Red Baron's Blog: Pas besoin d’un dessin

Monday, June 6, 2022

Pas besoin d’un dessin

No need for a drawing is the title of an exhibition at the Musée d'art et d'histoire (MAH, i.e., Museum of Art and History) in Geneva.

Three months ago, Red Baron was in Geneva for a one-day trip and a one-hour meeting. After lunch, I had some time left and visited the current exhibition at the MAH.

There were no spectacular loans from other museums, but they had invited the art historian and curator of international exhibitions, Jean-Hubert Martin, to dig into the MAH holdings. This museum man takes the visitor to the exhibition through more than 500 works borrowed from all artistic and historical fields of the MAH. The turgid introduction on the web to this inbred exhibition reads as follows:

The public is encouraged to observe, feel, and appropriate what our common treasure, namely this fascinating diversity of the collection is. Through play, switching, and analogy, some of the museum's best-known works enter into a simple and uncomplicated dialogue with singular objects that have sometimes escaped our attention. The tour restores our confidence in our emotional strength. The museum reveals itself in a new light and becomes the theater of our desires.

Did I feel like that? Nope. According to various topics, the rearranged objects were embedded in the old infrastructure I knew from my past visits with my grandson. I didn't imply any added value, e.g., when the impressive guillotine was placed in front of the in situ display cabinets with the knight's armors.

Nevertheless, here are some photos of interesting objects. Before I show you examples of four of those topics, here is one of the Museum's treasures, a wood-cut romanesque style Madonna and Child.

I have seen such configurations at The Cloisters in uptown New York, but this representation is stunning, although the tooth of the time has gnawed Mary's arm.

Unknown painter: Miraculous Breastfeeding around 1730

The painting reminded me of the Lactation Bernardi. St. Bernard of Clairvaux had a vision where St. Mary sprinkled milk on his lips. Here, however, we see a shackled old man imprisoned and breastfed by a woman who doesn't resemble the Virgin.

Well, this scene is much older and described in old Roman documents: Condemned to starvation in a Roman prison, an old man is kept alive by the milk he sucks from his daughter's breast, who visits him every day. Once surprised by a guard, the authorities did not put her on trial. In fact, they released her father, even providing him food for the rest of his days, so impressed were they by such selfless love. And this was well before the Christian faith had spread.