Joséphin Péladan: A Proto-Curator?

Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.

This, of course, is a provisional term for these individuals, although of all the possible professions in the art field, that of the modern-day curator most closely fits their work. Certainly, they had little in common with either the traditional museum custodian or the private gallerist. In France we find a few interesting examples of "protocurators" even before Péladan. A very early one is Mammès-Claude Pahin de La Blancherie, who in the second half of the eighteenth century was especially appalled by the cruelty of the American slave trade and devoted himself to liberating art and science from the bonds of tradition. Among other activities connected with his ideological views, he also organized a few exhibitions. These were temporary art shows, produced and conceived by Pahin himself and presented in the rooms of his own salon, which operated with the help of important sponsors. One appealing characteristic of his exhibition practice was that his catalogues also listed works he wanted to exhibit but was unable to borrow for the show. These were marked by an asterisk. See Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 14-22.

Today the best-known curators normally have certain well-developed philosophical positions, on which their work is based and which they feel committed to—or at least very passionately defend. They present these views as part of both their personal and professional identities, use them to set themselves apart from other curators, actually “compete” with them against each other, and so forth. See, for instance, Beti Žerovc, “Charles Esche,”Život umjetnosti, vol. 37, no. 3 (2003): 60–65.

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 316.

Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists (London: Phaidon, 1973), 26.

Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), 98–102.

Ibid., 109.

Joséphin Péladan, Der Androgyn (Munich: Georg Müller, 1924; originally published in French in 1891). The foreword to the German edition of Péladan’s novel series was written by August Strindberg.

Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France: Joséphin Péladan and the Salons de la Rose-Croix (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), 90. Despite the fact that the exhibitions were official events of the Rosicrucian Order, I propose viewing them as primarily Péladan’s affair in both their organization and content, which is how they have been treated by previous writers who have discussed them. I do not compare them with similar exhibitions put on by different artists’ associations at the time, since in the latter the groups’ dynamics, work, interests, and goals were, as a rule, explicitly in the foreground. Much original material connected with Péladan’s Rosicrucian Order and its exhibitions is available on the internet (e.g., through the electronic library Gallica), while in the work cited above, Pincus-Witten provides a precise description of the Order and the exhibitions in English.

Péladan’s obvious knack for promotion, including of course self-promotion, has been noted by earlier art historians, who compare him to the more famous Marinetti. Like the celebrated futurist after him, Péladan worked tirelessly to proclaim his positions and organize events, while at the same time drawing attention to himself. “Like Marinetti, Péladan seems to have been a compulsive exhibitionist, whose greatest artistic creation was his own personality” (Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 109). In the history of contemporary art, Péladan may well be more important than we now imagine, among other reasons because of his potential influence on art-world figures such as Diaghilev, Marinetti, and others, who started appearing not long after him. Péladan, who was also very active in the areas of conceiving and organizing musical and theatrical events, is further connected with such figures by his desire to produce the most auratic events possible, where what was essential was not so much the chosen medium or art form but rather the ultimate effect of the whole, which had to be as magnificent as possible. Thus, a musical event or art exhibition would be “directed” very much like a theater production. Compare Beti Žerovc, “The Exhibition as Artwork, the Curator as Artist: A Comparison with Theatre,” Maska, vol. 25, no. 133/134 (Autumn 2010): 78–93. On the synaesthetic effects of the different artistic media at the Rosicrucian salons, and on Péladan’s extraordinary enthusiasm for Wagner, see Laurinda S. Dixon, “Art and Music at the Salons de la Rose-Croix,” in The Documented Image; Visions in Art History, eds. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon (New York: Syracuse, 1987), 165–186.

Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, “The Belgian artists and the Rose-Croix,” in Simbolismo en Europa: Nestor en las Hesperides (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderna, 1990), 371.

Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France, 104–106, 131. The strong connection between contemporary art exhibitions and the media, even in the nineteenth century, is evident in the fact that for this first salon, as many as two thousand invitations were sent to the press! In fact, of all the Rosicrucian salons, the first received the best response from the media; this was, I expect, due in part not only to the initial shock at such an extraordinary project, but also to the show itself, which in fact impressed many as a special kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. The salons that followed did not elicit such a response, and the last editions saw a decline in both the size of the shows and the quality of the artwork, as well as in the enthusiasm of sympathizers and financial backers and even in Péladan’s own determination and drive. All of this led to an increase in negative responses from the press. See Christophe Beaufils, Joséphin Péladan (1858−1918): Essai sur une maladie du lyrisme (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1993), 272–273, 300–301, 313–314, and elsewhere.

