15 December 2020
2 May 2021
In the second half of the 19th century, Darwin and his followers, such as Haeckel in Germany, questioned the origins of man, his place in Nature, his relationship with animals and his own animality in a world now understood as an ecosystem....
This upheaval in the sciences, as well as the public debates that have taken place throughout the century, have had a profound influence on artists. The iconography of the monkey reflects the embarrassment in front of our ape ancestors and the fantastical quest for the "missing link". The symbolist aesthetics of metamorphosis is populated by monsters and hybrids, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids and other chimeras. With Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, Nature becomes an artist
