Two Exhibitions in Paris

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Gótikus ház földalatti labirintusa © Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Sade. Attacking the Sun
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 14 October 2014 – 25 January 2015

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740–1814) completely transformed the history of both literature and the arts, first as an underground writer, and later by becoming a veritable legend in his lifetime.
The Divin Marquis’s work is a radical questioning of issues of limits, proportion, excess, notions of beauty, ugliness, the sublime and the body image. He takes the way we look at things and sweeps away all our religious, ideological, moral and social presuppositions.
Following the analysis of the writer Annie Le Brun, a specialist of Sade, the exhibition will be focusing on the revolution of representation opened up by the author’s writings. Topics addressed will be the ferocity and singularity of desire, deviation, extremes, the weird and the monstrous, desire as a principle of excess and imaginary recomposition of the world, through works by Goya, Gericault, Ingres, Rops, Rodin, Picasso…

Marcel Duchamp. La peinture, même
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 24 September 2014 – 5 January 2015

A new interpretation of the paintings of Marcel Duchamp, one of the most iconic figures in 20th century art.
Much has been said about Marcel Duchamp’s break with painting, putting forward, as a red herring, the original psychological trauma caused by his Cubist friends’ and brothers’ rejection of his Nu descendant un escalier for the 1911 Salon des Indépendants. In the light of various iconoclastic, Dadaist gestures and his invention of the ready-made, the creator of Fountain (the “Fountain/urinal”) is generally perceived as the artist who killed painting. And yet the debate remains open: was not Duchamp’s intention to reformulate it, rather? The Centre Pompidou exhibition now proposes a new interpretation of the paintings of one of the most iconic figures in 20th century art.