This
exhibition about la Boheme, modern myth, is hold at Grand Palais from
26 September 2012 to 14 January 2013. The fact that it is organized by
NMR - Grand Palace and the fundación Mapfre, Madrid is more
attractive and promising. If Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Modigliani
and Picasso are of course invited, Especially as the Bohemian reminds
each of us so much, and sometimes so different ... Artists, exoticism,
music, as countries where the man would still be a wolf to man and hide
for days in his dreams! And the blurb, which we take here so long
excerpts, is written so so sensitive! It is true that the "Bohemian" is
firmly entrenched in our imagination. In many ways and forms very
diverse. It is as much a part of us as our great modern myths. It was
sung, filmed, verse, exalted, declared dead a hundred times, and
percent once adjusted. The idea of Bohemia appeared in the middle of
the nineteenth century in the company of Romanticism and Realism. It
marked the transformation of the status of the artist, who left the
protection of the prince to become "solitary genius, miserable and
misunderstood that anticipates the convulsions of society." Poets
(Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine ...), painters or musicians
(Courbet, Van Gogh, Satie, Modigliani, Picasso ...), many great heralds
of modernity that gave a face to one facets of this tumultuous concept.
Rebels all conventions,
drummers paved cow eating rabid fans of women and drinks they have, for
generations of apprentice artists, turned the dream of redemptive glory
that is gained at the risk from oblivion and death. The literature and
the press, theater and opera, La Boheme has quickly gained immense
popularity and has entered the collective imagination and forever
linked the image of Paris in the Latin Quarter, Montmartre, then
Montparnasse. Last twenty years of work on external fields as the
history of marginality, migration, nomads, renewed analysis of this
phenomenon. The myth of Bohemia is now part of history, much richer and
more complex, the report of the European peoples to the gypsy nation.
Egyptian called the classical period, and then appointed the most
diverse names - Gypsy Manouche bigot - the Bohemian became shortly
after its appearance in the West in the fifteenth century, a hero of
the novel (Cervantes at first) and favorite subject for artists (Calot,
Vouet, Georges de la Tour). The mystery of its origins, long
incomprehensible language, his intimate relationship with nature, his
ability to tell the future, are a legend. His sudden appearances and
disappearances feed the fantasy of a life without ties, without rules,
intense and sensual. The artist, fascinated, found him in his master
free. Gypsies and bohemians have therefore a related party. Figures of
liberty, of wandering, they share marginality and misery. Elusive,
clever, insider secrets to inaccessible, permanently reduced to the
standard, they disturb, provoke and delight our sedentary society. This
is of course the term gypsy who come from the pen of the first
descriptors bohemian life emerging. And under the Nazi regime, artists
and gypsies will be combined in the same detestation. By being in a new
relationship as well as on the intersections between disciplines
(painting, literature, photography, music), based on more than 180
works and unpublished discoveries combining outstanding loans (The
Fortune Teller, Georges de la Tour , Metropolitan Museum New York,
L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, in Montmartre area,
Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, La Gitane Van Dongen,
MNAM, Paris ...), this exhibition aims to bring a new light on this
common history. The scenography is Robert Carsen. The visitor crosses
the centuries and will cross the most picturesque representations of
people wandering. Then penetrate the world of the painter, his garret,
his studio, his shelter, to complete his race in the cafes of
Montmartre. When, out of the tavern he resumed his way, he will quickly
sobered by the inauguration of the exhibition hall Gypsy has
degenerated Art in Munich 1937 ... Through a journey of four centuries
and fifteen themes, a phenomenon that sheds light bohemian, Leonard da
Vinci Picasso, throughout the history of art and societies, and still
resonates in our contemporary world. As Puccini's opera, this
exhibition is a large popular rendezvous, mixing fantasy and severity,
entertainment and melancholy, misery and glory.
Bohemians at the Grand Palais from 26 September 2012 to 14 January 2013