The Pinacoteca of Paris offer until January 28 a splendid journey in the work of the painter Georges Rouault. Meanwhile Jackson Pollock, which looks great, you walk by the middle of masterpieces of rare intensity. Mountain landscapes, figures of marchers, many portraits, scenes of parade or circus, many religious scenes: there is no room in this magnificent journey that has her web mistress. Each time one is struck with the force of the Treaty, the strength of colors. Between children's drawing and the extreme sophistication, you do not miss this opportunity to (re) discover an artist so endearing, challenging, surprising. Rather than a chronological approach would have been a little cold and school, the museum has chosen a thematic, where each section begins with the relationship between the painter and a poet, philosopher or artist encountered by chance in life and each time for determining the trajectory of the work. Professor Gustave Moreau, Matisse's classmate and friend, the writer Leon Bloy and Suares, the Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain and obviously Ambroise Vollard, the dealer.
This bias has the advantage of not redistribute lot of cards and make visible how many parallel lines coexist within a lifetime, and concurrent with the whole constitution of a work. We find the rest, and not surprisingly, two of the major concerns of the curator Marc Restellini: the taste of the Orient on the one hand, anti-academic second. The circle of friends are all Rouault pariah figures, writers ignored, condemned, forgotten, evolving away from conventions, or nearly disappeared from collective memory. This is not the slightest interest in exposure to revive them.
Another curiosity: Georges Rouault, painter known in France (not a figure of speech, and from this point of view, the visibility of this exhibition will suffer no doubt that massive, Picasso at the Grand Palace) is a huge star in Japan, which houses several museums devoted specifically to his work, including that of oil company Idemitsu. One of the challenges of this course is to understand the reasons for this fascination for Eastern Catholic French painter, a priori far from the Japanese aesthetic heritage. The composition
very graphic paintings of Rouault immediately evokes the calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing and layout features. The important thing is not what the lines represent, but their arrangement on the canvas, the path they propose to the eye, and finally when they invite meditation. It is precisely this meditative character of the work that fascinates: Rouault's paintings are primarily as supports for meditation and contemplation. And while Western art criticism is the report focuses strictly aesthetic at work, an intellectual vision or iconography (the table is a symbol ... it refers to ... it says that ...), the 'Japanese art lover plunges as if contemplating a calligraphy or a roll of ukiyo-e. This is not the outward appearance lies the interest of the work, but in the inner journey and return home that the work permits.
This dual relation to the work of art is an absolutely vital that this exhibition rightly points out, and is reflected in the historical development of the report to written text and reading . The contemporary era, mainly preoccupied with the technological or literary texts, conceived as objects to manipulate, forgot the medieval practices of reading, the questioning turned to ethics. In his superb book on the "Inner Bilbiothèques," Brian Stock has shown the importance meditative practices of reading and writing for the constitution of self. A tradition born of Augustine considers the text as the first holder of a meditation, an opportunity to adopt a particular posture (meditation, silence). The important thing is not to learn, be entertained or surprised, but to ruminate on the text. It's such a beautiful exhibition that I will update my other desolation to the poor arrangement of space and of wandering, which seems to be becoming a habit, though it does not appear due to space, which is of good size. Georges Rouault, 70 paintings from the collection Idemitsu to Pinacoteca Paris, until 18 January.
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