The Art Newspaper

Debussy, Music and the Arts

Until 11 Jun 12

paris. Claude Debussy, more than other composers, was intimately involved in creating works inspired by art, says Xavier Rey of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, who has spent two years working on this show with Guy Cogeval, the director of the Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, and Jean-Michel Nectoux, a musicologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

The result, an exhibition of around 200 works at the Orangerie, Paris, aims to evoke the vibrant cultural scene that fired the composer with a passion for symbolism in literature and art.

It also forms an early celebration of the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth in August. The show, “a mix of works Debussy admired and those he could have seen”, features pieces once owned by influential brothers-in-law—the painter Henry Lerolle, the composer Ernest Chausson and Arthur Fontaine, then a councillor of state—who introduced the composer to many of his artistic peers.

Debussy particularly admired Degas, and “met him at Lerolle’s house for dinner”, Rey says. Both Debussy and Degas disliked the term “impressionist”, and the composer described as “imbeciles” those critics who applied it to Turner.

Degas’s Marine, 1869, will be shown alongside Turner’s Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance, 1835-40, which has been loaned by the Louvre, creating “an association that has never been made before”, Rey says.

Neo-impressionism is represented by Henri-Edmond Cross’s Les Iles d’Or (the golden isles), 1891-92, symbolism by Klimt’s Roses under the Trees, 1905, and abstraction by Kandinsky’s Improvisation III, 1909 (loaned by the Centre Pompidou).

Also on view are Marcel Baschet’s 1865 portrait of Debussy and the manuscript of the composer’s 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande, on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

When the score of Debussy’s symphonic suite “La Mer” was published in 1905, Katsushika Hokusai’s Kanagawa-oki nami ura (the great wave off Kanagawa), 1830-33, was reproduced on the cover, and Paris’s Musée Guimet has loaned a woodblock print of the work.

La Mer, 1900, a glass vase by Emile Gallé, continues the theme. The show features a number of Japanese prints, which “were very important to Debussy’s [musical] imagery”, Rey says.

The Musée de la Musique has loaned the composer’s “lucky charm”, a 19th-century Japanese wooden paperweight in the shape of a toad, which Debussy “kept with him at all times”.

Concerts, symposia and talks will take place at the Orsay and the Orangerie between February and May.

The show is due to travel to the Bridgestone Museum of Art (13 July-14 October), when 12 works from the Tokyo museum’s collection will also be on display. n Ria Hopkinson Categories: Thematic

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