DANS LE FLOU, UNE AUTRE VISION DE L'ART, DE 1945 A NOS JOURS
In the blur, another vision of art, from 1945 to the present day
April 30 - August 18 2025
Musée de l'Orangerie - Paris
Curators
Claire Bernardi, director of the musée de l’Orangerie
Emilia Philippot, chief curator, assistant to the director of studies at the Institut national du patrimoine
In collaboration with Juliette Degennes, curator at the Musée de l'Orangerie
The Water Lilies have long been seen as the paragon of abstract, all-over, sensitive painting. On the other hand, the vagueness that reigns over the vast aquatic expanses of Monet's great canvases has remained an unthought. This exhibition explores this dimension of Monet's late work as a genuine aesthetic choice whose posterity must be brought to light. Deliberately making vagueness a key to modern and contemporary art, it brings together works by some fifty artists. Through them, the blur is revealed as the privileged means of expression of a world where instability reigns and visibility has become blurred. This aesthetic of f lou is rooted in the ruins of the Second World War, and unfolds its specifically political dimension. Acknowledging the profound upheaval in the world order, artists opted for the indeterminate, the indistinct and the allusive, placing greater emphasis on the viewer's interpretation. In this way, vagueness becomes both a symptom and a remedy for a world in search of meaning: at the same time as betraying instability, it creates the conditions for re-enchantment.
The exhibition will follow a thematic rather than chronological thread. An introductory room will be devoted to the aesthetic roots of vagueness in the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, following the intellectual, scientific, societal and artistic upheavals with which Impressionism grew up. The exhibition will then be divided into three main sections, combining pictorial works, videos, photographs and installations: “At the frontiers of the visible”, “The erosion of certainties”, and “In praise of the indistinct”. An epilogue, “re-enchanting the world”, will open the exhibition, focusing in particular on artist Mircea Cantor's trembling affirmation of “unpredictable future”.
