calendario eventi  :: 

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2/10/2012

Three exhibitions

Pinacotheque de Paris, Paris

Van Gogh
Dreaming of Japan

The two exhibitions displayed simultaneously in both spaces of the Pinacothèque de Paris allow visitors to compare Van Gogh’s œuvre with that of Hiroshige.

Everything has been said on Van Gogh’s psychological frailty, on his bipolar disorders, his schizophrenia and on his crises of delirium accompanied by delusions, as well as on their direct consequences on his body of work and on his way of seeing the world. But it is quite legitimate to wonder if the analysis of his serious trouble, placed alongside his works’ analysis has not finally led to our forgetting the essential.

A more traditional approach of his work allows us to note above all that his references were turned toward an art that was the opposite of what he produced: that of Hiroshige. An art whose whole philosophy rests upon solidity, composition, serenity, travel and inner peace.

That meeting of opposites is astonishing but made possible today thanks to the simultaneous exhibition of Van Gogh’s art and that of Hiroshige in the Pinacothèque de Paris. There has never been such an in-depth study of Van Gogh’s references and never has there been such a daring confrontation. It enables us to realize that Van Gogh’s references to Japan in general and to Hiroshige in particular were not only reduced to a few key works, obvious copies of the master of Edo (Tokyo’s ancient name until 1868), but that the majority of his landscapes from 1887 onwards were constructed around a referential system, in the centre of which is found, almost systematically, Hiroshige’s oeuvre.

By showing about forty works and mainly landscapes, the exhibition – the first one devoted exclusively to the Dutch artist for decades in Paris – is a clear demonstration of the importance of Japanese art in Impressionist art. The comparison with Hiroshige, thanks to these two simultaneous exhibitions is obviously a première that allows a confrontation of an incomparable accuracy.

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Hiroshige
the Art of Travel

The two exhibitions displayed simultaneously in both spaces of the Pinacothèque de Paris allow visitors to compare Van Gogh’s œuvre with that of Hiroshige.

Everyone in France is convinced that the most famous Japanese artist is Hokusai. It is a mistake that amuses Japanese a lot. In fact, the Japanese Leonardo da Vinci is not the master of The Great Wave but another who has never yet been honored in the French museums : Utagawa Hiroshige.

Nonetheless, in the Impressionists’ times, Hiroshige was by far the artist who most fascinated the whole group of young rebels in the Salons.

Since then and despite his unique fame in Japan and throughout the world, France seems to have ignored, forgotten or neglected him. The exhibition, which the Pinacothèque de Paris is showing today, is above all a compensation of this major forgetfulness of French museums since there has never been an exhibition of the Master of Edo.

It also offers a unique opportunity to provide a perspective, since Hiroshige’s oeuvre was Van Gogh’s main reference. More than any other painter, he has been the most inspired Hiroshige’s work, to the extent that all the scenes and landscapes painted by Van Gogh from 1887 onward are direct or indirect references to Hiroshige’s art.
The Hiroshige exhibition is in fact shown alongside the Van Gogh exhibition, as its “second part”. This also in order to emphasize the confrontations between the two artists and above all to enter, as Van Gogh did in his time in Siegfried Bing’s gallery, inside Hiroshige’s outstanding world.
That world is above all, that of travel. Beyond the nowadays-classical views of Edo, Tokyo before 1868, Hiroshige was to lead us into two mythical journeys, by taking us onto the two roads linking Edo to Kyoto. There is the southern road, aka Tōkaidō, and the northern route, aka Kisokaidō. By stopping off in each of the villages along these roads, about fifty during each trip, Hiroshige’s works lead us into that imaginary and ancestral Japan, his dream-world. But above all Hiroshige invites us to an interior journey, a journey of meditation.

Hiroshige was one of the last masters in the ukiyo-e tradition. He lifted that genre, the most remarkable in the prosperous Edo period, to a hitherto unseen level. The ukiyo-e, literally “images of the floating world” refers to the highly colored style of etchings specific to the Edo period. It is aimed to display nature in its four seasons, the passage of time, as well as city life in the excessive sensations it offers to the body.

This first exhibition of Hiroshige in Paris was made possible thanks to the important work carried out by the exhibition curator Matthi Forrer, an eminent specialist of Hiroshige’s art and curator in the Leiden museum, who agreed to lend us very exceptionally the group of works shown today.

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Denis Rouvre
Low Tide - The Japan of chaos

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9 occurred off the shores of the island of Honshu, in Japan. The tsunami that followed swept through the coastline of the Tokohu region over nearly six hundred kilometers, making twenty-one thousand victims and disappearances, by obliterating, totally or partially, many cities and port regions. That natural catastrophe led to a series of major accidents in the reactors of the nuclear centre in Fukushima. The very same day, about two hundred and fifteen thousand people living close to the damaged area were evacuated, then, in hundreds of thousands, those living in a radius of thirty kilometers also had to leave.

