at the André-Malraux Museum of Modern Art, artists carried away by the wind

“If, by chance, on the Pont des Arts, you come across the wind, the rogue wind, be careful of your petticoat…” Out of the wind, Georges Brassens made a song; Annette Haudiquet, director of the André-Malraux Museum of Modern Art in Le Havre (MuMa), photographer Jacqueline Salmon and art critic Jean-Christian Fleury have made an exhibition of it. Annette Haudiquet is now accustomed to the fact: an a priori impossible theme (we remember the “Electric Nights”, which shed light on the influence of artificial light on the artists who were confronted with it for the first time) always treated finely and pushed the further than is possible given the resources of a provincial museum.

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Impossible, because burdened by a size defect: how to represent the wind, “That which cannot be painted”, says, quoting Pliny the Elder, the subtitle of the exhibition? Well, essentially in negative, by its effects, and this, from the entrance to the museum, on the forecourt planted, for the occasion, by the services of the city’s green spaces, with 17,000 shoots of grasses which undulate in the slightest breath. The grace of the movement and the contrast with the minerality of the surrounding buildings are such that one wonders why no one had thought of it before.

The rascals, however, will be a little frustrated, the only artist to take Brassens literally being the Catalan Ricard Urgell i Carreras (1873-1924), who shows a lady involuntarily revealing her posterior. It is not out of prudishness that this aspect is neglected but rather because, by the sea, the wind is a serious matter: the life of sailors can depend on it. We have therefore favored very impressive scenes of storms which make the inconvenience suffered by summer visitors running after their boater or their parasol seem amusing.

Human or animal figure

In 189 paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, photographs or films, the exhibition tries to tame these tornadoes. As the subject makes a strictly chronological journey improbable, we favored a certain number of themes and, from the outset, posed the problem: how to embody the wind? For the ancient Greeks, it’s quite simple: such a phenomenon can only be due to the intervention of the gods. They are numerous, the winds too. Aristotle distinguishes two (the one from the north and the one from the south), then four (coming from the cardinal points), and finally eight. We erect, at I^er century of our era, on the agora of Athens, a tower of the winds where everyone is represented by a bas-relief. The wind takes on a human or more rarely animal figure. Sometimes, it is limited to a head, the main thing being that it has puffy cheeks…

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