About 1891. “The Dawn of Labor,” one of several loony allegories by Charles Maurin, unites more than a dozen nudes into a disorderly, Rubens-esque tumble, but their bodies are rendered as flat as the Japanese prints then in fashion. It is an incomprehensible painting, though it would have offered a rare hint of socialism in Péladan’s largely right-wing salon. [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/arts/design/mystical-symbolists-in-all-their-kitschy-glory.html] The Salon of the Rose+Cross was a window on wonderfully eccentric phase in French art. (Another art critic at the time, Félix Fénéon, was involved with anarchist bomb throwers.) The period after the heydays of Impressionism involved a fantastical melange of realism and fantasy as artists strived to create mythic art for modern times. Maurin’s painting fuses the rising tide of revolution with a sensual mythic vision [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/aug/21/guggenheim-exhibition-mystical-symbolism-josephin-peladan-]