PAID ENTRY | Beaux-arts de Paris

Collected and reproduced from the 16th century on, ancient statuary has never ceased to nourish and inspire artists who discovered it in Italy or France through casts or drawn and engraved copies. From Jean Boucher to Carpeaux, via Poussin, Bouchardon and Ingres, the greatest French painters and sculptors were enthusiastic students of this school of antiquity.

Artists have allowed themselves audaciously surprising liberties in their interpretations of antiquity, whether this be in the disturbing transpositions of Jean Boucher and Géricault, who have no qualms about restyling their models in playful and erotic compositions, or radically different contexts, such as when Poussin places an antique box in the foreground of a depiction of the Holy Family.

The exhibition presents around thirty original drawings, some of them never previously exhibited in public, as well as a selection of prints and collections of drawings, all from the Beaux-Arts de Paris collections.

The Cabinet de dessins Jean Bonna thus aims to shed light on the lessons learned from antiquity and the extraordinary productivity garnered through the perspectives of artists on these masterpieces.

À l'école de l'antique : Poussin, Géricault, Ingres...

Cabinet de dessins Jean Bonna

14, rue Bonaparte

Paris 6e

From Wednesay to Sunday. 12 pm – 9 pm
Closed on Monday and Tuesday

Free entry

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Jean BOUCHER Satyre et Bacchante, 1600 Sanguine et craie sur papier beige J. Masson, don en 1925 © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Nicolas POUSSIN Divers instruments de sacrifice antiques, d'après Nicolas Beatrizet, vers 1640 Plume, encre brune et lavis brun A.-C.-H. His de la Salle, don en 1867 © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Nicolas DE LAGILLIÈRE Homme mordu par un serpent, assis dans la pose du Laocoon, vers 1705 Pierre noire et craie sur papier brun Fonds de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Jean Auguste Dominique INGRES Buste dit d'Aristote, vers 1790 Graphite, rehauts de craie sur papier beige M. Guérin, don en 1932 © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Théodore GÉRICAULT Cortège de Silène, vers 1816-1817 Mine de plomb, encre noire, lavis de sanguine et aquarelle A.-C.-H. His de la Salle, don en 1867 © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Jean-Baptiste CARPEAUX Étude d'après Le Tireur d'épine, vers 1858 Pierre noire G. Stirbey, don en 1882 © Beaux-Arts de Paris

Over the past decade there has been a renewed interest in the practice of casting, which once again brings together the artistic and industrial worlds. Casting in plaster has never gone away, but the repertoire has now been enlarged. Casts of all kinds proliferate in our daily lives, and artists avail

themselves of newly available digital techniques and artificial materials. Casts embody the special but unseen quality of almost all sculpture: that it is more often serial than unique. Sculpture is inherently plural and casting makes it so.

The artists in this show have been chosen because they are fascinated by casting, and what it allows them to do. For some it is a way of capturing transient life stages; for others a way of immortalising historical events. While some use plaster for its historical associations, others use 3D scans to speak

of cloning, surrogacy, and virtual multiplication. Casting has always been linked to documentation, and still today it gives form to what might not otherwise be known. Artists explore the moulds as much as the images, looking quite literally inside the sculpture itself.

Contemporary works have been placed alongside the historic cast collections of the Fine Art schools of Paris and Lisbon to highlight these continuities. Generations of students have grown up alongside these collections, as interesting for their disordered repetitions as for their original teaching purpose. This exhibition goes beyond iconography to look instead at the infinite possibilities of a technique that has become part of our lives.

Infinite Sculpture is the result of a collaboration between the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. It draws on the historic collections of the Louvre, the Réunion des musées nationaux and Faculdade de Belas Artes in Lisbon. The contemporary works are all on loan.

Infinite sculpture

December 4, 2019 – February 16, 2020

Palais des Beaux-Arts

13, quai Malaquais

Paris 6e

Opening hours 12 pm- 9 pm

From Wednesday to Sunday

Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

Esculturas Infinitas

April 23rd - Septembre 7th, 2020

Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Lisbon