The Dream Walkers
The Musée d’Orsay has a rich collection of approximately 55,000 drawings, including several hundred notebooks and pastels, drawn by more than 6,000 different artists.
Due to the fragility of works on paper to light. Most of these sheets are kept in reserve and accessible to the public in the graphic arts cabinets of the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.
This collection is both vertiginous and random: the vertigo of the number, the chance of donations, legacies, sales, opportunities, personalities, encounters, the distribution between national collections. This allows us to sketch a history of art from the period 1848-1914; comparable to an immense puzzle of which there are always missing pieces.
The drawings, often coming from the intimate universe of the artists, are less known and less documented than the masterpieces on display.
An exhibition outside the walls of part of the graphic arts collection is therefore an opportunity to promote and study it. But also to offer a rich overview of the practice of drawing during the second half of the 19th century. Through the various aspects of this medium, both in techniques and in uses.
The thread that connects the surveyors chosen in the exhibition is the dream. Not according to his limited sense of nocturnal activity during sleep. But understood in the broad sense of inner life, of the relationship between subjectivity and reality, of going beyond the visible, of oneirism, daydreaming and creative imagination.
The exhibition is an invitation to travel. Less to the picturesque journey than to the wandering journey in the poetic imagination of artists; who enter the “second life”; what is the dream. Through the power of imagination, they create “a new world” akin to infinity.
The course will be articulated from five sections: interior gazes or figures of dream and reverie; dreamlike experiences of the landscape; by monsters and marvels; over the pages and drawings inspired by the music.