another vision of art from 1945 to the present day

Painting, sculpture, photography, video, cinema… The exhibition “In the Blur” provides a superb focus on the use of the indistinct in the visual arts, focusing on the period from 1945 to the present day. Its source is a masterpiece: Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, a large set installed since 1927 at the Musée de l’Orangerie, where blur reigns over the large aquatic compositions populated with water lilies. A true aesthetic choice by the master of Impressionism. This intriguing fog has since inspired many artists using various techniques. The thematic journey of the exhibition is at once sensitive, historical, poetic and political.

In the first room, as a prologue, very different works interact: the oldest, a misty landscape painted by William Turner around 1845, sits next to Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond, Pink Harmony and a transparent condensation cube by conceptual artist Hans Haacke, trapping both the mist and the instability of our environment. Auguste Rodin’s block of white marble proves that blur and sculpture are not mutually exclusive, as one might think. The artist blurs the contours of his marbles, making the material vibrate.

On a large panel, Claudio Parmiggiani, a key figure of Arte Povera, used a technique called “controlled fires.” He deliberately sets fire to a room, extinguishes it, lets the soot settle on the premises, then comes to remove the objects and furniture to leave an impression. Soot and smoke draw, as if in a negative, the ghost of a shelf covered with books, with vaporous contours. The choice of the library is not insignificant, the artist is referring to the book burnings that we have known throughout history … behind the blur sometimes hides a political message.

A small canvas by Gerhard Richter is nevertheless one of the highlights of the exhibition. The artist created it from a highly publicized photo of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York: the collision of the first plane with the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At first glance, it is a very abstract, almost illegible painting. It is knowing the source image that allows it to be deciphered, but what we see is the gesture of the painter who, with broad brushstrokes, places paint on the image of the two twin towers, which is itself painted. The superimposition of layers, as is often the case with the German artist, creates “a blur of surface.” He deliberately uses grainy materials that block the view and force us to look more closely, also transcribing into paint the fog of television screens in a world saturated with images. Richter says his relationship with reality has always been about vagueness, which he links to insecurity, incompleteness, and inconsistency. He is the most represented artist in the exhibition, with paintings evoking the instability of the world.

A large photograph by Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar, taken as part of a long-term project he devoted to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, shows a young girl who witnessed the massacre of her father and mother with machetes. Alfredo Jaar had arranged to meet her, but when it came time to answer his questions, the teenager, unable to utter a word, left with her back to him. In a reflexive movement, he then grabbed his camera and took this shot without framing it, without focusing. “This blurred image,” he says, “represents my inability to tell the story of this woman’s experience or the experience of Rwanda—the impossibility.”

April 30 – August 18, 2025

MUSEE DE L’ORANGERIE

Jardin des Tuileries 75001 Paris

No matter the landscape

This is the first monographic exhibition in a French museum devoted to this emblematic artist of the contemporary Brazilian scene. A true prodigy of the pictorial gesture, he develops his work around light and consistently depicts landscapes, following a rigorous approach that leads him from figuration to abstraction.

For over fifteen years, the artist has been producing a serial body of work consisting of small-format paintings, called Deserto-Modelo, a term borrowed from the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. These “desert models” – that is, imaginary landscapes, interior visions painted from memory in the studio – are never created on location or from photographs, but are always mnemonic reconstructions, close to abstraction. In the manner of the Impressionists, however, the question of light and the sensitive projection of a form of introspection are particularly perceptible.

As the artist describes it: “Light is at the center of my work, it is movement. It is light that guides my painting, that creates intensity and ends up creating spaces that are neither abstract nor figurative.” Although small, Lucas Arruda’s paintings are charged with great dramatic tension, so that each brushstroke is decisive, paradoxically monumental on the scale of the canvas.

The inspiration for this invitation to Lucas Arruda comes from this simple and spontaneous sensation, widely shared by observers of his paintings: they are familiar to us, in painting or in mind. These panoramic motifs – horizon lines, edged with dense jungles or cloudy skies – border on universality, so difficult is it to identify the places or periods represented. However, Lucas Arruda’s paintings do not entirely adhere to the pictorial tradition of landscape, otherwise richly represented in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, within which our minds immediately connect them.

This long lineage, which includes the pictorial work of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and the Barbizon school, the stormy seascapes of Gustave Courbet, the ponds of Eugène Boudin, without forgetting of course the impressionists Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, is made up of works created from observations of reality, whereas Lucas Arruda’s production is entirely imagined. In this perspective, the repetition of the motif in series, which the representation of light will fundamentally vary, becomes the cornerstone of a more intuitive rapprochement between Lucas Arruda and Claude Monet.

The exhibition itinerary follows the progression of this reflection, mobilizing around thirty impressionist paintings from the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, alongside around thirty paintings by Lucas Arruda, in the impressionist gallery (5th floor).

April 8 – July 20, 2025

MUSEE D’ORSAY

Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing 75007 Paris

If we have known since Paul Cézanne that “the Louvre is a book in which we learn to read”, this inexhaustible source of inspiration has not escaped one of the most vibrant worlds of contemporary creation, that of fashion. Increasingly, studies and monographs devoted to the great names of fashion do not hesitate to trace aesthetic genealogies that place these personalities in a historical and artistic perspective.

The rhythm is not only that of ruptures, more or less radical, nor of seasonal change, it is also that of echoes and reminders. The threads that are woven between their work and the world of art are almost infinite, and the history of art as expressed by the Louvre, in the depth of its collections and the reflections of taste, is a terrain of influence and sources just as vast.

Faced with the encyclopedic immensity of the Louvre, the method proposed here is to place this multiple subject in the light of the history of decorative styles, crafts and ornament, through the galleries and rooms of the Department of Decorative Arts. The textile presence is fundamental, but more focused on decorations and tapestries than on clothing itself.

On nearly 9,000 square meters, 65 contemporary silhouettes, accompanied by around thirty accessories, are displayed in a close, unprecedented, historical and poetic dialogue with the masterpieces of the department, from Byzantium to the Second Empire. So many remarkable loans, granted by the most emblematic houses, from the oldest to the most recent, from Paris and elsewhere.

The aim here is not to sprinkle the Department of Decorative Arts with fashion pieces, but to arouse or highlight proven connections, its collections having sometimes been shaped by the generosity of men and women of fashion, from Jacques Doucet to Madame Carven.

In terms of the history of art and fashion, there are countless complicities, often adopting common methods, knowledge of the oldest techniques, visual culture, the subtle play of references, from the museum’s catalogue raisonné to the fashion moodboard. Another way of looking at art objects through the prism of contemporary designers.

January 24 – July 25, 2025

MUSEE DU LOUVRE