“Crime and Punishment” in Orsay

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Exhibition

Crime and Punishment

Venue

Orsay Museum in Paris

Client

Orsay Museum

Project Manager

Hubert le Gall

Area

1000 m²

Scenography set-up, design and manufacture of panels, , showcase windows, , furniture, plinths, remote and onsite layouts and installation, painting of all volumes, installation of showcase windows, carpets and tapestry , glass covers and logistics.

March 16th to June 27th 2010

Crime and Punishment

Art Confronted by Justice and Death

The Guillotine veiled in black, the door of death row is loaded with graffitis, moldings of the heads of criminals but also pictorial masterpieces: the exhibition «Crimes et Châtiments» which opened Tuesday, at the Musée d’Orsay, is phenomenal.

Conceptualized by former Seal Guard Robert Badinter and designed by the academician Jean Clair, it explores the way artists look at crimes perpetrated from the Revolution up to 1939.

“Why do men kill? What is this justice, which for so long, has killed man itself? I said to myself that art would allow me to advance in my knowledge of crime and its punishments”, stated Friday to the press, Robert Badinter who voted the death penalty abolition in September 1981.

“I discovered that what interests the artist is the violation of fundamental prohibitions, sacrilege, sex and death,” he added.

The former lawyer, who had been thinking about this exhibition for ten years, first proposed it to the Louvre and later, with Jean Clair, approached the Musée d’Orsay.

Inexorable Justice

When Art Meets Horror

“It did not take five minutes” for our proposal to be accepted by Guy Cocheval, the president of the Musée d’Orsay, reports Jean Clair. It was then assembled very quickly: 475 pieces were gathered in a record time.

“From the moment you have 45 severed heads, 33 detached limbs, phrenological skulls, a guillotine blade and a bunch of symbolic pictures, it was necessary to organize all this in sections so that it could be readable by an uninformed public.”, continues the art historian.
“The abolition of the death penalty was the fundamental foundation from which we started,” he added. At the end of the first room stands the guillotine, veiled in black but with a clearly visible blade. It was a blood freezing vision.

“This is the first time we have dared to show such an atrocious object in an art museum,” Clair said. “The real object is more shocking than all the representations we have made of it,” he said.

Guy Cocheval acknowledged that he was “not very keen to show such an object” but that he had been convinced.

Another striking object, the door to death row, loaned by the Penitentiary Museum of Fontainebleau., the prisoners awaiting capital punishment carved on the wood, with sharp objects, inscriptions such as «farewell Frisette», «no luck» dated 1899, 1911 etc…

Crime and Punishment

The assassination of the revolutionary Marat by Charlotte Corday, in 1793, had a special place in the exhibition. It has given rise to many speculations that have evolved over time. The murderer gradually became a heroine while the Apostle of Terror took on the features of the Executioner.

The exhibition also explores the attempts of science to grasp the criminal mind in the 19th century. With phrenology (study of character according to the shape of the skull) and criminal anthropology, develops the idea that man does not have his free will.

Edgar Degas’ 14-year-old dancer is «a flower of the pavement, with a bold forehead, she will transmit syphilis to the old bourgeois who visit her », Jean Clair argues.

In the magnificent painting «Interior», also known as «The Rape», Degas takes a scientific look at the painful scene where the woman curls up on herself while the man stands in the shadows.