I didn't read much yesterday, but the theme of the super-rich art salon continues. Charles was Jewish, so the insidious creep of antisemitism makes itself known in Renoirs complaints that Charles has hung Gustave Moreau near his own paintings. Renoir says of Moreau, it's "Jew Art". On the internet today I have a look at Gustav's Galatee and it reminds me of sixties album covers - in fact very specifically, King Crimson covers, and in especial the cover to In the Wake of Poseidon. Further "research" (research is just a euphemism for Wikipedia), shows that Gustave Moreau was regarded as a Symbolist painter and one of the precursors of Surrealism, so I don't think I'm that far off the mark.
It's a strange mix, high finance and art, although Charles doesn't do much of the finance, he is just a recipient of the family's huge wealth. The antisemitism also manifest itself in financial scandals that are blamed on the Jewish banking families. The market crashes also demonstrate that perfidious banking and the making of money from money were uneasy and very fallible things even in the 1880s, with scapegoats always being sought. But I don't think we have that association of blame with racial groups, at least not overtly anymore.
It's good reading about this other world, and having the internet to hand to look up the pictures - but that does then beg the question of looking at the pictures for real. It seems easy to accept the digital image as the real thing, but it isn't. I remember seeing Paul Klee's golden fish in a Hamburg art gallery, having only ever seen reproductions before, and being amazed by the tiny size of the painting, and the reflective shiny quality of the gold paint that he used. This is one of the things that Edmund De Waal muses on - what it would be like to see all these Moreaus and Monets and Degas and Renoirs crammed into a little room with a vitrine full of netsuke.
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