The Musée d'Orsay is considered one of the most beautiful and richest museums in the world. Located on the Rive Gauche of the Seine and opposite the Jardin des Tuileries, it was not always a museum. The building was built by Victor Laloux for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and initially served as a train station before being converted into a museum in 1986.
"Maurice Denis (1870-1943) was approached by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who wanted to publish an album of prints by the painter. Denis used his Amours de Marthe as a source of inspiration. These are private notes that he wrote in his diary in 1891, when he began courting his future wife Marthe Meunier (1871-1919)." Denis didn't just want to create simple illustrations, he wanted to capture the wonder and emotion of the first days of love in appropriate forms. The young woman to whom he entrusts his heart becomes the central theme of the series. He depicts her in private and familial, sometimes allegorical scenes that reflect all his love for her. Denis essentially drew on the motifs of his paintings from the early 1890s to create this ode to pictures.
The long process of creation, which came to an end in early 1899, led to numerous preparatory drawings, with pastels in the foreground, whose pale colors recur in some lithographs. Amour is the synthesis and result of the sculptural research that the artist had begun at the Académie Julian. In a way, it marks the end of the painter's Nabi period. Two portraits of Marthe from 1891, one in oil, the other in pastel, are presented in this installation as an echo of the lithographs.
until May 14, 2023
