Presented in the old museum of painting (the museum library built by Charles Auguste Questel in 1872), 18/20 highlights a number of the most important ideas from the second half of the eighteenth century, ideas which helped shape the modern period of which we are more or less the heirs.

Whereas, under the Ancien Régime, there was a static vision of man and society, one strongly informed by religion, pre-Revolutionary society began to look to a very different, dynamic vision of the world as a place defined without limits in time or space. It was this society that invented the family circle, and the child’s place within it, and strengthened the notions of the individual, of intimacy and of amorous feeling. The private sphere began to exist in its own right and gradually contaminated the public sphere.

These powerful ideas are expounded in circular modules on the floor that are themselves projections of the oculi in the library ceiling in one of the rooms of the museum.

This exhibition is organised with the coo
peration of the Department of Art History at the Université Pierre Mendes-France and is supported by Charles Burger (Toiles de Jouy).

The exhibition layout – the works
by presentation space

Time and history

Jean-Baptiste Féret (Evreux, 1664–Paris, 1739)
Landscape with Shepherds
Oil on canvas
Collection Musée de Grenoble

Temple of Love, Nantes, circa 1790, new edition by Charles Burger

On Kawara
May 27, 1967
Liquitex on canvas, 20.50 x 20.50 cm. Courtesy: private collector, Geneva. The artist (born 1933, lives and works in New York) records ad responds to the passing of time with his Date Paintings, a series of works that he has been working on for several decades now. These pieces always start with the local newspapers of the place where the artist happens to be at the time. An event related in the paper catches his attention and he cuts out the article. Its publication date is painted on a small canvas in the language of the newspaper. The article is kept in a cardboard box, along with the painting when this is not being exhibited.

Space and geography

Optical views
Etchings on paper
Private collection
Eighteenth-century optical views are etchings made specially to be seen through optical apparatus which invert the positions of text and image. They are hand-coloured with a brush, and sometimes a stencil.

America Pays Homage to France
Manufacture de Jouy, circa 1783, design by Jean-Baptiste Huet and his school, new edition by Charles Burger

Peter Halley
Orange Prison, 2001
Day-glo, pearlescent and roll-a-tex acrylic on canvas
Courtesy Galerie Art & Public, Cabinet PH, Geneva
In the 1980s Peter Halley (born 1953, lives and works in New York) was the most important artist in the “Neo-Geo” movement, which undertook a return to abstract geometrical painting. Also the author of numerous texts, Halley describes the forms he paints as “geographies”, claiming that they represent contemporary societal space.

Exoticism and Chinoiseries

The fascination with the porcelain and lacquer of the Far East was at its height in the eighteenth century. Imported by haberdashers, fine vases and sculptures from China and lacquerware from Japan made to decorate furniture enlivened the refined interiors of the age. Imitating their Oriental counterparts, the major manufactories (Sèvres, Delft) as well as many busy provincial centres (Nevers, Rouen, Marseille, Grenoble, La Tronche) successfully took to producing the same forms and patterns. New pagoda motifs and small genre scenes “with Chinese” were produced in the famous blue and white. The taste for Chinoiseries contributed fully to this important moment in French art by bringing a lively, exotic note to every aspect of decoration;

Chronology of the Emperors of all the Imperial Dynasties of China
Bibliothèque Municipale de Grenoble

Covered baluster vase with cartouche in relief
High fire blue Delftware
Netherlands
Collection Musée de Grenoble

Earthenware tiles
Très-Cloître workshop, Grenoble
Collection Musée Dauphinois

Henk Visch
Vaarwel, 1994
Colour videogram, DVD transfer, 15’
Courtesy www.henkvisch.nl
Essentially a sculptor, Henk Visch (born 1950 in Eindhoven, where he lives and works) has made this one video, Vaarwel (Farewell), using a continuous travelling shot to evoke the exotic world of Chinese restaurants, where he is a regular patron. The appropriated objects are shown in saturated colours and to music that are both taken from this world that is virutally alien to the culture to which it so demonstratively refers.

