Maurice Chabas - Towards Deliverance

Wash and India ink, heightened with white gouache. Signed and titled in pen lower right: Towards Deliverance // Maurice Chabas. It was in 1885 that Maurice Chabas began exhibiting at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, of which he became a member. Between 1891 and 1896, he exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and won two medals, before receiving a bronze medal at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. His participation in all the Salons of the Rose + Croix from 1892 to 1897 confirmed his renown; his mystical works, presented under the direction of Sâr Péladan, were particularly noteworthy. Unlike many Symbolists who practiced philosophy in their ivory towers, Chabas consistently led a social life that went beyond mere worldliness, for the artist believed in the power of conviction and spiritual conversion. Chabas's first solo exhibition was held on the Avenue de l'Opéra at the end of 1885. Imbued with spiritualism, the painter sought to convey, through his art, his belief in the soul's survival after the body's death. A crucial theme in his work, he gave a seminal lecture on the social role of art on March 22, 1914. According to him, the principal quality required of an artist is to have attained the contemplative life, which alone allows for true individual evolution: the revelation of the great mysteries of Life occurs only in meditation and solitude. This proselytizing constituted, for him, an intellectual and spiritual act of charity. Maurice Chabas magnified art by attributing to it a considerable power of suggestion, where the artist becomes an apostle, guiding humanity toward perfection and eternal peace. From April 14 to April 28, 1926, a solo exhibition of exclusively religious paintings was held at La Palette Française gallery, located at 152 Boulevard Haussmann. Comprising some twenty cosmic paintings and a few drawings, the central theme revolved around souls freed from their physical bodies, soaring towards celestial spheres. Maurice Chabas was passionately fond of the sky; his friends believed that, through constant contemplation and exploration of its depths, the painter had glimpsed God there. Supported by the writings of his astronomer friend Camille Flammarion, it was from Flammarion's work, *Death and its Mystery*, that the painter conceived his flights of souls, based on the idea of the soul's survival and an intercommunication between the earthly world and the afterlife. The artist does not suggest a possible vision, but paints a truth he claims to have contemplated himself in an ecstatic state. In 1932, Chabas presented six spiritualist works in an exhibition devoted to such visions, held in Paris and Geneva alongside works by renowned deceased artists such as Victor Hugo, William Blake, and Odilon Redon. Faced with his ambitious works, critics did not hesitate to speak of a religious dawn of renewal, the creation of a new and magnificent spiritual art. With his sumptuous, Japanese-inspired pen, the artist depicts in our magnificent ink drawing the flight of a soul, symbolized by an angelic figure with open arms flying above a Breton sea towards God, a radiant star in the heavens. Ill. 1. Maurice Chabas, Mystical Landscape. India ink wash and white gouache on paper, 18 x 26 cm, signed lower left. Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Collection. Notes: Marc Lenossos, Maurice Chabas Exhibition, Dernières Nouvelles, February 4, 1930. Bibliography: Myriam de Palma, Maurice Chabas (1862-1947) Painter and Spiritual Messenger, Somogy Editions d'Art, 2009, 127 pp.