After Isadora Duncan dancing, Saveurs d'artistes, in the kitchen of painters or The Soul of the ForestThe Musée d'arts de Nantes continues to showcase its collections, with thematic displays in room 21 of the Palais.
Le Sentiment géographique takes visitors on a journey along the banks of the Loire, from Nantes to the Atlantic, through some thirty works from the museum's modern and contemporary art collections.
Geneviève Asse, Philippe Cognée, Sheila Hicks, Jean-Émile Laboureur... many artists have sublimated the Loire and its landscapes. They are honored in this exhibition, which proposes a sensitive approach from Nantes' urbanity to the Loire's nature.
A sense of space, of sites to be recognized from memory, that's the geographical feeling, a feeling that every reverie brings with it.
Michel Chaillou, Le sentiment géographique, 1976
If every sentient being dreams of a land made to measure, every place also gives rise to its own interpretation. Julien Gracq invokes an "almost geodesic beauty" to describe the fascinating spectacle of the loops of the Meuse river (Un Balcon en forêt, 1958). In so doing, he turns the rigorous objectivity of geodesy (the science of studying the shape and measuring the dimensions of the earth) on its head, offering a subjectively embodied variant.
Each person is the measuring instrument of the landscape before them. Only a glance can reveal its beauty.
The Musée d'arts collection offers an artistic apprehension of this link with the Nantes region. Representations or evocations of the landscape emerge through the prism of singular experiences. Le Sentiment géographique invites us to wander from the banks of the Loire to the mouth of the Atlantic, and to search for traces of our own imagination in works produced in the 20th century. Some thirty works (paintings, drawings, photographs, etc.) by some twenty artists are on show in Salle 21.
Curated by:
Claire Lebossé, curator in charge of the modern art collection at the Musée d'arts de Nantes.