The 84 works brought together in this exhibition, oils, drawings and engravings by over twenty artists, reflect through the theme of landscape the sensitivity, mystery and metaphysical questions that worried the artists of the idealist movement of the late 19th century. The works reveal the profound, mysterious and magical nature that accompanies the human being in his psychological and spiritual journey, a mysterious, poetic nature, with luminous and crepuscular views. Within the theme, some aspects are explored in depth such as the soul of the landscape, the mystical landscape, the landscape of the soul and the landscape of restlessness.
«Your soul is a chosen landscape»: with this famous verse, Paul Verlaine established a poetic correspondence between the secret ways of thought and the poetic decoration of a «quiet moonlight, which invites you to dream of the birds above the trees and to cry of ecstasy at the sources.” This mental vision of a landscape that embodies the human soul corresponds perfectly to the way Symbolist artists conceived of nature. Far from being isolated, decadent artists on the margins of the evolution of their era, the symbolist painters participated through their intellectual and plastic research in the genesis of what would become twentieth-century painting, an essentially conceptual and “magical”.
Symbolist landscapes are dreamscapes, because idealist artists do not wish to show the visible but the invisible. For them, nature is not picturesque but suggestive. They therefore paint not what the landscape shows but what it hides. Trees, clouds, distant horizons, mysterious woods, sunsets or twilights: they compose ideas that lead us towards our interiority.
A place of projection of a theatricality that can be ascendant and positive, but at the same time disturbing or worthy of a nightmare, nature as the symbolists perceive it embodies all the torments and all the hopes of a moment of civilization full of metamorphosis. The French symbolist artists (or those who lived in France) present in this exhibition lead us, not without uncertainty, through their attempts, their anguish and their dreams, towards a world different from reality, that universe defined by Baudelaire as « Anywhere out of the world.” Through their eyes, their thoughts and their artistic genius, they reveal to us the secret geography of the ideal place.
On display works by: Edmond Aman-JeanValère Bernard, Marsella, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Maurice Chabas, Charles Marie Dulac, Eugène Grasset, Henry de Groux, Charles Guilloux, Louis Welden Hawkins, Jeanne Jacquemin, Frantisek Kupka, Charles Lacoste, Floirac, Henri Le Sidaner, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Henri Martin, Emile-René Ménard, Constant Montald, Alphonse Osbert, Armand Point, Ary Renan, Auguste de Niederhäusern-Rodo, Carlos Schwabe, Alexandre Séon.
