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.

.

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 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