After the success of the exhibition Windows, from the Renaissance to the present day. Dürer, Monet, Magritte in 2013, the Fondation de l'Hermitage continues its exploration of the main themes of Western iconography and offers the public the discovery of the many artistic facets of shadows.
With loans from prestigious museums and private collections, this world-class exhibition showcases the myriad forms a shadow on a blackboard can take, and illustrates the intimate links between shadow and the arts since the introduction of shadows. worn in painting at the end of the Middle Ages.
The journey crosses the centuries and the themes, associating in an unprecedented way masterpieces of Western art that testify to the continuous interest of the artists for this theme, which is in the self-portrait (Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix), research on perspective (Baccio Bandinelli, Pieter de Hooch ), work on chiaroscuro (Luca Cambiaso, Jacob Jordaens, Joseph Wright of Derby) or dramatization of landscapes among the Romantics (Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus , Wilhelm Bendz). The exhibition also gives pride of place to impressionist (Claude Monet) and post-impressionist (Henri-Edmond Cross, Joaquín Sorolla and Bastida) shadows, which bear witness to the appearance of artificial light and research into color theory in the XNUMXth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, counterproductives and powerful shadows play a decisive role in the search for a synthetic and innovative formal language (Félix Vallotton, Hans Emmenegger).
Among the highlights of the exhibition is a section dealing with disturbing and paradoxical shadows of symbolist artists (William Degouve of Nuncques, Leon Spilliaert), expressionists (Edvard Munch), "metaphysics" (Giorgio de Chirico), surrealist (Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst) and New Objectivity (Christian Schad, Niklaus Stoecklin). The uses of shadow in modern and contemporary creation are, for their part, declined through the emblematic works of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Christian Boltanski or Joseph Kosuth, while video artists (Vito Acconci, Jean Otth, Thomas Maisonnasse) reinterpret the great myths of origins which, from Plato to Pliny, connect shadow, art and knowledge. Conversely, a major photographic section including striking images by Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Lee Friedlander and Wolfgang Tillmans, shows that this theme follows photography like its shadow…
