Last weekend in Paris? a different exhibition to visit that will surprise for a Romanticism not really known to the general public.
Son of a painter and art historian father, Johann Heinrich Fussli he was for a time a pastor and began his artistic career quite late, during a first trip to London, under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy. After a long stay in Italy, during which he was particularly fascinated by the power of Michelangelo's compositions, he returned to settle in London at the end of the 1770s. An atypical artist and intellectual, Füssli draws his inspiration from the sources of literary works which he passes through the filter of his imagination. He develops a dreamlike and dramatic language in his painting, where the wonderful and the fantastic, the sublime and the grotesque constantly meet. Organized thematically, the exhibition explores all of Füssli's work to which a monographic exhibition had not been dedicated since 1975 in Paris. It opens with the representation of Shakespearean theatre, in particular the macbeth, to then focus on mythological and biblical stories before moving on to the female figure in his graphic work. Finally the themes of the nightmare, a true Füsslian creation, followed by the themes of dreams and apparitions.
Füssli developed a relatively marginal fantasy vein for the time because it eluded academic rules. It was in 1782 that he presented his first version of Le Cauchemar, a work emblematic of his imagination that truly established his career as a painter. Elected an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1788, then an academician in 1790, Füssli, while working serially, embodied a search for the sublime that imposed itself on the England of his time. The exhibition at the Jacquemart-André Museum allows visitors to rediscover the astonishing work of this rare artist in French collections, a highly original painter who develops a paradoxical body of work, fueled by an imagination in which terror and horror are combined , at the aesthetic origin of dark romanticism.
