Le Fil d’Ariane

Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, offers Theseus the ball of thread that will let him find his way out of the labyrinth after he slays the Minotaur — while behind them a woman draped in red looks on. Henry Cros, better known as the Symbolist sculptor who revived the ancient art of pâte de verre, here turns to Greek myth in paint: the figure of the princess, the coiled red thread and the watching companion are simplified into broad, glowing shapes that give the small panel the quality of a dreamlike emblem rather than a theatrical telling. Painted around 1889, the year of the artist’s celebrated glasswork for the Exposition Universelle, it belongs to the mythological world the Symbolists preferred to the realism of their contemporaries. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.