Death at large at le Musée d’Orsay, Paris
If you are in or around Paris these days, if you like ghosts, vampires, sorcerers, devils, dismembered corpses and dark atmospheres watched upon by guards who look like walking dead themselves, the Orsay new exhibition “L’Ange du bizarre” (“The Angel of the Odd”) is for you! Death behind all its masks: paintings, sculptures, engravings, freed from any religious dogma or any notion of Paradise, main character of our anxieties and irrationality, is the hostess of the show.
The bridge and the abyss
The exhibition opens on the bridge crossed by Jonathan Harper to visit Count Nosferatu: remember the lines from Bram Stoker’s book or Murnau’s movie: “and when he crossed the bridge, the ghosts came toward him…” And Jonathan seems to embody all of us, visitors, stepping into the unknown, into the abyss… The tone is set, first with a wonderful collection of paintings by Füssli that we seldom have the opportunity to see in such numbers and from such provenances, among them one of the famous Nightmare versions; followed by William Blake’s works, each and every about Satan, so beautiful and so cruel at the same time, and dominating the world… The empty, foggy, cloudy landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich don’t make the atmosphere happier! These first rooms serve as a homage to the founding fathers of the gothic “genre”, so, so British, who, in the XVIIIth century, were the first to revolt against an all-encompassing Science pretending to rationally explain Man. How can you rationally explain our darkest fears, the artists answered? And our creative drive?
The dismembered body
The second film awaiting us in the wings is Frankenstein, the monster created from cadavers’ parts by a mad scientist usurping the role of God. It serves as an appetizer to the second part of the exhibition: Heads of Medusa, sorcerers’ Sabbaths, cannibals devouring human parts, bats by Delacroix, black engravings by Goya and Redon celebrating Death in all its shapes and masks, beheaded bodies, Victor Hugo’s haunted burgs, a study for the Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, cannibalism galore!) Sirens and Debauchery by Gustave Moreau: here comes the second generation of romantic artists.
The forests
The last part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Surrealists, who all contemplated and rendered life in such a strange mirror… Mainly Max Ernst, whose hostile petrified forests, shaped like strangled and struggling human bodies as in the Lacoon in the Vatican Museum, serve as a reminder to realize how quickly and easily we can get trapped by our imagination and our fear of the dark… A good choice, therefore, to say good-bye to that odd world which took us upon a strange journey amid the acrid fumes of the caldrons, the stinking smell of roasted flesh, the screams of the torture victims, and the songs of the Sirens…
Mars 2013
By Colette Juillard
