Sade. Attack the sun.
Editions Gallimard / Musée d'Orsay| N° d'inventaire | 23997 |
| Format | 25 x 31.5 |
| Détails | 336 p., 350 illustrations, publisher's hardcover. |
| Publication | Paris, 2014 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782070146826 |
"The purpose of this work is to show how, before having a major importance in the thought of the 20th century , the work of the Marquis de Sade induced a part of the sensibility of the 19th century , even though the character and his ideas were considered cursed.
For, if Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Swinburne, Mirbeau… not to mention Apollinaire, referred to it in various ways, everything leads us to believe that the strength of this thought is also to have encountered, revealed, even provoked, what then profoundly agitates plastic expression, concerning as much the inscription of desire as its power of metamorphosis.
It is the image of the body being turned upside down from within, announcing a revolution in representation. Whether this is evident in Delacroix, Moreau, Böcklin…, what is at stake is also worrying Ingres, Degas or Cézanne and of course Picasso… And this while Félicien Rops, Odilon Redon, Alfred Kubin are approaching an expression that had remained marginal until then ( curiosa or madness), before surrealism, claiming to be inspired by Sade, recognized desire as the great inventor of form.
By rediscovering this path, it will be possible to measure how much, by saying what we do not want to see, Sade will have encouraged us to show what we cannot say. Or how the 19th century became the conductor of a thought which, by encouraging us to discover the imaginary of the body, will lead
to the first physical awareness of infinity."
Annie Le Brun.
Exhibition catalog.
"The purpose of this work is to show how, before having a major importance in the thought of the 20th century , the work of the Marquis de Sade induced a part of the sensibility of the 19th century , even though the character and his ideas were considered cursed.
For, if Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Swinburne, Mirbeau… not to mention Apollinaire, referred to it in various ways, everything leads us to believe that the strength of this thought is also to have encountered, revealed, even provoked, what then profoundly agitates plastic expression, concerning as much the inscription of desire as its power of metamorphosis.
It is the image of the body being turned upside down from within, announcing a revolution in representation. Whether this is evident in Delacroix, Moreau, Böcklin…, what is at stake is also worrying Ingres, Degas or Cézanne and of course Picasso… And this while Félicien Rops, Odilon Redon, Alfred Kubin are approaching an expression that had remained marginal until then ( curiosa or madness), before surrealism, claiming to be inspired by Sade, recognized desire as the great inventor of form.
By rediscovering this path, it will be possible to measure how much, by saying what we do not want to see, Sade will have encouraged us to show what we cannot say. Or how the 19th century became the conductor of a thought which, by encouraging us to discover the imaginary of the body, will lead
to the first physical awareness of infinity."
Annie Le Brun.
Exhibition catalog.