The museum’s collections, and the new emphasis on their dialogue with the environment, partly guide the exhibition programme. In the wake of the “Waves” exhibitions, “Clouds over there… The Wonderful Clouds”, “Impression(s), Sun”, the MuMa offers this summer an exhibition dedicated to the wind, a meteor whose «real» effects can be observed from the windows of the museum, and in all variations of its power, while having the opportunity to examine the effects "represented" in the works hung in theatres (Boudin, Courbet, Renoir, etc.).
How to paint the wind? How to represent what is essentially invisible? Since the wind imposes its omnipresence, its strength, its anger but also its benefits on humanity, the latter wonders about the way to represent itself and to represent this element as familiar as it is elusive. You feel it, you feel it, but it’s only by
the effects it has on the visible world we perceive it.
The exhibition The wind. “What Can Not Be Painted”” explores artists' solutions to the question of the representation of the wind, the challenge it poses, “how to represent the invisible?” Multidisciplinary, it embraces a broad period, from Antiquity to the contemporary period, because we must indeed wait for the invention of cinema, the only one capable of capturing the movement in its duration, so that the wind is no longer suggested by its fixed image.
Nearly 150 works by Dürer, Goya, Hokusai, François Gérard, Turner, Corot, Hugo, Daumier, Millet, Nadar, Boudin, Daum, Monet, Renoir, Gallé, Anquetin, Steinlen, Sorolla, Vallotton, Vlaminck, van Dongen, Dufy, Arp, Man Ray, Lartigue, Brassaï, Gilbert Garcin, Alexandre Hollan, Jeff Wall, Bernard Moninot, Philippe Favier, Éric Bourret, Véronique Ellena, Jean-Baptiste Née…