“The Idol of Perversity[L’Idole de la Perversite’].” by Jean Delville, 1891.
Great to see Joséphin Péladan & Salon de la Rose + Croix get there due in The New Yorker . Finally it seems as the Occult Roots of Modernism are being acknowledged. BWH
The Magus of Paris and the Occult Roots of Modernism
Joséphin Péladan’s mystical art exhibitions, in Paris, set the stage for everything from Kandinsky’s abstractions to Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
In the Paris of the early eighteen-nineties, at the height of the Decadence, the man of the moment was the novelist, art critic, and would-be guru Joséphin Péladan, who named himself Le Sâr, after the ancient Akkadian word for “king.” He went about in a flowing white cloak, an azure jacket, a lace ruff, and an Astrakhan hat, which, in conjunction with his bushy head of hair and double-pointed beard, gave him the aspect of a Middle Eastern potentate. He was in the midst of writing a twenty-one-volume cycle of novels, titled “La Décadence Latine,” which follows the fantastical adventures of various enchanters, adepts, femmes fatales, androgynes, and other enemies of the ordinary.
Photograph by Walter Damry / RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
His bibliography also includes literary tracts, explications of Wagnerian mythology, and a self-help tome called “How One Becomes a Magus.” He let it be known that he had completed the syllabus. He informed Félix Faure, the President of the Republic, that he had the gift of “seeing and hearing at the greatest distances, useful in controlling enemy councils and suppressing espionage.” He began one lecture by saying, “People of Nîmes, I have only to pronounce a certain formula for the earth to open and swallow you all.” In 1890, he established the Order of the Catholic Rose + Croix of the Temple and the Grail, one of a number of end-of-century sects that purported to revive lost arts of magic. The peak of his fame arrived in 1892, when he launched an annual art exhibition called the Salon de la Rose + Croix, which embraced the Symbolist movement, with an emphasis on its more eldritch guises. Thousands of visitors passed through, uncertain whether they were witnessing a colossal breakthrough or a monumental joke…..
see full article in The NEW YORKER
“Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, 1892-1897” opens at the Guggenheim Museum, on June 30th,
“The Death of Orpheus [Orphiee Mort]. ” Jean Delville, 1893
“I Lock My Dear Upon Myself” by Fernand Khnopff, 1891
“The New Generation [De Jonge Generatie],” by Jan Toorop, 1892
“The Angel of Splendors [L’Ange des Splendours],” by Jean Delville 1894
“Portrait of the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians in Choir Dress, Josephin Paladin,” by Jean Delville, 1895
“Orpheus in Hades [Orphee], ” by Pierre Amédée Marcel-Beronneau 1897
