BOOK:Peintures des Lointains,Skira Editore/Musée du Quai Branly
With 500 works and dating from the late 18th Century to the mid-20th Century, the Collection of Musée du Quai Branly is largely unknown. The catalogue of the exhibition “Peintures des Lointains, la Collection du Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac”, a coedition by Skira Editore/Musée du Quai Branly, with 272 pages and 210 illustrations seeds light to 200 works. A composite and largely unknown collection, where Ange Tissier’s odalisque sits alongside portraits of American Indians by George Catlin, and scenes of day-to-day life in Cairo by Émile Bernard stand shoulder to shoulder with prints and drawings of Tahiti by Matisse and Gauguin. This collection also tells the story of an encounter with the Other and the Elsewhere, questioning the evolution of the artistic perspective of the unknown. In a rapidly expanding colonial Europe, Western art takes different paths when faced with the shock of a world that welcomes it in, first succumbing to the temptation of exoticism, where the exaltation of colour and light fuels dreams of a luxurious and exquisite Eastern world, before later coming to represent a more realistic, ethnographic perspective that is mindful of the Other. From oneirism and naturalism, fantasy to documentary and romanticism to colonial propaganda, what we have here is a reflection of artistic and political history.-Dimitris Lempesis
Info: Curator: Sarah Ligner, Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Branly, Paris, Duration: 30/1-18-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu-Sat 11:00-21:00, www.quaibranly.fr
