Paris (AFP)
In the nave of the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, the presence of the elephant Marguerite is intriguing: the exhibition "The origins of the world" invites you to discover how much science, animal, botanical or biological, inspired artists in the 19th century .
More than five months late, this exceptional exhibition, the result of three years of work, finally opens to the public on Wednesday.
It was extended until July 18 after intense negotiations with lenders.
The exhibition was produced with the collaboration of scientific teams from the Natural History Museum.
It follows on from other thematic exhibitions such as "The Black Model" last year, which explored another major evolution of representations in art in the 19th century.
As for "The Black Model", the period retained is "the long XIXth century", until the end of the war of 14-18.
In the middle of this period, appeared "The Origin of Species" (1859) by Charles Darwin.
This pivotal thinker of evolutionism will dominate to the detriment of others unjustly forgotten.
Eighty loans enriched the exhibition, with the evocative subtitle: "the invention of nature in the 19th century".
Cartels surmounted by an elephant silhouette were specially hung at child height.
The exhibition recreates the multiple interactions between science and the arts at a time when scientists impose their vision of the world, while the old order of knowledge based on religion is fracturing.
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The conception of man's place in the world changes as the discoveries follow one another, giving rise to debates, questions and interpretations.
This mobilizes painters in a diversity of inspirations very well rendered.
The exhibition restores the priority of the time: taking an inventory of nature.
Everything is called into question: the origin of life goes back millions and not a few thousand years.
Man descends from the monkey.
The number of known species is exploding.
Scientists and explorers discover the infinitely small, the seabed, geology, planets, extinct animals, fossils and other dinosaurs.
All this relativizes the Judeo-Christian vision of the Garden of Eden, where man is at the center of creation.
These discoveries lead man to question his animality, comforting, positive, or terrifying, bestial.
It is seen as a single branch of a multiple tree, where the species are related.
The painters will be passionate about imagining life in the Stone Age.
Spectacular paintings show the great voyages of scientific exploration.
Life in the "unexplored abyss" does not only fascinate Jules Verne.
A painter like the Austrian Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez went so far as to paint the seabed, enclosed in a small submersible.
Other themes naturally inspire the painter: why is the peacock beautiful?
Does beauty have a natural foundation?
The exhibition also shows how evolution has been understood differently in France, the United Kingdom and Germany.
As the exhibition unfolds, the visitor feels uneasy in front of the representations of monsters, centaurs, chimeras, sirens.
Stifling in the positivist and scientist atmosphere, some painters take refuge in occultism, spiritualism, desperate fatalism (Munch) or symbolic and strange expression (Mondrian).
"By removing all transcendence from humanity, Darwinian theory painfully questions the place of man on earth," notes the president of the Musée d'Orsay Laurence des Cars.
Director Laurent Grasso created a film for the exhibition, "Artificialis", which shows that the renewal of representations of the world continues, for better or for worse, with scanners and other computer tools.
Projected above the nave, not far from the elephant Marguerite, "Artificialis" wants to be "a spectral journey in the new dimensions allowed by new technologies, a questioning around the visible and the invisible", underlines with AFP the director.
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