Crime and Punishment (Crime et châtiment) at the Musée d’Orsay

I went to an incredibly powerful exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay yesterday: Crime et Châtiment. Of course, I knew I would love the show when I saw the publicity posters that featured Géricault’s painting of severed limbs. For those of you who have had the nineteenth-century class from me, you know that I’m kind of into that beautifully painted macabre scene.

The first room set the tone for the entire show. You walk into this narrow and long room with walls painted black and large canvases featuring the various aspects of crime and punishment disposed on either side. As you moved down this corridor of sorts, you realize that you are heading towards a large object that is draped in a black canopy and dramatically lit. The object is the emblem par excellence of 19th-century violence: the guillotine. The staging of this room, with the nave-like passage and altar of death, definitely draws on associations with sacred architecture and begs the question of how violence fits within the paradigm of worship.

Various kinds of crimes and punishments, as treated in modern European visual culture, are explored in this show. The exhibition, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, features a stunning array of works from “high” art and popular visual culture as well as objects related to acts of crime and punishment. While there were lots of well-known pieces in the show (Goya, Blake, Picasso) and a definite emphasis on the French fixation with this topic, I was happy to see lesser-known works too. I was stunned–but pleasantly so–to see the incorporation of so much material from popular culture–posters, book illustrations, images d’Epinal, etc.–and anthropological objects, such as death masks, phrenological instruments, and even a model of Bentham’s Panopticon. There were quotes from various literary figures on the walls (Hugo, Bréton, Dostoevsky) to add further texture to the show. It was an extremely avant-garde exhibition in terms of conception, content, and display, and if this exhibition is any indication of the vision of the Orsay’s new (and controversial) director, I’m going to be an ardent supporter. Quite frankly, I’ve never warmed to what I see as the sleek, safe, consumer-driven mentality that governed that institution and I’m glad to see the Orsay allow the complexities of nineteenth-century visual culture to bubble to the surface.

Not surprisingly, I was especially moved by the room devoted to the French Revolution, as well as with those images concerning women’s relationship to crime and punishment. Perhaps the most compelling work for me was Léon Bonnat’s Crucifixion. This painting should have been in that first room–or maybe its last–as a reminder to the world of the ultimate crime, deicide, and humankind’s potential for redemption.

For more info, click on these links:

Notice in rfi
Brief slide show

Conversation topic: What’s your favorite image of crime (or punishment) and why?