PARIS (dpa) – They were considered rebels and outsiders because they simply rejected the school of classicism and the reasoning that was glorified from Antiquity to Enlightenment.
And they became dissidents within the art world because they chose unconscious, free, unbridled physical expression as their creed.The Louvre is hosting an exhibition entitled “Painting as Crime”. It shows 380 works by painters such as Goya, Rene Magritte and Otto Muehl “which do not fit into the official catechism of art history.”The exhibition which lasts until January 14, shows works depicting bodies covered in blood or writhing in sawdust, or ones which show heads with spider-like legs emerging from them.“Western art is administered and supervised by the state through academies, salons and commissioned works. The creativity of art has been restrained by moral and aesthetic rules,” explains Regis Michel, curator of the exhibition.The art historian is renowned for choosing bizarre subjects. Last year, he amazed the public with the topic “Possession and Destruction. Sexual Strategies in Western Art”.With more than 100 works, he sought to prove that Picasso, Rembrandt and Michelangelo were not only great masters but also psychopaths and exhibitionists.“I consciously seek to provoke,” says the Frenchman.The exhibition begins with Blake’s murderers and hangmen. The English poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) was obsessed with evil. For him, God embodied power and thus evil. Accordingly, Blake showed God as a long-haired monster, a brutal tyrant or murderer.Goya counts among this gallery of dissidents especially because of his later works in which his tendency to the fantastic, horrible, gloomy and tragic comes to the fore.Odilon Redon can be considered one of the outcasts of the 19th century. The French painter and illustrator was haunted by the human eye. He drew gawping eyes, eyes in a state of weightlessness staring out of a chasm.Redon’s portrayal of light-sensitive organs as well as his monster gallery, a series of collages and decapitated heads, encountered tremendous criticism at the time.Even today, Redon is hardly ever exhibited. “Redon’s art is unnerving. No-one wants to see it. Even French museums do not want to exhibit his works,” says the curator of the exhibition.The final part of the exhibition is dedicated to contemporary art and focuses on the Viennese actionists Otto Muehl, Guenter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.Faced with the question of “Who is afraid of Otto Muehl?” the show tries to acquaint the visitor with his work: videos showing both men and women writhing naked in sawdust and excrement, or a gagged and bound man having blood, egg white and paint poured over him.Brus and Schwarzkogler’s body painting and self-mutilation caused a scandal in the mid 60s.By rejecting aestheticism, both wanted to make society aware of destructive mechanisms through their photographs and videos. In 1966, Schwarzkogler took the final consequence of his stance by killing himself.The title of the exhibition goes back to a saying of Schwarzkogler. “Painting as Crime” is the title of a manifesto which proved inspirational for Regis Michel.“And if it was true?” asks an art expert. “And what if western art is a crime against the imagination or a mechanism serving an underhand cult namely that which, since Hegel’s time, has been called the religion of art?”
