From my point of view there is nothing quite so boring as one single theme en masse. All white, all black, nothing but ….whatever!
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| Pierre et Gilles Mercury |
The exhibition that I have tried to go to since it opened has had
dissuasive queues and giggling ladies alongside rather bemused gentlemen.
Today I was at the Orsay museum at opening time and very surprised by
the number of school groups. They couldn’t be going to see "Masculine
/Masculine" could they? No, I was relieved, they weren’t!
This exhibition has had a tremendous buzz around it. The male nude from the 17th century to today.
While it has been quite natural for the female nude to be regularly exhibited, the male nude has not been accorded the same treatment. It is highly significant that until the show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in the autumn of 2012, no exhibition had opted to take a fresh approach, over a long historical perspective, to the representation of the male nude. However, male nudity was for a long time, from the 17th to 19th centuries, the basis of traditional Academic art training and a key element in Western creative art.
In the first week, two men were ushered out of the exhibition as they had (separately) been able to throw off their clothes and walk around the different galleries - naked ! The first time I gather spectators didn’t know if the person in question was part of the exhibition or not. The second time, he was rushed off and out….
The 17th to the 19th centuries were the kind of painting we knew. Seeing so many of them together made me begin to lose interest fast. By the 20th century it was Pierre and Gilles (Mercury is the poster for the exhibition - see above) - and artists we know.
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| Hippolyte Flandrin Jeune assis au bord de la mer, |
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| Paul Cadmus Le Bain (The Bath) |
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| David La Chapelle Would-Be Martyr and 72 virgins |
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| Jacques Louis David Académie d’homme, dit Patrocle |
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| In Nature Frédéric Bazille |
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| Rodin - Nude Veritas |
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| Jean-Baptiste Frédéric 17th |
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| Jean-Baptiste Frédéric -The Heroic |
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| Pierre et Gilles "Vive La France" |
I knew all the latter work on show. The « Vive La France » was censored in Vienna - France didn’t think it necessary and wherever I had seen it before, I smiled or perhaps I even giggled.
But then it was shown with other work, so the impact was quite something. Seeing Lucien Freud next to Francis Bacon was just too much for me. However, there were some photos which were really sensual without being erotic. Somehow though, seeing so much flesh makes the exhibition rather boring and all sensuality or erotica is lost.
An hour and half was enough for me.
Then up to the 5th floor to see :-
Allegro Barbaro. Béla Bartók and Hungarian Modernity 1905 -1920
This exhibition will give the French public an opportunity to discover a particularly vibrant period in Hungarian cultural and artistic life, through Béla Bartók (1881-1945), the man and his music.
In the early 20th century, musicians and painters in Hungary shared a desire to seek new forms of expression and a renewal with tradition. Breaking new ground within the European avant-garde, in just a few years they created their own distinctive idiom, a modernity imbued with the traditions of Hungary.
With around one hundred paintings from public collections in Hungary and from private collections, including numerous documents relating to the young Bartók and to the musicians, composers, writers, poets, philosophers and psychoanalysts in his circle (musical scores, photographs, films, archive recordings, etc), the exhibition aims to revive this rich dialogue between music and the arts from early 20th century Hungary.
The title of the exhibition, Allegro barbaro, is a tribute to the piano score written by the young Béla Bartók in 1911. It aims to revive, one hundred years on, the rich dialogue that existed between the arts in Hungary on the eve of the 20th century.
Music and painting resonated with the same spirit of renewal at that time. Hungary was committed to embracing European modernity while still expressing its attachment to a culture and an idiom that conveyed its unique character within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Just at the moment when Béla Bartók’s first symphony, Kossuth, had its debut in Budapest in 1904, young Hungarian painters appeared on the national scene. These artists were as “lively and barbarous” as the composer.
Having embraced Fauvism for a while, (Béla Czóbel, Géza Bornemisza, Sándor Ziffer, among others), they would not have objected to this description any more than those who would later form the group called Nyolcak [The Eight] (Ödön Márffy, Róbert Berény, Károly Kernstok in particular), or the Activists led by Lajos Kassák (Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Uitz, László Moholy-Nagy...), or the musicians, poets and art critics of the Hungarian avant-garde in the years leading up to the First World War.
Accompanied by Bartók’s music, this exhibition takes the visitor on a moving and historical tour among artworks that share the rhythms of Bartók’s vehement, percussive scores.
I have taken the text directly from the museum's home page. It’s informative and about a period in Hungary I knew little about. Bartok’s music has been part of me for years. I have always considered it to be « modern music » but is it still 68 years after his death? It was marvelous to sit down in closed off areas and listen to sequences of many pieces I knew and many I didn't know. Short snippets perhaps but delightful.
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| János Mattis-Teutsch Paysage |
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| Sándor Ziffer Autoportrait 1907-8 |
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| Sándor Bortnyik Le Prince de bois |
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| Ödön Márffy Portrait de Jenı Kerpely |
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| Róbert Berény Nu féminin couché - one is an event! Not 100 |
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| József Rippl-Rónai Dans le jardin des Somssich |
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| A little girl for sure..... |
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| Ödön Márffy Jeune fille de Nyerges |
I knew only one of the artists and nothing of their history during their stay in France. Definitely fauves and definitely influenced by Matisse, Gauguin and then the Fauves in general. There is nothing particularly new about what they were doing. In fact some of the paintings were a « little rough » in their approach. However, what I had just been through with the first exhibition made this « music to my eyes » .
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