Under the sun of Marmottan
Surrounding Claude Monet's “Impression, soleil levant”, around a hundred works illustrate the place of the sun in art from Antiquity to the present day.
William Turner (1775-1851), The Sun Setting Through Vapor , c. 1809, oil on canvas, 69 x 101 cm. © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Paris. Hanging in the museum, the tapestry Soleil de Paris by Jean Lurçat (1962) and the canvas by Vicky Colombet, Rising Sun #1476 (2022) give a foretaste of the exhibition held there, celebrating the 150th anniversary of ' Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet (1872). Suppose the flagship painting of the Marmottan Museum was shown to the public for the first time in 1874, giving its name to the Impressionist movement. In that case, we now know that it was painted on November 13, 1872, around 7:35 a.m. from a window of a hotel overlooking the port of Le Havre. Around him, the curators, Marianne Mathieu, scientific director of the museum, and Michael Philipp, chief curator at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam (Germany) [see box below], brought together nearly a hundred works forming as many milestones in the history of the representation of the sun in the arts. Claude Monet (1840-1926), Impression, rising sun (1872), oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm, Musée Marmottan Monet collection, Paris. Scientific impressions and observations No Japanese prints appear in the exhibition. However, Monet may have been familiar with Women Worshiping the Rising Sun at Ise by Kitagawa Utamaro (late 18th century) – at Ise is the shrine dedicated to Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess. In Europe, the sun is masculine. A miniature bust of Sol in the guise of Alexander the Great (second half of the 3rd century BC) is a prefiguration of the appropriation of his image by Western monarchs. In the catalog, Hendrik Ziegler analyzes this phenomenon, illustrated by Johann Melchior Dinglinger's sun-shaped harness ornament of Augustus the Strong (1709). Like this one, several works come from German-speaking countries such as the attractive Allegory of the day by Joachim von Sandrart (1643, see ill.). The latter published between 1675 and 1679 a sum on the German fine arts in which he devoted an article to his friend Claude Gellée dit le Lorrain: "He stayed in the countryside from the first light of day until night, in order to observe the dawn, sunrise and sunset and twilight, and later be able to reproduce his impressions well. A work by Lorrain, The Embarkation of Saint Paula at Ostia (circa 1650) is presented here. This painter, appreciated by William Turner, often inspired him. In his Mortlake Terrace (1827), the blinding light of the setting sun dissolves the stone wall bordering the Thames. At the same time, Caspar David Friedrich chose to give the sun a "symbolic and mystical value" , according to the Easter Morning cartel (circa 1828-1835). We see the three Marys, in modern costume, heading towards the tomb of Christ indicated by a luminous sun, symbol of the Resurrection which marks the advent of a new world. The sun seen by symbolists and scientists If Gustave Courbet, the Impressionists and then the Neo-Impressionists worked on light, aided by scientific research, the Symbolists and their heirs, Edvard Munch or Félix Vallotton for example, gave the sun an almost mystical image (which Vincent also does van Gogh, absent from the exhibition). The cartoon Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata from Maurice Denis (1904) uses the iconography of glory symbolizing the presence of God. In contrast, the exhibition shows photographs, gouaches and pastels by 19th century scientists painstakingly depicting eclipses and an oil on canvas by astronomer Hippolyte Guénaire, Nebula of the Hunting Dogs, Chacornac 1862, C. Wolf 1876 ( 1878). Contemporary artists, such as Joan Miró or Alexander Calder, are characterized by the poeticization of the discoveries of astrophysics in the 20th century. Richard Pousette-Dart, for his part, used the images of the sun restored by telescopes to “plunge[r] us into the heart of a primordial experience of the divine” (according to the Golden Center cartel , 1964). The Marmottan Museum also invites artists to measure themselves against Impression, rising sun – this was the case, recently, of Vicky Colombet. Gérard Fromanger thus painted Impression, rising sun 2019 (2019) reflecting "a new perception of the universe upset by the conquest of space". The section “The sun, one star among many others” closes this journey, but Otto Piene's Black Sun (1961) shows the persistence of the symbolism which, for artists, is attached to our star. le journal des arts, Elisabeth Santacreu Art expert: https://www.vwart.com/
Surrounding Claude Monet's “Impression, soleil levant”, around a hundred works illustrate the place of the sun in art from Antiquity to...