From the Chamber to social networks

A fascinating journey into the heart of our secret gardens through a history of intimacy from the 18th century to the present day! 470 works, paintings and photographs, as well as decorative, everyday and design art objects, reveal how intimacy has evolved. From the bedroom seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Nan Goldin, from wrought iron beds of the 19th century to the Bouroullec Brothers’ box bed, from the commode to the women’s urinal, from objects from the dry toilet to the bathroom, from aristocratic beauty to mass consumption, from licentious books to sex toys, from the Walkman to social networks and influence, including surveillance and protection tools, the exhibition shows how intimacy has become established and then profoundly changed. The boundaries between private and public have become more blurred and porous, giving rise to many debates.

In the 19th century, with the emergence of a bourgeois class, professional and family life separated: women were then mistresses of the domestic and the intimate. Painters, mainly male, such as Edouard Vuillard, who opened the path, often represented them in their interiors. It was only gradually, thanks to feminist revolutions, that the “mystified woman” shown in Betty Friedan’s book dissociated herself from the enclosed space.

The exhibition continues in the nave with a spectacular scenography centered on twenty-five masterpieces of 20th-century design around the theme of the nest and shared intimacy. Design from the 1950s to today, through seats, sofas and beds, illustrates a constant dialectic between a desire for isolation and a chosen promiscuity. Pieces such as Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair bear witness to the protective withdrawal of the 1950s and 1960s, while creations by Superstudio, Archizoom and Memphis reflect the desire for gathering typical of the 1960s and 1970s.

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The tour continues at the back of the nave and in the galleries of the rue de Rivoli, addressing six themes that explore the most contemporary changes, from sexuality to social networks, including content creation and surveillance techniques. It also questions the issue of intimacy in times of precariousness and ends in a room dedicated to the most precious of intimacy, this conversation with oneself that the personal diary offers. Finally, a work by Thomas Hirschhorn, quoting the philosopher Simone Weil, invites us to reflect on the possibilities of social networks and to consider a new humanism.

October 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025

MAD

107 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris

An exhibition that offers to discover the major designers who led the artistic developments of the Italian Renaissance. Pisanello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Veronese, Correggio… Thanks to research work carried out at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in collaboration with international experts and the Fondation Custodia, discoveries have been made about these sheets and some have been reattributed to leading artists such as Pontormo, Federico Zuccari, Aurelio Lomi, or Pellegrino Tibaldi.

The drawings of the precursors of the Italian Renaissance, at the beginning of the 15th century, now rare, are one of the highlights of the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Several studies by Pisanello, Parri Spinelli, or Benozzo Gozzoli introduce the exhibition. From then on, we can see the pre-eminence of Florence and Venice. As the main centres of artistic creation at that time, these schools also dominate the Rotterdam collection. The latter is also world-renowned for its exceptional collection of drawings by Fra Bartolomeo: thirteen sheets out of the 400 that the institution holds are presented in Paris, as the heart of Florentine production. Venice is not to be outdone, and the exhibition brings together its greatest representatives: Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto and their workshops, as well as that of the Bassano.

Drawings by the three great masters of the Renaissance – Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo – form the highlight of the exhibition and lead to the works of artists from Rome (Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo), Emilian (Parmesan, Correggio) and other schools, who assimilated and appropriated the influence of these artists. As an opening, the exhibition ends with the generation of draftsmen active at the end of the 16th century and at the turn of the 1600s, actors of the bella maniera, heralds of the Baroque and Classicism. Among them, the Baroche, the Zuccari, the Cavalier d’Arpin, the Carracci…

October 12, 2024 – January 12, 2025

FONDATION CUSTODIA

121 rue de Lille 75007 Paris

Little known outside her country’s borders, the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer was nevertheless the most renowned female painter in her country at the end of the 19th century. Famous for her use of rich and luminous colours, she created a very personal synthesis of interior scenes and the practice of the open air. She drew her inspiration from the realist movement as well as from the innovations of impressionism through a free touch and a great interest in variations in light. She is also known for her sensitive portraits of the rural world and her interest in church interiors.

At a time when women were not considered full citizens in Norway, she rose to prominence with her brush as an important figure in the art scene of her time. A member of the board of directors and acquisition committee of the National Gallery of Norway for twenty years, she opened a painting school in the early 1890s where she trained important artists of the next generation, such as Nikolai Astrup, Halfdan Egedius and Helga Ring Reusch. She was supported by the collector Rasmus Meyer, who was also a major patron of Edvard Munch.

While Backer’s painting evolved stylistically over the course of her long career, she remained faithful to a narrow range of subjects and her practice was always informed by the study of the motif. After discussing the artist’s training in the great cultural capitals of the time, notably Munich and Paris, the exhibition will also present Harriet Backer’s circle of close friends, Scandinavian women artists who also trained across Europe and shared her feminist commitments. The exhibition will then address the artist’s major favourite themes: rustic interiors, paintings of traditional Norwegian churches, landscapes and her very particular sense of still lifes. The exhibition will devote a large space to representations of musical scenes. It is indeed an important component in the life of Backer, whose sister Agathe Backer Grondhal was a renowned musician in Norway, and a central subject in his work where the vibrations of the key make the musical notes perceptible.

