It is a miraculous exhibition. We even called it the phantom exhibition, at the start of confinement when, a week before its inauguration scheduled for March 24, it was fully installed and the Musée d'Orsay had feared that it could not postpone it to this summer. . So, this sixty paintings by James Tissot (1836-1902) really comes out of the shadows, even oblivion, in more ways than one. The painter has known purgatory for a long time. Exactly the opposite of Van Gogh, cursed become blessed, Tissot was a commercial artist celebrated in his lifetime then, if not forgotten, at least downgraded after his death, until his first retrospective at the Petit Palais in 1985.
There is a Tissot charm that hurt him. It was too well painted to be honest. A pasticher, said his detractors. He has so many styles that you scratch your head a bit, it's true, to find which one is really yours. He has one, like those Hollywood filmmakers who have a paw and inside a system, emit a personal note that leads astray and seduces. This worldly portrait painter did not paint only the big bourgeoisie. The love of her life and the inspiration for her most poignant portraits, Kathleen Newton, had a rough journey. He, the practicing Catholic who became famous for his illustrations from the Bible, fell in love with a divorced woman who had two children with a man who was not her husband. The second may even be from the painter.
We do not care. Except that this ambiguity, these unsaid, this unstable balance, are at the heart of his painting, which captures elegant, but intriguing, even embarrassing scenes. This man in a boat in the port of London, why is he leaving with two women and three bottles of champagne, under a dark sky of industrial smoke? Perhaps only Degas, his friend, also in love with technical virtuosity and misanthropic wish, savored the hidden perversity of the painter. This mixture of romanticism, reverie and perhaps lies. What could be more beautiful than this painting "October", in which a woman who could be a bourgeois but almost also a semi-mundane rising in rank, an outsider in any case, not at all arrived in life, looks at us before continuing his route in a park, towards who knows what meeting?
Easy success pays off sooner or later
A romantic painting, like his life. Tissot was named Jacques-Joseph at his birth in Nantes, before becoming famous in London under the first name of James. But he was called James since he was 10 years old. Tissot does not tell stories, it is his destiny that invents them. What was he doing in the Commune? In 1870, he delivered staggering drawings of the truth of the Civil War, in which he participated by engaging in National Defense. Except that he continued the battle as an endian. Like Courbet and the Communards? Maybe not, but we don't know everything. He leaves traces only in his painting.
It was at this time that he fled to London to become the most French of English painters. When Kathleen dies at the age of 29 from tuberculosis, after six years of passion, he returns to France three days later, leaving the children he will never see again, to become, this time, the most British of French artists, Pre-Raphaelite and Dandy in Paris.
What is a career about? Degas had advised him to exhibit with the Impressionists. But Tissot, at the time, sold his paintings much more expensive than them. Easy success pays off sooner or later. “It really falls into oblivion and the black hole of academicism. Even during his lifetime, he goes out of fashion, ”explains Paul Perrin, one of the curators of the exhibition. What we like today is his efficiency, the graphic readability of his paintings, his eye, these women who hide their game. He does not undress them, except once. Tissot did not paint nudes. This is proof that he had nothing academic.
Newsletter - The essentials of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le ParisienI'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to allow you to receive our news and commercial offers. Find out more
"James Tissot, the modern ambiguous" , Musée d'Orsay (Paris VII), 11-14 euros, until September 13, reservation required.
Reopening, news
The museum reopens with novelties. Like this Bonnard which has just entered the collections following a donation and which will be hung in the permanent rooms on June 29. "The Open Window", "a beautiful title for deconfinement", they say at the museum, a landscape from 1943, of the painter's last years, which breathes its last colored lights, a "fairly melancholy celebration of nature and a response to war ”, explains Sylvie Patry, director of conservation and collections. Bonnard already announces Rothko with its “vibrant ranges” of almost abstract colors, she adds. A museum always wants to strengthen its strong points, and on Bonnard, which definitively closes a history started by impressionism, it is successful.
Another novelty in particular, “Le Chapeau rouge” by Gauguin, an acquisition, like “Le Christ vert”, the most radical work by Maurice Denis.
Visitors to this Tuesday will find their museum with the Impressionist rooms all open. Orsay will now be accessible by reservation. These have accelerated since Paris moved into the green zone. The reduced gauges will allow you to savor the museum in a smaller group: "In the nave, people will have an extraordinary sensation", notes the patroness of the temple of the Impressionists, Laurence des Cars, who wants to "recreate the desire to come to the museum, to 'as much as the great open spaces of Orsay are extremely reassuring. "