HERMANN NITSCH MUSÉE DE L'ORANGERIE

Ce qui reste à voir c'est une frénésie de couleurs et de formes qui se détachent bien au-delà du contenu, comme les extases de couleurs des Nymphéas de Monet » (en 2022, dans un entretien avec Sarah Imatte, conservatrice du patrimoine au musée de l'Orangerie). Si Nitsch n'a pas eu le temps de concrétiser son projet pour le musée de l'Orangerie, le musée a souhaité lui rendre hommage, un an après sa mort, sous la forme de ce contrepoint réunissant un ensemble de peintures et d'œuvres graphiques réalisées peu avant sa mort, choisies directement dans l'atelier de l'artiste. Elles se déploieront dans l'espace du « pronaos » aux Nymphéas, ainsi que dans la salle contemporaine au R-2 du musée.

Commissariat :

Claire Bernardi, Directrice du musée de l'Orangerie

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Considered a major artist of the Viennese Actionism movement, of which he was one of the founders, Hermann Nitsch, born in 1938 in Vienna, died in April 2022 in Mistelbach (Austria), where he lived and worked. Internationally recognized as the master of Austrian performance art, the artist developed a powerfully expressive body of work, borrowing from religious dramaturgy to develop a total art culminating every year since the 1950s in his "Orgien Mysterien Theater", where he invited friends and audiences to six days of uninterrupted festivities and performances.

In the last years of his career, Hermann Nitsch developed a vital, increasingly colorful style of painting, always closely linked to his performative acts and the places in which they took place. Fascinated by Monet's Water Lilies, to which he paid homage at the Musée de l'Orangerie during each of his visits to Paris, the Viennese artist was invited before his death to come and dialogue with this masterpiece of Impressionism, whose proximity to the issues at stake in his own practice he emphasized: "In my performances, my expressive and religious painting has become a finished drama, an analytical dramaturgy. What remains to be seen is a frenzy of color and form that stands out far beyond its content, like the ecstasies of color in Monet's Water Lilies" (in 2022, in an interview with Sarah Imatte, curator at the Musée de l'Orangerie). Although Nitsch did not have the time to realize his project for the Musée de l'Orangerie, the museum decided to pay tribute to him, a year after his death, in the form of this counterpoint bringing together a group of paintings and graphic works produced shortly before his death, chosen directly from the artist's studio. They will be displayed in the "pronaos" area of the Water Lilies, as well as in the contemporary room on the museum's R-2 floor.

Curator:

Claire Bernardi, Head of Musée de l'Orangerie