Galeries Nationales du Grand
Palais
Mélancolie : Génie et folie en Occident
Métro : Champs-Elysées Clémenceau. Tel
:
01.44.13.17.17. Until 16 january 2006.
250 sculptures, paintings, various art objets, drawings, are offered to
the public in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais to pay homage to
most romantic of sadnesses of the heart : Melancholy. From
Greek
Antiquity to today, the topic is permanently present for the artists of
the Occident. The masterpiece of the exhibition is the famous
Melancolia of Dürer which raises the question to become human,
in
its individual or collective expression. This engraving artwork gathers
many symbols which will influence several artists thereafter
:
the polyhedron of science, a skeleton of bat, a dog, a sand glass for
the inescapable escape of time, the comet of the dark night.
The
Angel of the Hearth of max Ernst was inspired by old visions of Cranach
(see reproduction of its Melancholy on the left). Further, the heavy
eyelids of Doctor Gachet of
Van Gogh
expresses vagueness-with-the inconsolable heart, tormented face posed
on its fist. At the end of studies, it devoted itself its
thesis
of medicine to the Melancholy. Grosz and Otto Ten defined a cynical
melancholy in their believed expressionism. Reflection of
abominable faintness social related to the plague Nazi. The
characters of Hopper, dumb men and fixed in their loneliness contrast
with American Way of Life, so optimistic in its versions
Technicolor. Another manner of finding itself with oneself in
the
crowd.