This exhibition, the first retrospective devoted to this artist in France, joins one of the major programming axes of the Musée d’Orsay which proposes, in parallel with the presentations of the most emblematic figures, discoveries of less famous but essential artists to understand the major evolutions of art in the second half of the 19th century. Norway is the subject of particular attention due to the dynamism of its artistic scene and the privileged links that the artists maintained with the Parisian avant-gardes.

September 24, 2024 – January 12, 2025

MUSEE D’ORSAY

Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing 
75007 Paris

BOOK YOUR TICKETS

The Jeu de Paume is showcasing the vibrant and unique work of Tina Barney, a major figure in American photography, whose work, mainly focusing on family relationships, has been rarely shown in France. The exhibition, which traces 40 years of the artist’s career, is the largest European retrospective dedicated to her to date.

Born in 1945, Tina Barney began photographing her family and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family rituals, she was particularly interested in relationships between generations in the domestic sphere.

His colorful portraits, often large-format group portraits, which at first glance seem to be family snapshots, are for the most part carefully staged by the artist, creating composed paintings that establish a dialogue with classical painting.

Others spontaneously capture elusive moments of interaction between subjects. Tina Barney has also often photographed on commission: her portraits of celebrities for the press, fashion magazines and luxury brands demonstrate the same complexity, sensitivity and sometimes humour as in her artistic practice.

The exhibition, produced by the Jeu de Paume, unveils a selection of 55 large-scale prints mixing color and black and white images, shots from his early days and unpublished productions, commissioned and personal works, known or anonymous models and those close to the artist.

September 28, 2024 – January 19, 2025

JEU DE PAUME

place de la Concorde 75008 Paris

An investigation into Balzac’s dressing gown

The Musée Rodin is showcasing a little-known piece from its collections, Auguste Rodin’s Study for a Dressing Gown for Balzac. Designed from a selection of sculptures from the museum’s collections, 19th-century fashion pieces from the Palais Galliera, and previously unpublished archives from the library of the Institut de France, the exhibition unfolds, starting with the singular Dressing Gown, an investigation into Rodin’s search for Balzac’s body. This investigation is a veritable prelude to a reflection on the bodies—real, idealized, statued, and hidden—in the monumental statuary of the 19th century that still populate our contemporary world.

Balzac’s body, as Rodin apprehends it through clothing, when he has a costume of the deceased novelist remade by Balzac’s tailor, reveals the man’s physique, considered unflattering by the monument’s patrons: Balzac, in a word, was fat. By bringing together couture and sculpture, and comparing the practice of tailors to that of statuary, the exhibition observes how the perception of bodies influences the creation of their highly idealized bronze image. It reveals how the myth of Balzac writing in a dressing gown ultimately allows Rodin to hide under ample folds a body rejected because of its corpulence. The exhibition invites us to reflect on the representation of bodies in public space, and on the necessary contemporary broadening of these representations.

Chosen by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891 to sculpt a monument to Balzac, Auguste Rodin embarked on a quest for the novelist who had been missing for nearly half a century: from studying Balzac’s image in Brussels at the home of a collector of Balzacian relics, to searching for his body in the writer’s native Touraine, where Rodin found a corpulent carter as a model, the stages of this investigation are recreated throughout the exhibition. A largely unknown fact, Rodin even found Balzac’s tailor and had him remake a costume of the writer to better understand his physiognomy. Visitors will be able to discover Balzac’s frock coat, recut for the occasion based on real and unpublished measurements of his body. Rodin then took on the challenge of embodying Balzac in clay and plaster for four years. The reaction of his contemporaries, for whom a large bronze man could not be represented as small and pot-bellied, led him to turn to the myth of a Balzac writing in a dressing gown to hide this body under the folds of a large drape. The casting of a real dressing gown in plaster, around 1896-1897, then appeared as the solution to the quest for a plastic formula restoring Balzac’s idea, in the absence of representing his exact body. The extraordinary Study of a dressing gown for Balzac, to which the second part of the exhibition is devoted, reflects the sculptor’s journey towards an idealization of the body, and invites us to question the current issues related to fatphobia and the exclusion of many bodies diverging from the “norm”.

The exhibition ends with the confrontation of the statue of Balzac, completed in 1898 and immediately rejected by the Société des Gens de Lettres, with a work by the contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price representing an anonymous black woman, in jogging pants. On one side, an idealized Balzac but difficult to understand for his patrons, late 19th century, and on the other the monumental celebration of an anonymous woman, symbol of a new diversity in public statuary of the 21st century. By taking as a starting point the process of creating the Monument to Balzac, the exhibition “Invisible Bodies” will invite a broader reflection on the evolution of representations of the body in public space.

October 15, 2024 – March 2, 2025

MUSEE RODIN

77 rue de Varenne 75007 Paris