![]() The series of annual salons, which continued for five years and gathered together hundreds of works by international artists, are the subject of a new exhibition at the Guggenheim. The Symbolist poet and critic Remy de Gourmont called the exhibition “the great event of the year.” Some critics arrived ready to ridicule Péladan-who styled himself as a “Sâr,” or high priest-but left feeling only admiration. ![]() Péladan’s first Salon de la Rose + Croix, an exhibition of work by artists that (loosely) shared the leader’s vision, was designed to instil in its audience maximum reverence for beauty and transcendence.Īnd while many visitors didn’t know quite what to make of this occultish scene, they came in droves. Having established his own esoteric fraternity, dubbed L’Ordre de la Rose + Croix du Temple et du Graal, Péladan set about disseminating his anti-realist vision of art as a conduit to higher states of mind, drawing heavily from the Symbolists, a French literary and artistic movement that rejected naturalism in pursuit of subjective expression. A year earlier, in 1891, Péladan had initiated an offshoot of the Rosicrucian order-a religious brotherhood (symbolized by a rose on a cross) that combined elements of Christianity, Jewish mysticism, and occult practices with the belief that its practitioners were the recipients of ancient wisdom. The event’s master of ceremonies, the eccentric poet and novelist Joséphin Péladan, greeted the city’s cultural elite (including the French author Émile Zola) in a long robe and pointed beard and, one imagines, with a gravely serious air. Wafts of burning incense and the sound of the prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal, which was played on an organ throughout the opening night, filled the space. ![]() Paintings of damsels, sirens, and monstrous femmes fatales, as well as religious visionaries, mythical figures, and fantastical temples hung salon-style from the walls. In 1892, on the corner of the grand, tree-rimmed avenue of Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, a peculiar new art salon opened to considerable fanfare at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. ![]()
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