REGARD CAPTIF (LE)

LE BAIN TURC (1863), JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES - COLLECTION PALETTES

of JAUBERT Alain

FRANCE, 1991, 00:29:00

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

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.

A bather woman is sitting on the edge of a basin. Behind her, at the rhythm of a Turkish tambourine, a woman is dancing, playing castanets. Others, resting on red sofas, are drinking or eating. In the memory of the old painter, all the women, admired or loved, possessed or not, still alive or dead long time ago, are here denuded and are lasciviously mingling.
The only mystery, at the center, the main character, seen back-view, is playing a kind of lute : the Tchegour. At the bottom of the painting, a Latin inscription is announcing : “J. Ingres painted it in 1862, in his 82nd year”
« Le Bain Turc » embodies the outcome of the research undertaken by the artist since 1807 on the theme of the bathers, in “La Grande Odalisque” or “La Source”.
Successive and complex revisions make the canvas go from rectangle to round, to end as tondo, frequent circular figure in the italian painting of the Renaissance, which marks here the shapes of the beings and the objects.

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