The most important exhibition of spring 2006, presenting 80 paintings and 104 drawings, this retrospective aims to shed new light on the artist, his fruitful contradictions and the paradoxical nature of his relationship with French romanticism.
Alongside masterpieces held by the Louvre and others made available through the generosity of private collectors, exceptional loans from American, English, and Russian museums provide an opportunity to explore Ingres’ work as never before possible.
The last retrospective devoted to this uniquely talented painter and draftsman dates back more than forty years. Long considered as the last representative of Davidian neo-classicism and the avowed rival of Delacroix, Ingres is above all, to use his own description, a “revolutionary”, albeit an inward one. Like Girodet, his originality must be appreciated by reference to the classical rules and precepts that the creator of Apotheosis of Homer embraced with such conviction, and that he transgressed with much the same fervor. This tension is central to his work, and it is also characteristic of the period during which this artist was active. There has too frequently been a tendency to separate Ingres from his epoch and the practices that defined modern painting after 1800, its dissemination and its interaction with new methods of creating images, from the efflorescence of engraving to the emergence of photography.
Baudelaire was right when he described Ingres as “a quintessentially audacious” artist, but we must today consider these celebrated “extravagances” in the context of early French romanticism.
As early as 1806, critics lambasted this painter’s portrayals of Napoleon and the Rivière family, taking issue with his “predilection for the bizarre”, his excess in all things.
Overly realistic, but also inordinately mannered, too cavalier in his use of eroticism, too free in his intermingling of genres, Ingres unnerved his contemporaries — to this day, his work defies simple classification. In truth, Ingres precipitates the demise of the Davidian model through his rejection of a certain idealized rendering and his search for new means of expression, his anatomical license and his astonishingly intense palette, and on a deeper level his refusal to compose, to unify the image and its interpretation.
For the first time, this Ingres retrospective gives equal weight to all facets and all phases of the artist’s career, from the primitivism of his youth to the glorious indecency of the last nudes, from the first Parisian portraits to the final flourish of the years 1840 to 1850, the culmination of his distinguishing “love of women” and his unclassifiable modernity.
The exhibition opens with two immense canvases displayed in the rotunda of the Napoleon Hall.
Jupiter and Thetis (1811, Granet Museum, Aix-en-Provence) and Ossian’s Dream (1813–1835, Ingres Museum, Montauban) answer and complement each other like day and night, temptation and melancholy, Homer and Ossian—these oppositions, and others like them, characterize Ingres’ entire career.
