Although we have opted not to follow modern scientific typology, we decided it was legitimate to use the names of cloud formations, which have been and still are the object of countless studies by dedicated observers
since Luke Howard proposed a system of classification at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
  Alongside some of the contemporary artworks featured in the summer exhibition, a new group of artworks will be juxtaposed with works from MuMa’s collections by artists such as by Boudin, Dufy and Renoir. “
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Meteorologica” further explores the issue of how the shifting, unstable, fleeting effects of “that which cannot be painted” can be depicted, by expanding it to encompass additional contemporary artists and to include the notion of impermanence..


THE ITINERARY

The itinerary has been devised according to “elective affinities”. It will focus on poetic and formal similarities between artists from different eras who have a shared sensibility to and interest in atmospheric phenomena and their hugely varying expressions.

For instance, Eugène Boudin’s sky studies are echoed by Bernard Moninot’s drawings, which record cloud movements hour by hour like a sort of meteorological diary,
 
While Jean-Baptiste Née’s drawings, Geneviève Asse’s paintings and photographs by Jacqueline Salmon, Jocelyne Alloucherie and Jungjin Lee answer Claude Monet’s attempts to capture particular moments in his exploration of the fleeting instant.



The wind that buffets trees, bends and sculpts branches, sends ripples through fields of grass, whisks leaves into the air or sends sand scurrying along the beach is found in Henri-Edmond Cross’ fantastical neo-Impressionist works, Alexandre Hollan’s charcoal drawings, Jean-Francis Auburtin’s pastels and the photographs of Josej Nadj, Véronique Ellena and Éric Bourret. 

The wind is an impromptu visitor: arriving suddenly with no warning offers it more scope to poke fun at things and people. In Samuel Buckman’s work, the wind whisks a leaf on a tree up into an endless autumn dance. Will the leaf never free itself from the branch and set off on its last flight? It swings to and fro and spins, stubbornly clinging on.
  Claire Trotignon’s iconoclastic wind fractures the world, merrily fragmenting it and scattering the pieces.

The wind is mischievous, playing hide and seek with a little girl (in Corinne Mercadier) or a mackerel sky slumming it with an ersatz cloud in the form of a smoke-plume from a factory chimney (in Yamamoto).
Meanwhile, François Azambourg's kite designs, like decoy clouds, await the moment when they can soar upwards and join the real clouds high up in the sky.

Mist and rain blur shapes, drenching them or enveloping them in a thick, luminous or pearly veil until they disappear. 
  In the works of artists such as Armand Guillaumin, Marcelo Fuentes, Israel Ariño, Anne Jaillette, Françoise Nuñez and Marc Corigliano, the landscape seems to melt into so many drops of water or dissolve into a light vapour.
In an even more radical transformation, the frost or condensation on a window mocks appearances, making the world around us seem unreal and suggesting a theatre of shadows,
lights and signs whose meaning eludes us (Manuela Marques) and takes us to the other side of the mirror. After that, we are hardly surprised to see mimosa pompoms transformed into snowflakes (Sarah Moon).

Lastly, the exhibition invites us to join the photographer Bernard Plossu on his travels, letting him take us to the many landscapes he has photographed in a lifetime of going wherever the wind blows. These photographs give form to the great winds celebrated by Saint-John Perse: "These were very great winds over all the faces of this world / Very great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither eyrie nor resting-place..." (Vents, Saint-John Perse, 1946, published in English as Winds, 1953, tr. Hugh Chisholm).

From California to Italy, from Mexico to Spain and Portugal, from the north to the south of France, Bernard Plossu seems to have roamed the entire world to capture the myriad, infinitely varied manifestations of the wind, which is the very image of breath, movement and life…


Artworks by Jocelyne Alloucherie, Israel Ariño, Geneviève Asse, Jean-Francis Auburtin, François Azambourg, Eugène Boudin, Éric Bourret, Colette Brunschwig, Samuel Buckman, Marc Corigliano, Henri-Edmond Cross, Raoul Dufy, Véronique Ellena, Marcelo Fuentes, Armand Guillaumin, Alexandre Hollan, Anne Jaillette, Jungjin Lee, Alfred-Marie Le Petit, Manuela Marques, Corinne Mercadier, Bernard Moninot, Sarah Moon, Josej Nadj, Jean-Baptiste Née, Françoise Nuñez, Bernard Plossu, François-Auguste Ravier, Auguste Renoir, Jacqueline Salmon, Claire Trotignon and Masao Yamamoto.
 
Exhibition curators :
Annette Haudiquet, chief heritage curator, Director of MuMa
Jacqueline Salmon, photographer
Jean-Christian Fleury, art critic and exhibition curator