Posted on 10/28/2005 9:35:17 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
PARIS - Do artists have to be miserable to produce great art? A new exhibition in France suggests that a little inner darkness helps.
"Melancholy — Genius and Insanity in the Western World," which has visitors lining up around the block at Paris' Grand Palais, is anything but depressing.
"Long Live Melancholy!" one highbrow French magazine raved in its review.
The dazzlingly extensive look at art from antiquity to the 21st century shows how troubled thoughts have inspired great painters, sculptors, philosophers and writers.
"Melancholy is not only negative," curator Gerard Regnier said in an interview. "On the contrary, it was a positive energy that gave strength and genius to great artists throughout Western civilization."
Among them: Picasso, Rodin, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Edward Hopper, Goya, Delacroix, William Blake. Nearly 300 works are on display, including masterpieces on rare loan from dozens of museums and collectors.
"The goal is to show the public the complexity and variety and positiveness of melancholy," said Regnier.
The show, which runs through Jan. 16 and then travels to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, was not initially an easy sell.
Paris' art elite flatly rejected the exhibit when Regnier first proposed it a decade ago. Culture and museum officials deemed that nobody would pay to see art associated with depression.
But persistence paid off and times changed. Depression is now a constant subject of cover stories and talk shows in France. The government says French use of anti-depressant drugs has doubled since 1990.
The show begins and ends with two sculptures — of men lost in thought, heads leaning on fists — that bear a striking resemblance but were created over 2,000 years apart.
The first is a magnificent first century B.C. bronze of Ajax, the Greek hero who killed himself after the Trojan War. The last is Australian artist Ron Mueck's "Big Man From 2000," a larger-than-life fat naked bald man crouched glumly in a corner, on loan from Washington's Hirshhorn Museum.
Touching on every period in-between, the exhibit shows how perceptions of melancholy oscillated through the ages, changes reflected in art and writings.
Antiquity viewed it as positive inspiration. "Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts ... are melancholic?" Aristotle asked.
It was regarded as a sin in the Middle Ages but rehabilitated by Renaissance astrologers who linked melancholy to the planets and felt it could produce genius or madness.
Albrecht Durer's iconic "Melancolia 1" from 1514 exemplifies the Renaissance view, with its pensive female figure surrounded by symbols of scientific research and wealth as a batlike creature flies through a night sky.
The exhibit winds its way through the late 19th and 20th centuries, when psychiatry deemed melancholy an illness and electric shock therapy was introduced. Particularly moving is a series of photographic sienna portraits taken in 1850 at an English asylum. The patients' faces are visibly weighed down by troubled minds.
Taken together, the show presents melancholy as a normal part of the human experience — a frame of mind that travels like a wave. At its low, we call it depression but the mood can be transient and at its height inspire greatness.
"I think people are amazed by the variety and richness of all these works," said Regnier. "It has nothing to do with sadness. It has to do with a moral of living, a moral of dealing with everyday life."
Artgoers look at a 2000 sculpture, 'Big Man' by Ron Mueck as part of the exhibition 'Melancholy-Genius and Insanity in the Western World' at the Grand Palais in Paris, Friday Oct. 28, 2005. The exhibition runs until January 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
A visitor looks at a 1502 oil painting,' Double Portrait' by Giorgio Da Castelfranco as part of the exhibition 'Melancholy-Genius and Insanity in the Western World' at the Grand Palais in Paris, Friday Oct. 28, 2005. The exhibition runs until January 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Geeze, I take a cocktail of Effexor and Xanax every day to get over this sh-t, not put it on display!
"Gomez, darling...look! How perfectly enchanting!!!"
That's a pretty good scuplture. How did the artist get Jerrold Nadler to sit still long enough to finish it? ;)
"Effexor and Xanax"! Really? Wow. You must be really calm.
I love Xanax, but it may not be the wisest medication for me. My then girlfriend got me out of a restaurant once without me remembering how I got out of there. Then I tried to jump out of her moving car.
Happy people tend not to create art. Happy people sell things to other happy people.
As for the Xanax, you just gotta know your tolerance level. I once took three and felt like I had gone on a tilt a whirl 50 times.
The image didn't show up, but I'm almost afraid to ask you to re-post it...
Well, maybe you are killing your inner Michelangelo with that cocktail? But then, maybe you are right: by all accounts he had an impossible character, and if ever it breaks loose...
The glib curator does himself and all of us a disservice by his offhand commentary of "Melancholy".
Several successive generations of insanity,alchohol/drugs and a rolling series of economic and war-torn civil strife have produced art that reflect the times in western society
Entire generations were overwhelmed with depression and ennui. Some called it the "Blues" or "weltshmairtz" and all levels of adult recorded memory reflect these terribly difficult passages of history in all the arts.
Curators should "curate" and leave art history up to serious adults.
Art Ping.
Let Sam Cree or me know if you want on or off this list.
"I'll cut you!"
Hi RP, I'm back from hurricane land.
I guess they have a Rembrandt or 2 in the show? IMO, he did melancholy better than any of the rest, good as many of them are.
Yes, Rembrandt was a king of melancholy; or self-doubt. I always want to console the man in these self-portraits to tell him he did alright in the end.
Sam, I'm glad you are free of hurricanes for a while. We'll keep our fingers crossed.
When checking on this, I found this great work of Three Philosophers by him. Stunning use of color for the time, and a soft, sensuous atmosphere. 
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