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Indepth Arts News:
"The Colours of the Sea"
1999-11-06 until 2000-01-16
Musee d'Orsay
Paris, ,
FR France
The manner in which the nineteenth century invented
tourism, in particular to the seaside, at the very time
when the taste for landscapes was fast developping and
diversifying, is now well-known. Coasts in Normandy
and Britanny, scenes on the beach or in holiday resorts,
Mediterrannean ports and its light and seaside sites all
provided Courbet, Boudin, Monet, Signac and Cézanne
with new motifs.
The Musée d'Orsay organises an exhibition entitled
The Colours of the Sea with Thalassa, le magazine
de la mer, a weekly television programme with a
maritime theme on France 3. The exhibition aims at
showing the importance of the sea in painting,
watercolour and pastels, photography, and the
invention, so to speak, of sites, marine landscapes on
the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, of the Atlantic
and of the Mediterranean. The whole is composed from
the Musée d'Orsay collections, with a few important
loans granted by Parisian and provincial museums.
This exhibition targets a public of amateurs with a
passion for the sea. Through the paintings on display, it
offers a poetical and fantastic transcription of the sea,
interpreted differently according to each artist's
temperament, from the realistic observation of Eugène
Boudin or Claude Monet, the singular visions of
Georges Lacombe or Emile Bernard, to the diffraction
of light and the saturated colours of the
neo-impressionists, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond
Cross.
At the same time, the sea was omnipresent in Victor
Hugo's work (The Toilers of the Sea, 1866), and then
was a source of inspiration for Claude Debussy, who
came to Pourville to observe the Channel and who
composed The Sea, and also Maurice Ravel and Ernest
Chausson for his Poem of Love and the Sea.
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Access:
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