The 20th century, which opens with a world war, renews the link between landscape and history. It had been believed that they were separated, that landscape had triumphed as an autonomous genre. What emerged was a new alliance: the union of two forces helping each other to confront the violence of the world. Two are not too many when faced with what stuns us.
The era invented new hybrid forms, surpassing and cancelling any idea of hierarchy between genres, capable of confronting history through the addition of their qualities. It is to this field of forces that the present exhibition aspires to give visible and intelligible form, by proposing a route in eleven stations that question, along a chrono-thematic current, the relationship between landscape and history. Opening with Claude Monet's gesture of offering two Nymphéas to France, the day after the armistice of 11 November 1918, in order to celebrate victory, this journey bears witness to the constant resistance of landscape as an agent of contemporary history. It will be a question of wars, of the quest for origins, of appropriation and nostalgia, of inner landscapes and the play between nature and abstraction. It will be a question of the relationship between landscape and nation. It will be a question of our relationship to time as much as to space, of the way in which landscape, as an active force, comes to cover over history, between mourning and oblivion. It will also be a question of the way in which landscape has imposed itself, like a witness, to express our era in its aspirations as in its crises, its utopias as in its anxieties. Landscape today is no longer merely a matter of pictorial genre as it once was. In photography, sculpture, video as well as painting, artists are attempting to give form to our history: our history within the landscape.
Eleven chrono-thematic sections structure this exhibition: Nymphéas pour l'histoire, Paysages en guerre, Pays, paysage, Abstraire la nature, À l'origine, Paysages intérieurs, Passé, présent, futur, Local, global, total, Après l'histoire, le paysage, Paysages de l'Anthropocène, Paradis perdus ? These are the stages of a crossing, the chapters of a history of our century, whose memory rests in the landscape.