Post date: Mar 04, 2013 4:14:39 PM
Death and darkness delight at new Parisian exhibition illuminating the murkier side of Romanticism.
PARIS, FRANCE (MARCH 4, 2013) (REUTERS) - The angel of death unfurled her wings over the Musee d'Orsay on Monday (March 4) as a new exhibition featuring some of the best-known names in 19th and 20th century art turning their hands to black magic is set to open its doors on Tuesday.
The show entitled "The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst" tackles the underbelly of the period where artists turned to witches, demons and nightmares to create troubling and challenging works.The large exhibition featuring some 200 works is the product of a collaboration betweenParis' iconic riverside landmark and the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Among the diverse pieces which feature are works by Francsico de Goya, Gustave Moreau, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Auguste Rodin, William Blake and Victor Hugo.
For the exhibition's curator Come Fabre, the thread of Dark Romanticism runs right through the period, influencing some of its best-known artists.
"What we wanted to show is that Dark Romanticism is like a river, a current flowing all the way through the 19th century and up to the start of the 20th, where lots of artists have at one moment or another come to drink. And it's true that you find people who you don't expect at all, like Bonnard, like Gauguin, like Bouguereau -- a painter you think of as being very academic -- or Dali. And it's just to show that this is a current that inspired lots of very diverse artists, independently of their own style," he said at a media preview of the exhibition on Monday.
Despite turning to medieval ghouls and goblins as subject matter, Fabre added that the works reflect the modernity of the age and a society plagued by social schisms and ravaged by pandemic diseases.
The exhibition also makes use of cinema -- a shiny new medium in the 20th century -- calling on interwar early cinematographers to bring to life the same troubling themes. The eerie soundtracks of these silent films echoes round the exhibition adding to the atmosphere.
The Musee d'Orsay's president Guy Cogeval said the project had been a dream of his since childhood but maintained that in a time of crisis and rocketing youth unemployment, the best time to do it was now.
"It's the good moment to do an exhibition although we didn't think of that because we were afraid while preparing the subject saying it will not interest anybody. And I've seen an explosion in Paris of interest. It means that the zeitgeist, as you say it justly, has changed a lot. Because France wouldn't have been appealed by an exhibition of Dark Romanticism 30 years ago or 20 years ago. Now it's the right time," he told Reuters TV in front of his favourite work by artist Edouard Vuillard.
The exhibition is set to open on Tuesday and will welcome dark romantics until June 9.