by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Salomé mourns the Baptist

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Salomé mourns the Baptist. Pencil. Khadi paper.30x30cm This absolutely stunning drawing shows Salome curled up on the floor, or as if dragging herself across it, leaning on her one visible hand. The rest of her body, majestically encamped, is made of gentle waves as if it were calm water, contrasting with the drama she is experiencing. Her very long hair drags itself across the floor and largely masks her face, whose features are difficult to discern. Entirely covered with veils, light, her beautiful and generous forms give a hint of her youth. The pencil flats, densely applied on the left, gradually fade on the right towards the lower part of her body and her feet, giving way to a bundle of lines so tenuous that they seem to be made up of a different pigment. The powerful line determining the back, the curvature of the buttocks, the bent knees and the start of the legs, is striking. At the far right of the composition, what could be a cast shadow – but from which light source? – composes a ghostly double to the dancer-murderer of her lover.The second part of the composition, in the upper part of the drawing, shows the Baptist lying down on the ground, feet and hands shackled, his head buried in the hollow of his arms. Other chains seem to encircle his torso. His muscular limbs, constrained to the most severe immobility, indicate that in his mourning, Salome relives his last moments, those leading up to his death, the nakedness of the saint giving his funeral reveries a powerfully erotic, albeit morbid, character. The lines here too are powerful, though less precisely drawn than those that define the young woman’s body. They tremble, undulate, under the jolts of this body trying in vain to espe its disastrous destiny. A series of horizontal lines sketch the straw mattress on which he was thrown into his dungeon.The absence of light or luminous shades, the wide gap between the two figures, make this composition unreal. Although this drawing may refer to the multiple studies on the same sheet of paper by the great masters, it is indeed one and the same composition. And it is on this point that it acquires so much interest and novelty.The references here are of course numerous: for the Baptist, one thinks of the male nudes of David, of Géricault, of all the Renaissance masters nourished by the culture of Ancient Greece…For Salomé, Delacroix, Degas, painters who have moved from chiaroscuro and miserable women (for example from Northern Europe) can also be summoned.It is a sublime work in the romantic sense of the term that we are dealing with, although it opens the way to a new apprehension of space, volume, the touch rendered only with a pencil, a remarkable work, a new stage in the artist’s career. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative