Art Of The Day Weekly
#360 - from 16 October 2014 to 22 October 2014
Sade's lesson
PARIS – Thanks to the catalogue -real or imaginary - of his sexual follies, his name is familiar to all. But the influence of marquis de Sade (1740-1814) goes beyond his licentious exploits. He was strongly opposed to any established powers, such as the Church, nobility or the Army, and praised individual freedom of both body and mind when facing duties and conventions, and he was ready to sacrifice his own freedom for his ideas. He did spend 27 years in priso, as long as a certain Nelson Mandela. He was an man of the encyclopedia of the enlightment and anticipated anarchy. How can we measure his influence through art, painting and movies? The musée d’Orsay has taken on that challenge, bringing forward the symbolists (Moreau, Redon), the surealists (Dalí, Masson), and a series of heretical and cursed artists (Pierre Molinier), with a taste for excess, atheism, perversion, madness and of course unlimited lust. These are surely new frontiers of which Sade is the pioneer explorer.
• Sade, attaquer le soleil at the musée d’Orsay, from 14 October 2014 to 25 January 2015.