Renaissance
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On September 19, the Musée d’Orsay is exhuming contemporary painting, a genre that was still despised until recently, in “Le Jour des peintres” by exhibiting 80 artists who were often unknown to the general public. An approach that is undoubtedly useful but which suffers from its lack of claims.
With the presence of 80 contemporary painters from the French scene, who will stand in front of their canvas at the Musée d’Orsay, ready to comment on it without depriving themselves of delivering their expert interpretation of the heritage works exhibited on the walls of the institution, ““Painters’ Day” bears witness to the vitality of the French scene, which is still too little known to the general public,” trumpets the press release. The event (read our article here) also bears witness to an attempt to get contemporary painting out of the closet where it was put away, in France, for at least two decades. Few painters working in the 90s and 2000s are quick to recount the condescending, even contemptuous, mockery that they had to endure during their studies, and, beyond that, the disinterest of the vast majority of gallery owners, exhibition curators and critics for their work, whose first fault was to identify it with this outdated, outmoded, bourgeois and dead practice, which was, immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, painting. Thomas Lévy-Lasnes, the artist who is organizing this “Painters’ Day”, once confided to Release that when he entered the Beaux-Arts in Paris, the director at the time, Henry-Claude Cousseau, had spent two hours trying to convince him “that painting was over and that if I persisted, I would waste my life. I was preparing myself for a life as a hermit, isolated in the countryside.”.
Resetting pictorial art
But this bet
