At the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, the pictorial breath of Rosa Bonheur in her Noah’s Ark
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She would have been 200 years old on March 16. Her century carried her to the firmament. The next left it in the dustbin of art history. It has only been a few years since Rosa Bonheur was once again considered as she deserves: a singular painter, among the rare female artists to have broken through in the very corseted 19th century.e century ; a being of freedom, who made no secret of living with the women she loved; a pioneer, too, of animal rights.
Because it was cows that she painted, essentially. Portraits of cows, more exactly: each with its individuality, this gaze that pierces us as if it were that of a peer. More than the pretext of the bicentenary of his birth, all these factors explain the recent resurgence of interest in the forgotten star of the Second Empire, as evidenced by the retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux. She will travel in the fall to the Musée d’Orsay, which hung, from its opening in 1986, in one of its large aisles, her masterpiece: Nivernais plowing. The public adores him; the experts, on the other hand, took a long time to really look at it.
Rosa Bonheur probably paid for her status as an official artist, friend of Empress Eugénie, and second woman to have been able to pin the Legion of Honor to her jacket.
Twenty-five years ago, the same Bordeaux museum already gave Rosa Bonheur an exhibition: it went completely unnoticed. In the catalog, the art historian Bruno Foucart nevertheless proclaimed the need “to appeal to the “court-museum”” the Rosa Bonheur affair, “star of his time but forgotten, become at best a textbook case illustrating the errors of taste of an era”recall Sandra Buratti-Hasan and Leïla Jarbouai in the catalog of the current exhibition.
And to specify: “Rosa Bonheur did not suffer only from her smooth painting associated too crudely with academicism, nor only from the fact of being a woman artist: her progressive erasure from the history of art is also linked to a too long an anthropocentric tradition and in defiance of the animal genre”. She also undoubtedly paid for her status as an official artist, friend of the Empress Eugénie, and second woman to have been able to pin the Legion of Honor to her jacket. Today, fortunately, the trial is over, and the judgment cannot be appealed. Thanks to the lawyers of gender studiesof the animal studies and ecofeminists who came to the bar, but not only. Verdict: Rosa Bonheur is a great lady, a great painter, who can help us look better today.
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