From September 12, 2023, to January 7, 2024, the Musée d’Orsay is organizing a major exhibition dedicated to the painter Louis Janmot and The Poem of the Soul, his magnum opus.
Begun in Rome in 1835 by the Lyonnais artist Louis Janmot (1814-1892) and continued until 1881, The Poem of the Soul is a lifelong project, both pictorial and literary. Housed at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, it illustrates the initiatory journey of a soul on Earth through 34 compositions. Comprising two cycles of 18 oil paintings and 16 charcoal drawings, it was described by Henri Focillon as « the most remarkable, most coherent, and strangest ensemble of romantic spiritualism. » A long poem of 2,814 verses, titled The Soul, accompanies these works.
The exhibition offers the opportunity to discover The Poem of the Soul in its entirety. While the first cycle is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, the second, more fragile, is very rarely shown. Like the protagonists of The Poem of the Soul, the public will be invited to explore the mysteries these images hold during a step-by-step stroll, an « initiatory journey » through the themes of the soul, the feminine ideal, the landscape, as well as the nightmare and the subconscious. The exhibition will strive to make visual and textual modes of expression coexist. Thus, the visitor will be able to hear the poem while contemplating the paintings.
The exhibition is thus the result of a partnership between two major French museums, curated by Stéphane Paccoud, Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, and Servane Dargnies de Vitry, Curator of Paintings at the Musée d’Orsay.
The Etrillard Foundation attaches great importance to the rediscovery of works, artistic movements, and musical repertoires unknown to the public. The exhibition Louis Janmot. The Poem of the Soul aligns perfectly with this mission: it brings to light the work of a little-known painter, a body of work that deserved a major retrospective. In an interdisciplinary approach dear to the Foundation, it creates bridges in a sensitive and unprecedented way between different arts—here poetry, music, drawing, sculpture, and painting.
The theme of the exhibition echoes the work of the recipient of our « Arts of the Past/Arts of the Present » doctoral research grant, Clara Lespessailles: this student from the École du Louvre is dedicating her thesis to primitivism among Ingres’s students, between 1830 and 1860. She is invited to participate in the study day organized in November in Lyon as part of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition.