Exhibition "The Surveyors of Dreams. Drawings of the Musée d'Orsay"
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The Musée d'Orsay has a collection of about 55,000 drawings, including several hundred notebooks and pastels, drawn by more than 6,000 different artists. This collection is both vertiginous and random: vertigo of number, chance of donations, bequests, sales, opportunities, personalities, encounters, allowing to sketch a history of art of the period 1848-1914. The drawings, often from the intimate world of artists, are less known and less documented than the masterpieces on display. The exhibition of the Palais Lumière is therefore an opportunity to value them, to study them, and to offer a rich insight into the practice of drawing during the second half of the nineteenth century, through the various aspects of this medium, both in the techniques (pastel, charcoal, watercolor, ink, graphite...) only in the uses (sketchbooks, illustrations projects, beautiful presentation sheets...). The thread that connects the surveyors chosen in the exhibition is the dream, understood in the broad sense of inner life, of the relationship between subjectivity and reality, of overcoming the visible, of dreaming, daydreaming and creative imagination. The itinerary is divided into five sections: interior views or figures of dream and daydreaming; dreamlike experiences of the landscape; by monsters and wonders; through pages and drawings inspired by music. Scientific Commission: Leïla Jarbouai, Chief Curator at the Musée d'Orsay with the collaboration of Geraldine Masson, Graphic Arts Scientist, Musée d'Orsay. General Commission in Evian, William Saadé, Honorary Chief Curator of Heritage.