Paint and Pain: Gustave-Adolphe Mossa’s Psychological Self-Portrait, Misogynist Self-Empathy, and Bloody Decadent Creativity

Even before the oppressive midsummer heat of 1906 could settle over Nice in southern France, the heart of the painter Gustave-Adolphe Mossa was broken. Until recently, the twenty-three-year-old had felt a profound emotional bond with Valentine N., but then she severed the intimate liaison over their financial inequality, plunging him into a dark maelstrom of grief, anger, and despair. The artist processed his painful experiences in poems, paintings, and drawings, which appear in the guise of humanistic erudition: Suicidal Pierrots, death-dealing sphinxes, a sadistic Dalila, and a Judith who casually stows the miniature head of John the Baptist in her purse like a coin. This misogynous swoon is disrupted in his painting Une Charogne, where he has his former beloved murdered by three hooded skeleton men in a pictorial act of revenge. The gargantuan woman blends into a gray and white snowscape in which her spilled wallet is flanked by a sadomasochistic quote from Baudelaire. Two of the skeletal priests set fire to the hem of the giantess’s dress with torches, while the third thrusts a torch into her bleeding eye sockets. Mossa, undoubtedly deeply hurt, settles accounts with Valentine through the sadistic femicide within the painting.