It is very difficult to speak of Jean Siméon Chardin's painting because it is neither symbolic, decorative, nor anecdotal. His still lifes and his intimate scenes are compositions of emptiness and silence. ” Thus spoke the academician and former patron of the Louvre Pierre Rosenberg during the last retrospective. It was in 1999, at the Grand Palais. The previous one took place in 1979. In the absence of a new vicennial event, Alexis Merle du Bourg, doctor of art history at Paris IV Sorbonne, takes up the challenge of an original speech in a beautiful book (in progress printing, in Italy).
His idea was to retrace the perception of the work. And we can see how the idea we have of these 200 or so paintings and drawings, most of them impeccably constructed and executed, could have varied! Diderot, one of the first in a long series of aesthetic commentators, wrote in his account of the Salon of 1767 that he stopped in front of a canvas "as if by instinct, like a traveler
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