Dominique de Font-Réaulx
Confusion of genres: the still lifes of Gustave Courbet, 1871-1873 (in French)
On the occasion of the major exhibition at the Louvre, Les Choses, une histoire de la nature morte (The Things, a History of the Still Life), Dominique de Font-Réaulx looks back at the still lifes painted by Gustave Courbet between 1871 and 1873, during his captivity after the Commune and in the years that followed, before his exile in Switzerland. The artist had created few still lifes before his imprisonment. It was the absolute necessity of continuing to create that drove him to depict the fruit brought to him in his cell, apples and pears, withered, scabbed, rotting. However, he continued in this way once he was released. Far from conforming to reality, far from adopting the distance that often prevails in this genre, Courbet gave his paintings a personal, human, even intimate dimension.
The passage of time, symbolic of the still life, appeared to him as a countdown, as his existence was now suspended on the execution of the judgement that held him responsible for the dismantling of the Vendôme Column in Paris. These still lifes are self-portraits in which his human sensitivity shines through, but also paintings of history, of a history of which the unjustly condemned artist felt himself a prisoner.
Dominique de Font-Réaulx is the General Curator at the Louvre Museum, Director of Mediation and Cultural Programming. Since 2018, she has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Histoire de l'art (Art History). She is the president of the Point du Jour, an art centre of national interest, in Cherbourg. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including The French Daguerreotype, a photographic object (2003, Orsay Museum), Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877 (2007/2008, Grand Palais national Gallery); Jean-Léon Gérôme (2010, Orsay Museum); A Short History of the Future (2015, Louvre); Love (2018, Louvre Lens). Her publications include Painting and photography, the challenges of an encounter (ed. Flammarion, 2012, republished in 2020) and Delacroix, the freedom to be oneself (ed. Cohen&Cohen), which received the Montherlant Prize from the Beaux-arts Academy. She teaches at the Institut de Sciences politiques de Paris, in the Master 2 Public Affairs programme, where she is scientific advisor for the Culture programme.
This series of lectures is a co-production of UCArts - Cultural Department of the Côte d'Azur University and the 20th Century National Museums of the Alpes-Maritimes. The six lectures are organised in partnership with the Friends of the Marc Chagall National Museum Association.
The programme is developed by the museum in collaboration with Josiane Rieu, professor of 16th century French literature at the Côte d'Azur University and member of the Transdisciplinary Centre for the Epistemology of Literature and the Living Arts.
To discover our series of lectures for the 2022-23 season, click here
Dominique de Font-Réaulx. Photo : © Laurence de Terline, 2022.
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