28, ill. (color, overall and detail) [French ed., 1998], observes that Moreau lists our painting in his notebook as no. 53 "Sphinx. Oedipus. A man of mature age wrestling with the enigma of life," the only picture of the subject marked with a cross to indicate that it has been completed; examines our picture within the context of its sources and other versions of the subject to elucidate Moreau's working methods; observes that the canvas was purchased on October 20, 1862 from Ottoz for Fr 30. and sold to Prince Napoleon on May 1, 1864 for Fr 8,000; quotes extensively from letters and press clippings containing reactions to its first exhibition at the Salon of 1864.
Gustave Moreau. "Sur ses oeuvres et sur lui-mĂȘme." Ecrits sur l'art. Ed. Peter Cooke. Vol. 1, Fontfroide, 2002, pp. 73â74, 182 nn. 61â63, publishes Moreau's thoughts on the painting from his contemporary manuscripts.
Peter Cooke. "Gustave Moreau's 'Ćdipus and the sphinx': archaism, temptation and the nude at the Salon of 1864." Burlington Magazine 146 (September 2004), pp. 609â15, fig. 18.
GeneviĂšve Lacambre inIl Simbolismo da Moreau a Gauguin a Klimt. Exh. cat., Palazzo dei Diamanti. Ferrara, 2007, p. 190.
Kathryn Calley Galitz inThe Masterpieces of French Painting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800â1920. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. New York, 2007, pp. 68â69, 243, no. 45, ill. (overall and detail, color and black and white).
Kathryn Calley Galitz inMasterpieces of European Painting, 1800â1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 73, 286, no. 67, ill. (color and black and white).
Peter Cooke. "Gustave Moreau's 'Salome': The Poetics and Politics of History Painting." Burlington Magazine 149 (August 2007), p. 528 n. 1.
Peter Cooke. "Gustave Moreau and the Reinvention of History Painting." Art Bulletin 90 (September 2008), pp. 394, 399â405, 408, 410â11, 433 n. 33, fig. 7, and ill. on cover (color detail), suggests that it is Moreau's attempt to "rival Ingres"; discusses it in the context of a "clear line of development" in Moreau's paintings between 1864 and 1869, which endeavor "to renew history painting through the application of an antitheatrical aesthetic to mythological subjects, without abandoning narrative".
Scott C. Allan. "Interrogating Gustave Moreau's Sphinx: Myth as Artistic Metaphor in the 1864 Salon." Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7 (Spring 2008) [http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring08/39-spring08/spring08article/110-interrogating-gustave-moreaus-sphinx-myth-as-artistic-metaphor-at-the-1864-salon].
Peter Cooke. "Symbolism, Decadence and Gustave Moreau." Burlington Magazine 151 (May 2009), pp. 312, 316, ill. p. 282, fig. 36 (color, overall and detail).
Guillermo Solana. LĂĄgrimas de Eros. Exh. cat., Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid, 2009, pp. 32, 277, fig. 8 (color).
Ferenc TĂłth inLand of Myths: The Art of Gustave Moreau. Ed. Ferenc TĂłth. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Budapest, 2009, pp. 26, 36, 167, fig. 13 (color).
Peter Cooke. "Gustave Moreau and Ingres." Burlington Magazine 156 (April 2014), pp. 221â23, fig. 12 (color), discusses Moreau's challenge to Ingres's own version of the subject, comparing the two paintings at length.
Katie Larson. "The Relocation of Spirituality and Rouault's Modernist Transformation of Moreau's Proto-Symbolist Techniques." The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art. Ed. Michelle Facos and Thor J. Mednick. Farnham, England, 2015, pp. 194, 196, 206 n. 6, states that the picture functions as an allegory of man's soul and its temptations; notes Oedipus's "frozen, somnambulistic quality" that disallows access to his interior state.
Patrick Noon inDelacroix and the Rise of Modern Art. Exh. cat., Minneapolis Institute of Art. London, 2015, p. 161.
Kathryn Calley Galitz. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings. New York, 2016, p. 437, no. 354, ill. pp. 363, 437 (color).
Mel Becker Solomon inGauguin Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ed. Gloria Groom and Genevieve Westerby. Chicago, 2016, para. 9, under no. 123, fig. 123.32 (color) [https://publications.artic.edu/gauguin/reader/gauguinart/section/139805], compares it to Gauguinâs transfer drawing âWoman with a Catâ (c. 1900, Art Institute of Chicago).
Monika Leonhardt inPraised and Ridiculed: French Painting 1820â1880. Exh. cat., Kunsthaus ZĂŒrich. Munich, 2017, p. 217.
The Symbolist Vision. Ed. Stephanie Hackett. Exh. cat., Shepherd W&K Galleries. New York, 2019, unpaginated, under no. 9.
Old Masters. Christie's, New York. October 15, 2020, p. 6, under no. 1.
In this interview, exhibition curator Kiki Karoglou shares provocative insights into the contemporary relevance of mythological hybrid beings and offers a behind-the-scenes look into the making of the exhibition.
After? Gustave Moreau (French, Paris 1826â1898 Paris)
mid to late 19th century
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