This exhibition inaugurates the Orangerie’s new cultural policy and new temporary exhibition areas after its recent renovation.
Designed by the museum's director, Pierre Georgel, it makes a symbolic link between the Orangerie’s past and future by evoking one of its best known exhibitions between the two wars, The Painters of Reality in France in the 17th Century, organised by Paul Jamot and Charles Sterling in 1934. The exhibition, which in particular revealed the work of Georges de La Tour, had deep impact. It brought about a durable change in the appreciation of 17th-century French art.
Apart from a complete virtual reconstitution of the exhibition and a wide choice of the originals presented in 1934 (about seventy 17th-century paintings, works by Georges de La Tour, the Le Nain brothers and other "painters of reality" such as Valentin, Tournier, Bourdon, Rivalz or specialists in still life such as Baugin and Linard, but more surprisingly Poussin and Claude Gellée), the 1934 exhibition is re-situated in its political and intellectual context by a substantial historical survey. One room allows visitors to discover the sometimes disconcerting consonances between the "painters of reality" of the 17th and the 20th centuries, with some fifteen works by Maurice Denis, Picasso, Léger, Magritte, Balthus, Hélion, as well as painters from the 1930s who were famous in their time and deserve rediscovery.
