This exhibition organised by the Musée d’Orsay, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles in collaboration with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madridis the first major exhibition in Paris devoted to the work of painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme since his death in 1904. During the last few decades, the widely held image of Gérôme has undergone a significant change in France. Stigmatised for many years as the representative of sterile Academic art, Gérôme is today recognised as one of the greatest image creators of the 19th century. This reappraisal is the result of three factors: historiographical research, led primarily by Gerald Ackerman, the pioneering exhibition in 1981 in his home town of Vesoul, and recent research conducted by the Musée Goupil in Bordeaux into how Gérôme’s work reached such a wide audience. The Musée d’Orsay has always shown an interest in this artist, notably with its acquisitions of Consummatum Est in 1990, La Réception du Grand Condé à Versailles [The Reception of Condé in Versailles] in 2004, and the original plaster figure of Corinthe [Corinth] in 2008.
The exhibition, like the accompanying catalogue, examines all the issues of his work, from his sources to his influence. It aims to reveal and analyse how he developed a prolific visual grammar that at times pushed the illusionist obsession to the point of strangeness, finding a resonance in all of the visual arts, prints, photography and most of all, in the cinema, which was then in its early years. It also aims to revisit his art and offer a new approach to such diverse questions as Gérôme’s place in French painting at the time, his theatrical interpretation of history painting, his complex relationship with the Orient, his use of polychromy in sculpture, and his approach to archaeological reference, from the Neo-Grec movement to the instructive role of his work. It also looks at how his personality crystallised the whole anti-Academic struggle of the late 19th century, and finally, how he aroused the interest of American collectors.