Beaufils, Joséphin Péladan, 225–235; Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France, 140–144.

The French symbolists who are best known today had no desire to participate in Péladan’s salons, although he did all he could to assemble as star-studded a group as possible (partly, I assume, because he was well aware of its promotional and social potential). Thus, he invited both Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to show their work, but he did not receive their permission. He simply idolized Moreau, who, however, evidently had serious doubts about the Rosicrucian hocus-pocus. Even so, the painter sent his students to Péladan to be exhibited. Of the numerous French artists who showed work in his salons, not many are particularly famous today. The ones who do stand out somewhat are Charles Filiger, Alphonse Osbert, Alexandre Séon, Edmond Aman-Jean, Antoine Bourdelle, Georges Rouault, and Armand Point. Nor can we say that the group of artists that formed around Péladan's salons was fully coherent in style. Especially in the first salon, several artists had distinctly post-impressionist tendencies; here we could put Count de la Rochefoucauld. As the years passed, the salons became more unified stylistically, though unfortunately with a drop-off in the better-quality artists, while the work of those such as Point, Osbert, and Séon came to be seen, in a way, as the most typically Rosicrucian style of art.

But even here he was not always successful, as we learn from an amusing anecdote. One of Péladan’s favorite painters was the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones, who was more than a little astonished by Péladan’s invitation to participate. He wrote about it to his colleague, the painter George Frederic Watts: “I don’t know about the Salon of the Rose-Cross—a funny high falutin sort of pamphlet has reached me—a letter asking me to exhibit there, but I feel suspicious of it … the pamphlet was disgracefully silly.” (Quentin Bell, A New and Noble School: The Pre-Raphaelites [London: Macdonald, 1982], 175).

Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World: The Conflict between Market and Self-Expression, (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1998), 9–10 et passim.

Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France, 211–216. Longer summaries of the rules can be found in Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 111–112; and Jullian, The Symbolists, 227.

Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 111–112.

Péladan’s similarity to certain modern-day curators can be seen as well in the incoherence of his ideas—he was incredibly enthusiastic about all sorts of things, including, unsurprisingly, things that were completely incompatible. For example, although he banned the portrait genre (with only rare exceptions), he exhibited grandiose portraits of himself, and although he was a devout Catholic and a defender of virtue and purity, he was also a devoted admirer of the Belgian painter and illustrator Félicien Rops, whose drawings and illustrations are often a very perverse kind of pornography. This was an artist and an art that sprang from completely different views, the very opposite of his own, but still Péladan desperately wanted him for his salons and so always found a way to explain his enthusiasm for the Belgian. For example: “I have seen some of his masterful etchings, of such an intense perversity that I, who am preparing the Treatise on Perversity, was enchanted by his extraordinary talent” (Ollinger-Zinque, “The Belgian artists and the Rose-Croix,” 370). The two men also engaged in a vast correspondence; Péladan wrote to Rops: “May the devil, your supposed master, keep for you the admiration of Catholic artists, to the greater confusion of Protestant pigs and bourgeois swine, Amen!” (ibid.). Rops, in fact, never did exhibit in Péladan’s salons, although he provided illustrations for a number of his novels.

Ollinger-Zinque, “The Belgian artists and the Rose-Croix,” 370.

On connections between Péladan and, for example, Duchamp (the two had many interests in common), see John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 27, 252; and James Housefield, “The Nineteenth-Century Renaissance and the Modern Facsimile: Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, From Ravaisson-Mollien to Péladan and Duchamp,” in The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century / Le 19e Siècle Renaissant, eds. Yannick Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Publications, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2003), 73−88, among others. When we consider what traces Péladan left on curatorship, it is essential to stress his potential structural influences. In the present article, therefore, I have largely disregarded his specific ideas, which can be so bombastic that they very quickly drown out everything else and take us in their own direction. Looking at these ideas, we soon find ourselves dealing with instantly obvious comparisons based mainly on content (for example, with Harald Szeemann’s body of work).