The Musée Marmottan Monet will be holding (from 7 March to 21 July 2019) an exhibition entitled ‘L’Orient des peintres, du rêve à la lumière’ (‘Oriental Visions From Dreams into Light’). Featuring around fifty masterpieces from major European and American public and private collections (the Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown), this exhibition will set out to provide fresh insight into this art form.

The exhibition will be held in a private mansion that houses the Paul Marmottan collections, devoted to Napoleon and his family. Indeed, painters were inspired by Napoleon’s victories to travel and see the Oriental fantasy for themselves. Hence, the dawn of the industrial era saw the emergence of orientalism, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century and permeated the whole of Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the avant-garde movements were inspired by these experiences and invented a new art form that bordered on abstraction, influenced by the Orient. Following many studies and previous exhibitions, the itinerary focuses on the Mediterranean ‘orient’, that of the French colonial empire. The exhibited works will be divided into two principal sections: the human figure and the landscape. The two approaches are initially represented by La Petite Baigneuse (Small Bather, 1828, Musée du Louvre, Paris) by Ingres and Paul Klee’s Innenarchitektur (Interior Architecture, 1914, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal).

Curatorship: Emmanuelle Amiot-Saulnier, Doctor in Art History