What if she was the most beautiful exhibition of the summer? Visually, there is no photo, so to speak of paintings. We rarely had the impression of touching the sea with our finger on a painting! Almost literally. The white foam by Peder Kroyer (1851-1909) is of a paste so thick, luminous, iridescent, that the light of the painting almost transforms the museum room into a beach. Especially since you can sit on a bench, as on the boards. It is rare enough to be reported. The Marmottan Monet museum has set up a scenography that allows you to contemplate, as if facing the horizon, these oceanic paintings.
This is the largest exhibition that France has devoted to this Danish painter who trained in France, on the motif, in Cernay-la-Ville, Concarneau, Saint-Malo, or Grez-sur- Loing. Is it the Breton light that illuminates these colors? The artist has created a kind of universal sea, which feeds on images captured during his travels in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Skagen, a mythical place of Danish painting, their Pont-Aven, village of fishermen - now a tourist spot - where two seas meet, in the far north of Denmark.
A spark of water and waves that produces “Blue Hour”, the title of the exhibition.
A scientific phenomenon: twilight lasts longer in these latitudes.
That of Skagen beach, where a naked boy sits in the water to enjoy the evening sun a little longer, which refuses to go to bed.
How we refuse to leave, magnetized by these paintings.
It is the largest exhibition that France has devoted to this Danish painter who was trained in France.
CHRISTIAN BARAJA
Scandinavia, after having been fashionable in the top sales of thrillers, now allows us to discover great painters who are somewhat the Impressionists of the Far North, but more naturalists.
Marmottan is after all Monet's museum.
After Zorn le Suédois at the Petit Palais, who also recently presented "The Golden Age of Danish Painting", an exhibition unfortunately victim of confinement, Marmottan reveals another painter totally unknown to us.
The most beautiful and zen of the moment
This happiness which radiates the paintings has been paid dearly.
Kroyer, born to an unknown father and mentally ill mother, was raised by an aunt.
His wife, herself a painter, Marie Kroyer, very beautiful, "too beautiful" will say a friend, will also suffer psychically, just like him, several times interned.
They will go their separate ways.
Life goes or drifts, and the painting captures moments of ecstasy or appeasement.
A dreamy woman in a blooming garden, sitting on a lounge chair.
For us, it will be a bench in front of the table, but what is good!
Very few painters know how to represent bathers in the water, in full play like these children.
We only know two: the Spaniard Sorolla, another magician of summer hours by the sea, and Kroyer.
South Pole and North Pole of painting.
"Boys bathing on a summer evening at Skagen beach."
Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst / Jakob Skou-Hansen
Photographs on display also show how much the Dane seeks realism: in his masterpiece, “Calm Evening on the Beach at Skagen” (1893), the painter first photographs his wife and a friend, the painter Anna. Ancher, who also benefited from a major retrospective, recently in Denmark.
This photo of relatives becomes a universal painting in which the two women, from behind, faces concealed, become silhouettes absorbed by the sand, the sea and the sky.
The most beautiful exhibition, and also the most zen, of the moment.
“The blue hour of Peder Severin Kroyer”
, Musée Marmottan Monet (2, rue Louis-Boilly in Paris XVI), until September 26th. Reservations are recommended but not compulsory. Price: 12 euros.
www.marmottan.fr
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