SAVEUR DE L'IMMOBILE (LA)

LA RAIE, JEAN-BAPTISTE SIMÉON CHARDIN - COLLECTION PALETTES

of JAUBERT Alain

FRANCE, 1991, 00:30:00

Production : DELTA IMAGES, PAINI Dominique, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, FR3, LA SEPT, REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, MUSEE D'ORSAY
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Allegory, Animals, Art, History of art, Louvre Museum, Painting

Summary :
By choosing main artworks in the imagination of the western culture, the series “Palettes” tells in each episode the story of a painting. In one word : its genealogy. As a canvas has its ascendants and its descendants. A double knowledge, technical and philosophical, nourished by a long tradition, gave birth to it. And the painting itself has brought about, all through the years, a multitude of other images…
Going from the idea that the deep meaning of a painting is conveyed by the choice of the colours and the themes, we are dissecting the canvas from its more visible composition to its deepest meaning.

“La Raie” is, at first sight, a simple still life, painted in the Dutch way, by a joung painter who wasn’t daring to go in for big historic scenes. Chardin is showing familiar objects in his still lives. You can find them again from one paiting to another. They figure in the inventories of the painter, found by the historians : a stone entablature, a water jug in sandstone, a knife with a handle in horn, a pale green striped tablecloth… Extremely meticulous, Chardin was very longly staging his still lives before starting to paint them. The painting is evoking the kitchen, room where seem to work out fundamental sharings between the raw and the cooked, the solid and the liquid, the animal and the vegetal, the living and the lifeless. Objects are placed as actors on a theater stage.
In the center of the painting, “a strange monster, fresh as the sea where it undulated, a skate is hanging” (Proust).* Its device evokes the écorché** of the anatomy plates, a historic scene and even a scene of torture.

to print