The Louvre-Lens displays somewhat watered-down images on the theme of exile

Lens (Pas-de-Calais). In 1873, Gustave Courbet was forced to leave France, sentenced to a fine that he could not pay for his participation in the events of the Commune. It was in Switzerland, on the banks of Lake Geneva, that he found refuge, and spent the last years of his life without seeing either Paris or his beloved Jura again. Final moments shared between intense artistic activity and heartbreak, which inspire Dominique de Font-Réaulx, specialist of the 19th century and Courbet, this question: “What does exile do to creation? »

In the vast temporary exhibition spaces of the Louvre-Lens, the art historian deploys a response in five sequences, organized by a scenography in the form of a crossroads. After a long introductory part devoted to exiles in the founding myths (notably the biblical Flood, but also evocations of the Koran, the Hindu Ramayana or Homeric texts), the visitor arrives at a rotunda which leads him to explore the notions of welcome, heartbreak, or memories of exile, without an imposed sense of visit.

This scenography supports the sensation of a walk through the history of art in the light of exile, rather than that of a real demonstration, of a “thesis exhibition”. Dominique de Font-Réaulx also takes care to point this out: “It’s a poetic exhibition, not a current event”. The back and forth between contemporary works and classic works, elegantly staged, implicitly affirm the existence of a form of companionship between exiles and creation which runs through history.

The exhibition’s questioning, on the influence of exile on creation, is well maintained, and also deliberately moves away from a study of the figure of the exile: the wandering Jew, Napoleon in exile in Saint Helena, and other obvious representations of the exile in art history are not the subject of an iconographic analysis here. On the other hand, in front of a representation of the Swiss castle of Chillon by Courbet, the visitor is invited to detect a melancholy specific to exiles who doubt whether they will one day be able to find their land.

More obviously, this melancholy takes the form of despair in the face of Here is my heartthe model of a city destroyed by the Syrian artist who took refuge in France Khaled Dawwa, that of anger in the face of the gigantic visa stamps carved in wood by Barthélémy Toguo, or of a hope revealed in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites Ford Madox Brown and Richard Redgrave, representing a last look at home before the big departure.

Along the way, certain images reappear, such as that of the frail skiff lost at sea, whether engraved by Victor Hugo, displayed on the large formats of Yan Pei-Ming or the small Escape from Rochefort by Manet, or even photographed by the Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil. The exhibition also initiates an interesting reflection on recent representations of exile, arriving late in the course, through the images of the “jungle” of Calais or the Parisian refugee camps of the photographers Mathieu Pernot and Bruno Serralongue, questioning the tension between the documentary objective and their inscription in a collective imagination.

It is in this part that the exhibition gains historical depth, evoking the creation of refugee status at the end of the 19th century. The visual manifestation of this status goes hand in hand with a new place, the camp, embodied here by the very beautiful sheets of Antoni Clavé produced when he was at the Perpignan stud camp after the Spanish Civil War.

This end of the journey contrasts with an overly general statement in the previous sections, and a form of distance from the burning news of the subject, from which it is nevertheless difficult to escape. The presentation of watercolors by Henri Michaux, to evoke “inner exile”, thus seems somewhat clumsy, a few meters from the evocation of exiles, which are very real. The poetic approach defended here offers a pleasant artistic journey, drawing avenues for reflection, but a little too calm in view of the subject it proposes to treat.