A projection of The Arcadian Shepherds (Les Bergers d'Arcadie) by Renaissance painter Nicolas Poussin serves as the gateway to Arcadie, an exhibit of modern art that recently opened at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Beginning a show of original works by the masters of 20th-century art with a Renaissance painter might seem heretical to some. But for Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Centre Georges Pompidou and curator of the exhibit, that's the point.
“I think we've emphasized for too long that there is a big difference [between classical and modern art]. I’m not sure that there is that difference. You can use different vocabulary [to discuss the works] but in fact you are saying the same old story,” he said.
TFAM organized the highly anticipated exhibition with France's Centre Georges Pompidou, known as the Pompidou Center in English. It features 83 objects by 42 masters of modernism including Henri Matisse, Georges Braques, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Joan Miro. The paintings, installations, photography and film are located in galleries 1A and 1B of the museum.
But the exhibit is more than just a collection of cubist nudes and impressionist landscapes. Ottinger has employed The Arcadian Shepherds as a means of questioning accepted assumptions about the relationship between two different traditions of Western art. It is an idea he hopes will help those unfamiliar with Western art gain a deeper understanding of its traditions and history.
The exhibit's main theme investigates Arcadia — a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. For Ottinger, the elements of utopia found in Poussin's painting are clearly evident in the modern works he has chosen to display.
The exhibit is broken down into 10 sub-themes: The Golden Age, Messengers, Arcadia, Arcadia Rediscovered, Abundance, Vanities, Sensual Delight, Harmony, Nights, and Breakfast on the Grass. Each of these sections addresses a detail of Poussin’s painting and suggests aesthetic continuity between French classicism and European modernism as informed by an artistic tradition that dates back to antiquity.
“Most of the questions asked by the modern painters could be rooted in a very old tradition and this tradition is the French painting and the classicism of Poussin,” Ottinger said.
It is a somewhat controversial argument because most art historians see a clear break between modern art and the traditions that came before it.
“We used to say that modern art starts with a famous painting by Manet — Luncheon on the Grass (Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe) … Why can't we consider the other side that this particular painting introduced in modern times a kind of nostalgia for what we have lost in modern times: contact with the nature. This is the narrative that is told in the exhibition itself and you can see that it makes sense to understand that many of these artists have a kind of wish to reconsider their relation to the cosmos,” he said.
The exhibit's 10 sub-themes investigate different aspects of Poussin's painting and reveal continuity in the preoccupation with nature — often with irony.
For example, in the section titled Abundance the curators placed Andreas Gursky's iconic photograph 99 Cents, which depicts American-style consumerism, beside Georges Braque's Canephore, an oil-on-canvas diptych of two women holding fruit, which symbolizes fertility. Juxtaposing the two works enables the viewer to consider different ways of interpreting abundance.
The section titled Vanities takes the viewer in a different direction. A canvas by Giorgio de Chirico The Melancholy of the Afternoon (Melancolie d'un Apres-Midi) shows an industrial landscape rendered in stark tones of black, green and brown. The same section displays Braques' Vanitas, a still life with a yellowed cross and human skull that is rich in symbolic meaning. Placing this section next to the one on abundance suggests that nature gives and man destroys.
With so much forethought going into the exhibit, it is disappointing that the curators and museum have yet to provide introductory essays for any of the 10 sections. Whether the cubism of Picasso or the expressionism of Miro, modern art is notoriously difficult to decipher. Without a clear context, the uninitiated viewer will probably fail to appreciate the deeper significance of the works on display, let alone understand the primary theme of utopia as a perennial artistic preoccupation.
It might even have the opposite effect and reinforce the commonly held assumption that art — especially the modern kind — can only be appreciated by a small circle of the initiated. A few paragraphs for each of the 10 sections would have sufficed to show how modern art fits into the larger tradition of Western art.
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