Date: 14-07-2002
Owning Institution: The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 19th Century        

The nineteenth-century French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes – idolised by Gauguin, admired by Picasso, less well known than he deserves to be – was strongly drawn to the story of John the Baptist’s death. Puvis painted two pictures inspired by the tale: a large unfinished painting done in the mid-1860s, owned by the National Gallery; and a smaller work, done a little later, now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. For the first time in nearly a century they can be seen side by side, in an exhibition arranged for the purposes of comparison. Today is the last day of its run in Birmingham (although it will also travel to the National Gallery, where it can be seen from 24 July). By way of encouragement to get along, this week’s picture is the Barber Institute Beheading of St John the Baptist.

The later of Puvis’s two pictures and therefore, so to speak, his final word on the subject, it was first exhibited in 1870. The reviews were not good. Jules-Antoigne Castagnary referred to it as “a grotesque vignette”, while the caricaturist ‘Cham’ satirised what he regarded as the picture’s unnatural compression in a cartoon with the mocking caption “Obliged to cut down the tree before coming to his head: John the Baptist still has a chance.”  The attack (while quite funny) missed the point of Puvis’s work. Naturalism and neat perspective were not high on his list of priorities. He harked back to early Italian Renaissance and Byzantine art (hence the icon-like face of St John, with its gold aureole). His aim, he said, was not principally to tell a story or flesh out a scene. “I have wanted to be more and more sober, and more and more simple. I have condensed, summarised, compressed. I have tried to say as much as possible in a few words.”

The biblical accounts of John the Baptist’s death pit sexual decadence against saintly virtue. Shortly after he was thrown into prison for criticising Herod’s adulterous relationship with Herodias, Herodias’s daughter Salome performed a sexy dance for Herod and his friends, and when given her choice of reward requested the Baptist’s head on a plate. This grisly subject was popular among nineteenth-century painters, largely because it gave artists the opportunity to smuggle sex and violence into their work under the pretext of religious art. Puvis’s handling of the subject is unusual, because he seems so thoroughly uninterested in the sadistic sexual overtones of the story. But he too gives the impression that he is using the story for his own ends – not to preach conventional Christian pieties, but to elaborate a form of personal symbolism.

In accordance with his stated goal of compression he reduces the story to a drama of three figures in a minimally elaborated setting. The saint’s prison has been abbreviated to a claustrophobically small courtyard, as unkempt as it is poky, weeds sprouting from the interstices between grey cracked flagstones. John kneels, arms extended symmetrically from his sides, palms held outwards as if to protest his innocence. He seems almost oblivious to his fate, having an expression of intense spiritual contemplation on his gaunt face. In dynamic contrast, John’s orientally garbed and muscular executioner is intent on severing the saint’s head from his body with a single stroke of his saber (audaciously, he is going for it on the backhand). The slight and stooping figure of Salome is perhaps even more surprising. Holding the platter for the saint’s head weakly, in her dangling left hand, she seems quite undone by the sight of the deed. She looks defeated in her moment of victory.

Perhaps the closest and most illuminating equivalent to Puvis’ painting, in literature, is his friend Stephane Mallarme’s poem “Herodiade”. It was written at about the same time, in 1867, while Mallarme was recovering from a spiritual crisis. Having lost his faith in God, the poet had discovered a new faith in Art. “We are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul,” he wrote, explaining that he now admired the saints and prophets not because they had seen the truth, but because they had so beautifully defied it with the fictions of religion – “proclaiming, in the face of the Void, these glorious lies!”. The figure of John the Baptist in Mallarme’s “Herodiade” is a dreamer who, even at the moment of his death, holds fast to his dream of “the Absolute”.

Which is also, I think, Puvis’s conception of John in this painting. There is nothing in the grim setting to suggest the imminent transport of the saint’s soul to heaven. But the expression on his face suggests that he is sufficiently rapt for that not to matter. In this frozen moment it is the beauty of his thoughts that counts. The painter has signed the picture, in the bottom right, with the date of his own forty-fifth birthday – an unusual gesture, which underlines his own personal sense of identification with the subject. As in Mallarme’s poem, so in Puvis’ picture, the saint has been reinvented as an inspiring prototype for melancholic but spiritually inclined late nineteenth-century artists. In a decadent, violent world he clings to his vision, which is all that he has.