Screenshot of the episode "Gazons - L'Olympia by Edouard Manet" from the web-series, "Merci de pas touch" -

Arte.tv

  • Arte.tv broadcasts

    Merci de non touch

     , a documentary web-series of 10 episodes of 3 to 5 minutes on ten major works in the history of art.

  • Hortense Belhôte, author and performer of the series, offers a feminist, LGBTQI + and contemporary reading of these works.

  • The originality of the series lies in its humorous tone, but also the trivial staging that accompanies each analysis of a painting.

Arte surprised us with the mini-series

A Musée vous, A Musée moi

, featuring works of art that come to life and become more human in order to better tell their meaning and their history.

We let ourselves be seduced this time by a new production on the history of art: Merci de pas touch

.

Broadcast on Arte.tv, the web-series confronts the paintings of the great masters with the times.

What time ?

Ours.

Merci de ne pas 

Touche thus reveals in an unvarnished analysis, a little iconoclastic and always funny, the underside of each work, ranging from the end of the 15th century to the 19th century.

We discover, for example,

The Origin of the World

by Courbet, subtitled "Let's call a cat";

Diane and Callisto

from Titian alias "Dirty Diane";

or even “Touch me” which is none other than 

The incredulity of Saint Thomas

by Caravaggio… We will let you discover why.

A current vision

For Hortense Belhôte, professor of art history, actress and author, the idea for this series started… with stripping during a performance conference on eroticism in art, at the Film Festival of Buttocks in 2017. From there, she decided to adapt the concept to a new format: a web series.

Merci de not touching

was born, with these 10 capsules of 3 to 5 minutes, offering an analysis of 10 paintings by masters exploring the theme.

Exit the seriousness and the academic tone of the experts.

Hortense Belhôte opts for a pop, mischievous and light posture that in no way detracts from the quality of the analysis - on the contrary.

“I didn't try to do a modern thing.

I just wondered how each work speaks to and touches me, as an individual today - absolutely not denying historical truths or academic research on the subject, she explains.

I didn't invent anything of what I'm saying, I just read books from people who worked on these works.

I like what the history of art tells about our gaze and how, through the history of art, we can find the keys to explaining our current culture ”.

A feminist, LGBT, queer and inclusive perspective

Hortense Belhôte makes no apologies for focusing on these works of her own, personal and influenced by her time.

Namely feminist, LGBT and queer.

It allows you to explore different currents of art history and to observe the plurality of sexual models.

For each work, a skit was shot in a contemporary context, putting the work in perspective.

For example, we discover a 

Venus in the

Vélasquez

mirror 

in the guise of a man doing voguing… "Venus could only be him", explains the author.

As for

Manet's

Olympia

, long analyzed as a prostitute waiting for a client with her maid, it would actually be a couple of lesbians, "precarious intellectuals, on a Sunday afternoon in a pavilion of suburbs, with their cat ”.

And then there is Hercules and Jesus: everything seems to indicate that they are gay - the first having a penchant for cross-dressing and the second for BDSM.

"If your friends were works of art, who would it be?"

"

Each capsule was shot in a place in the daily life of Hortense Belhôte.

Football field for

L'Olympia

, laundry for Hercules, queer night for Venus… The author is also on screen as a performer, and plays with the codes of pop culture and classical art by filling each episode of references, symbols and humor.

If the sets are those of his daily life, the actors are “his best friends”.

She also explains to us that she updated the paintings with regard to her / their life: “The garage episode I wrote for my motorcycle… and for my girlfriend, with her kid who pisses us off!

".

The cabbage leaves that he uses as Eve's outfit come from a friend who has lent his fruits and vegetables for the occasion!

Familiar, sometimes a little provocative, Hortense Belhôte has found her credo - “contemporaneity through intimacy”, in her words - thus recreating a direct link between our time, art and great history.

Desecrate works

“My goal was not to continue to promote a sacralization of these objects but to show what is fascinating in them because of what they say about us.

The idea was to make it accessible, not to continue to convey exclusions in the circulation of knowledge ”.

Far from trying to exclude or divide, Hortense Belhôte's playfulness is rather an invitation to update our vision of these paintings, making them readable but also closer to us.

She adds that her goal and her pleasure "is to tell me that a teenager in the middle of coming out, a city dweller, very 21st century can recognize himself in there and that it does him good.

And that at the same time a heterosexual grandmother completely of the XXth century could also find it very nice.

"

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