After its 80th anniversary celebrations with ‘Impressionist works from Private Collections’ and ‘Impression Sunrise,’ the Musée Marmottan Monet will now present from February 12th to July 5th, 2015 the first exhibition ever dedicated to the theme of ‘La Toilette and the Invention of Privacy.’ The exhibition brings together works by major artists of the fifteenth century to the present, explores the rituals of cleanliness, their spaces and their gestures.
This is the first time such a subject, unique and indispensable, is presented in the form of an exhibition. In these works that reflect everyday practices that might seem mundane, the public will discover the pleasures and surprises with a depth that few expected. Prestigious museums and international collections joined enthusiastically in this project giving major loans, including some paintings that have never been shown since their creation. One hundred paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs and motion pictures («time-lapse») allow to offer an exceptional exhibition. The exhibition opens with an outstanding collection of engravings by Dürer, de Primatice, paintings from the l’Ecole de Fontainebleau, including a Clouet, the outstanding Femme à la puce by Georges de La Tour, a unique and amazing collection of François Boucher, showing the invention of gestures and the special places one washed in the Old Regime Europe.
In the second part of the exhibition, visitors will discover that with the nineteenth century there was a profound renewal of tools and modes of cleanliness. The appearance of the bathroom, that of a more diverse and abundant use of water inspired Manet, Berthe Morisot, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec and other artists, not least, unpublished scenes of women washing in tubs or in makeshift tanks. The gestures are disrupted, the space becomes definitively closed and made to conceal privacy, from which emerges a deep impression of intimacy and modernity.
The last part of the exhibtion presents to the vistor the both familiar and disconcerting modern bathrooms and there «functional» uses, with artworks from Pierre Bonnard which show bathroom spaces where one is allowed, away from the eyes of others and the noise of the city, to dream.
Curators:
Georges Vigarello, historian
Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, art historian
