The Curators View - The Dream Archive from the Musée d'Orsay

The choice of works as well as the title of the exhibition "The Dream Archive from the Musée d'Orsay" at the museum Albertina was made by Werner Spies, the former director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Werner Spies was at complete liberty to choose from more than 90,000 items in the Musée d’Orsay, with the support of curator Leïla Jarbouai.

The Dream Archive is an appropriate title for the show, as the visitor gets the feeling of finding himself in the dream -or nightmarish- scenarios of the artists. There are architectural fantasies, monstrous creatures or melancholic self portraits, showing that the 19th century was not only characterized by technical progress, social emancipation or visions of the future, but also had its darker side, full of fears and abysses.
On numerous pictures, like on the self portraits by Corinth, Léon Spilliaert or even Baudelaire, we see self-doubt, anguish and gloom. Visions of cemeteries, vanitas motifs, death and skeletons are recurrent subjects in the exhibited works. Women are depicted as an object of desire as well as a threatening femme fatale, conveying the atmosphere in which, at the end of a seemingly optimistic century, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis could show a glimpse of the bourgeois subject’s unconscious dark side. (written by Cem Angeli)
An exhibition-portrait by CastYourArt. | www.castyourart.com

https://www.albertina.at/

Interviewee: Werner Spies
Artworks by: Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Felicien Rops,

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Roman Pachernegg
Production country: Austria, Vienna