It was an afternoon of strange art. First, why do the horses on the huge Bartholdi fountain seem to have tortoises on their hooves?
Two things stuck with me from my visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts 40+ years ago. One was the magnificent Puvis de Chavannes frescoes on the stairwell,
and the other, Louis Janmot's series of 18 paintings, Le poème de l'âme - which he worked on between 1835-1855: a very strange mixture of social realism, allegory, spiritual fantasy, Catholicism, morbidity, and goodness knows what else. I came away, I remember, wanting to work on it - it was so strange, and to me, deeply embedded (I thought) in C19th French art though I was, very unlike anything else. Obviously I didn't work on it, at all, but it's stayed with me ...
I never fully took on board how depressed the father was in this picture ...
and it was a few decades before I was looking for lightning flashes everywhere -
... and I'd utterly forgotten both how weird some of the details are -
and also - in very many of the canvases - what a detailed chronicler of biodiversity Janmot was.
Speaking of biodiversity, and moving on to other artists, other rooms, I was delighted to get a snail and a bee in the same image.
But the oddnesses continued ...
and pleased though I was to see for real Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret's 1879 picture of a wedding party being photographed,
I'd never noticed before the small boy being deliberately asphyxiated with pipe smoke.
It was quite a relief to escape into the semi-normality of Lyon streets ...
I
No comments:
Post a Comment