Mossa’s Salomés

mossa5.jpg

Salomé (1901).

Monsieur Wiley prompted this post by drawing my attention to the picture above. I’d already seen another Salomé by Gustav Adolf Mossa on this page a few days ago but resisted the temptation to mention it. A bit more searching revealed yet another Mossa rendering of the theme which perhaps isn’t so surprising given the artist’s obsession with lethal women. The first exceeds all previous depictions of the Biblical temptress by having her actually licking blood from the executioner’s sword. In the third picture she’s content merely to use a severed hand as a page-turner while John the Baptist’s mutilated body is carted away by servants.

The search for pictures turned up a blog I hadn’t seen before, Women in the Bible (“This is no religious blog!”), which has several Salomé postings. And there’s also Les voiles de Salomé: Labyrinthique errance, virevoltes et volutes.

mossa6.jpg

Encor Salomé (1905).

mossa7.jpg

Salomé (1908).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Salomé archive

The art of Gustav Adolf Mossa, 1883–1971

mossa1.jpg

Self-portrait.

A French artist and another late Symbolist painter whose idiosyncracies point to Surrealism but whose obsession with femmes fatales looks back to the preoccupations of the fin de siècle. If you don’t mind the implicit misogyny there’s a lot more to be seen here and here.

mossa2.jpg

Elle (1906).

mossa3.jpg

Le baiser d’Hélène (1905).

mossa4.jpg

Bruges-la-morte (1911).

Previously on { feuilleton }
Le Sphinx Mystérieux
La belle sans nom
The Feminine Sphinx
Le Monstre
Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
Empusa
Bruges-la-Morte