Privacy and domesticity

Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo (Rivoli, 1719-Paris, 1795)
A Bacchant Playing the Triangle
Oil on canvas

Pierre Achard (1748-1833)
Pair of cabriolet chairs (stamped “P. Achard”)
Late eighteenth century
Painted wood, fabric
Collection Musée Dauphinois
A joiner and sculptor from the Dauphinois region, at the end of the eighteenth century Pierre Achard made a number of fine chairs in response to commissions from the various administrations in Grenoble (municipal, prefectural and judiciary) and from private individuals.

Nan Goldin
Pablo and Hikaru Honda at Home, Tokyo 1994
Courtesy private collector, Geneva
Lewis and Matt in the Tub, Cambridge, MA, 1988
Courtesy private collector, Geneva
Nan Goldin (born 1953 in Washington, lives and works in Paris) has been photographing her own life and the lives of her friends since she was a teenager. Shown at home, as their private, intimate selves, they are caught unfazed as they go about their daily life. The photos show us parties, moments of intense anxiety, conversations, sexual acts, getting ready to go out, etc.

Portrait gallery

The portrait
The taste for naturalness brought a new sensibility to the portraits that filled the salons of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, as well as private interiors. During the Enlightenment, the portrait thus emancipated itself from classical tradition and its conventional poses, acquiring a greater depth of facial expression and aiming to attain simplicity and grace. Rendered in paint but also pastel, in order to achieve and retain a greater smoothness and ease of line, the portrait gained in vitality and even sensuality.

Thomas Ruff
Portrait (P. Martin), 1989
Portrait (M. Turk), 1990
Series of 60 portraits, 1983-86. Courtesy private collector, Geneva
Thomas Ruff (born 1958, lives and works in Düsseldorf) came onto the international art scene in the 1980s. His first portraits were of his friends and entourage, including other young artists and students of the same generation. The framing remained more or less constant, the realism uncompromising.

Rineke Dijkstra
Abigael, Herzliya, April 10, 1999
Abigael, Palmahim Israeli Air Force Base, December 18, 2000
Photographic diptych, C-prints. Courtesy private collector, Geneva
The photographer Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam) specialises exclusively in portraits, especially of young people. This diptych of a young Israeli woman shows her at two different moments in her life: one, in relaxed summer clothes, the other a year and a half later, in an Israeli army uniform.

Olaf Breuning
P Boy, 2000
Courtesy private collector, Geneva
A boy model is dressed in accessories from a sports shop. But these trendy, branded accessories are combined with a long piece of fur covered with rabbits’ paws which turn him into a “wild” boy, an oddity in the world of triumphant industry.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Portrait of a man (half-profile)
Oil on canvas
Collection Musée de Grenoble

French School, eighteenth century
Portrait of a Man, erroneously known as Portrait of Lépicié
Oil on canvas
Collection Musée de Grenoble

Libon
Portrait of the Great Grandmother of Hector Berlioz, 1778
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Libon was a miniaturist who trained at the Academy of Amiens and lived in Grenoble in 1780. Berlioz’s great grandmother was a member of the Brochier family, whose head was a lawyer at the Parlement du Dauphiné in 1779.

Anonymous
Portraits of Marie-Louise-Céleste and Françoise-Alexandrine-Camille de Rochechouart
Pair of pastels
Private collection

Unknown artist
Savage
Wooden sculpture in the round
16th-17th century
Musée Dauphinois
Although made in an earlier century, this “savage” crystallises a set of ideas that were fundamental to eighteenth-century society regarding the relation between mankind and benign nature. Evoking both older, learned myths and popular beliefs, the strangeness of this figure could also have fascinated Enlightenment society.

Musée Stendhal
Renée Green
Commemorative Toile, 1992
Lamp with tablets
Courtesy Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne-Berlin
Renée Green (born 1959 in Cleveland, lives and works in New York and Barcelona) discovered Toile de Jouy during a residency in Nantes. She used it directly in works that she produced on-site, then went to collaborate with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, where she produced her own “Toile de Jouy” based on motifs that she found in period prints (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), prints that “deranged” the bucolic scenes of the original fabric. In this one we see a Frenchman hanged during the Revolution in Haiti, a Black, a white man licking a slave to assess his value. Green uses this fabric to cover furniture and other surfaces and to make curtains.