In November 2011 as well as in February 2012, I went onsite, without any preconceived ideas as to what I might do there. I was above all driven the need to confront a reality that escaped me and that my imagination rejected.

I covered three hundred kilometers along the coastline, those that had been the most damaged. An extreme desolation reigned there. The gigantic wave had not spared anything. I photographed landscapes without thinking, convinced that I needed time to grasp the cataclysm. In those ravaged places, there was no-one to recount what had occurred. It was a desert: dead, faceless and voiceless.

Then I wanted to find the people who lived there before. I went into the areas of the temporary dwellings — the kasetsu jūtaku —, built after the catastrophe to house those homeless people. They are pre-fabricated houses, organized in little villages and look as if they are placed away from the coastline on what are none other than waste lands. Their occupants, mostly old people, attempt by hook and by crook to survive there. Most of them have lost everything, family, friends, homes, animals, and quite often as much as the slightest souvenir that might help them recreate their personal history. Their life was shattered in a few seconds.



Aware that I was intruding into those people’s intimacy, but filled with the desire to photograph them and to record their words, I knocked on the doors until some of them were opened. All of them did not wish to receive me. The men and women who agreed to follow me to the photo studio that I had set up in the communal house are surely those whose will to live was strongest. However, on their faces, I read the implacable reality, shot through by as many shadings as there are lives. Those faces were an echo to the destroyed sites. Like a two-piece puzzle in which each element has no option other than to correspond to the other. But they were standing ; they, which the past turmoils had not destroyed , were still ready to face up to the coming ones.

As for their testimony, they ended up becoming as essential to me as the portraits or as the places of chaos, adding their motifs to the pattern of a collective fate in which are interwoven the threads of singular stories. In those fragments of life are found side by side, distress or resignation, sorrow or anxiety, as well as a wish to live, an incredible dignity. To capture that subtle and poignant mixture of weakness and strength led me as much to query man’s future in the midst of a world without any bearings, as to grasp the extent of the resources he can deploy faced with adversity. It is the path followed by these survivors in quest of acknowledgment and of renewal that I wished to share and to whom I wanted to pay homage.
Denis Rouvre

Denis Rouvre is a French photographer, born in 1967. Lives and works in Paris.

Denis Rouvre’s portraits are published in the national and international media. A portfolio of his work on those who survived the tsunami of March 11, 2011 in Japan was published in the New-York Times Magazine. One of the portraits of that series earned him a 3d prize from World Press Photo 2012, Portraits isolés. He was rewarded by prestigious prizes: 2d prize from World Press Photo 2010 for his series Lamb, 2d prize from SONY World Photography Award 2011 for his series After Meeting and was awarded a Hasselblad Masters Portrait.

His latest personal series, seeking out man’s power and frailty, were exhibited in France and abroad. He has also published several books, including Sortie de match in the Éditions de la Martinière.
In October, 2012 he will publish two new books with the Somogy Éditions d’art : Low Tide, on the survivors of the tsunami in March 2011 in Japan and Lamb, on the Senegalese fighters.

Denis Rouvre is represented in Paris by the Hélène Bailly gallery, in The Hague by the Project 2.0 gallery and in Antwerp by the Axel Pairon gallery.

The exhibition has received support from Pernod Ricard Mécénat and Olympus France

Press Department
KALIMA
Tygénia Saustier / tsaustier@kalima-rp.fr
(33) 1 44 90 02 36

Pinacothèque 1
28, place de la Madeleine - 75008 Paris
Pinacothèque 2
8, rue Vignon - 75008 Paris
The Museum is open daily
From 10:30 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Admissions stop at 5:45 p.m.
Holidays
The Pinacotheque de Paris is open on May 1st, July 14, December 25 and January 1st from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Admissions stop at 5:45 p.m.
Late-night openings
The Pinacotheque de Paris is open until 9 p.m. every Wednesday and
Friday
Admissions stop at 8:15 p.m.
Full fee 17 €
Reduced fee* 14 €
Skip the wainting lines ! Buy your ticket online !
Full fee online 18,50 €
Reduce fee online* 15,50 €
Twinned ticket Van Gogh - Hiroshige + The Collections
(sold until 16h, on Wednesdays and Fridays until 18h)
The two temporary exhibitions Van Gogh, dreaming of Japan - Hiroshige, the art of travel and The Collections.
Full fee 22 €
Reduce fee* 18 €
Skip the wainting lines ! Buy your ticket online !
Full fee online 13,50 €
Reduce fee online* 19,50 €
Single ticket Van Gogh
Full fee 10 €
Reduce fee* 8 €
Skip the wainting lines ! Buy your ticket online !
Full fee online 11,50 €
Reduce fee online* 9,50 €
The exhibition Denis Rouvre : Low Tide - The Japan of chaos is in free access

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