{"id":3228,"date":"2019-06-06T12:13:24","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T10:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eg-fineart.com\/gustave%e2%80%90adolf-mossa\/"},"modified":"2019-07-03T17:53:42","modified_gmt":"2019-07-03T15:53:42","slug":"gustave%e2%80%90adolf-mossa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/gustave%e2%80%90adolf-mossa\/","title":{"rendered":"Gustave\u2010Adolf Mossa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gustav-Adolf Mossa was initiated to watercolor by his father, Alexis Mossa, his only teacher and a landscape painter and professor at the Ecole nationale des Arts d\u00e9coratifs<\/em> in Nice. Together they travelled through Italy in 1902 and again in 1903 before coming back to Nice, where Gustav-Adolf started developing his own style, founded on a highly symbolistic and obsessive imaginary. The reason why \u2013 shortly after his return from Italy and quite without precedence \u2013 he was able to build such an outstanding, unique and creative symbolist oeuvre, remains a mystery. The secret genesis of his work inevitably aroused the interest of psychologists and psychoanalysts, but their varied interpretations were often contradictory: one stresses the smothering role of an over-possessive mother, while another refers to the aura of the paternal image, the statue of the Commander, etc. For instance, the psychiatrist Guy Darcourt has suggested that Mossa\u2019s artistic productions illustrate fantasies that could be associated to neurosis. However, one point can be made: literature undoubtedly remains at the core of Mossa\u2019s artistic creation. It was his sensual enjoyment and deep knowledge of a vast literary corpus that provided Mossa with his inspiration. His library, now kept at the Palais Mass\u00e9na in Nice, shows his very great interest in poets, tragic epics, classical music, but also for the newly established sciences of psychanalysis. Even if Mossa had no medical background and was not familiar at all with the Parisian or Viennese circles of neurologists, he had books and papers by Charcot and Freud in his library. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in this\ncontext that the current and captivating self-portrait appeared at the early\nstage of his oeuvre. The young artist has represented himself in a frontal\nmanner, bare backed, with red eyes and retracted shoulders, suggesting the\ndarkness of this state of mind, and with his palette and a (phallic?) brush in\nhis hands. This feeling is further exalted through the different details and\nsymbols composing the portrait. An aggressive snake surrounds his shoulders and\na scorpion covered with blood figures on his chest. If, following symbolic\ntradition, the presence of the reptile has often been associated with evil, the\nscorpion significance is less straightforward. Mossa has probably borrowed the\nmotif from a crucifixion painted in the 15th<\/sup> century, attributed to\nGiovanni Canavesio, in Notre-Dame-des-Fontaine at La Brigue, near Nice. In the\nfresco, the scorpion is visible on a yellow flag held by roman soldiers\nassisting the crucifixion. In the context of this drawing, the association of\nthe scorpion to blood could be further understood through the idea of suffering,\nechoing the Passion of the Christ. But it is also an echo of sexual connotation\nand Ophidian representations, that make of this animal a divinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blood\nspots and handprint covering the wall further underline this image of pain and despair.\nRepresented holding an elongated brush, a palette and violin, Mossa presents\nhimself both as a painter and a musician, underlining the complexity of his\nidentity. In the same perspective, the background is decorated with three\ndrawings: a venetian setting of the Bridge of Sighs, a woman menacing a hydrocephalic\nfoetus with a knife, which could raise many further interpretations (\u2026), and a Provencal\nlandscape. The arrangement with the two landscapes situates Mossa in filiation with\nhis father and evokes the two places that mattered most to him. The Ponte dei Sospiri<\/em> in Venice is moreover\na symbol of death in art, etc., Mossa\u2019s symbols often being layered and abounding\nwithin his oeuvre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As suggested\nin the title chosen for the catalogue raisonn\u00e9, the present sheet has been\nunderstood as a psychological introspection by the artist of him-self. It is a portrait that,\nlike the Oracle of Delphi, reveals and obscures at the same time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has also been\nconsidered as the first Freudian self-portrait in the history of art. The intense\nand literary discussions at the end of the 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup>\ncentury, about the monster hidden within the human body are clearly another way\nto understand this work. All these approaches are very tempting, yet the truth\nremains a secret. From 1919, Mossa systematically kept hidden his own \u201cworld\u201d\nin portfolio and didn\u2019t speak about his symbolist and allegorical creation,\neven to those close to him. This silence is at the very heart of the enigma. After\nhis death, his bequest to the Mus\u00e9e des\nBeaux-Arts<\/em> of Nice of a collection of his works has revealed this\nextraordinary corpus. Works that are being rediscovered only today, inciting\ngreat interest and raising many questions.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gustav-Adolf Mossa was initiated to watercolor by his father, Alexis Mossa, his only teacher and a landscape painter and professor at the Ecole nationale des Arts d\u00e9coratifs in Nice. Together they travelled through Italy in 1902 and again in 1903 before coming back to Nice, where Gustav-Adolf started developing his own style, founded on a … Continue reading “Gustave\u2010Adolf Mossa”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3228\/"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post\/"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2\/"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments\/?post=3228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3228\/revisions\/"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3235,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3228\/revisions\/3235\/"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3225\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/?parent=3228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/?post=3228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillisgoldman.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags\/?post=3228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}