Thalassa! Thalassa!
Imagery of the Sea

This show challenges us with a singular landscape, the sea, in works of art from the 19th century to the present. What role have artists played in fashioning its imagery? How do they express our desire to preserve its mysteries and beauties?

At the point where art history and the history of culture meet, Thalassa! Thalassa! Imagery of the Sea probes our relationship to the sea as that connection has taken shape in figurative art from the 19th century down to the present. In light of humans’ reworking and reordering of the shoreline, in keeping with the development of navigation and the advances made in geology and zoology, how we see the Ocean and its denizens both real and imaginary has indeed experienced an endless sea change.

Many technical inventions have accompanied these developments and advances, including aquarium, diving bell, the old-style hard-hat diving suit, periscope, undersea vehicle, and on and on. All of these devices–to which we would have to add the microscope, photography, and film–have helped to redefine the visible and the invisible, making our point of view something much more fluid, erasing our bearings, our landmarks, and raising unknown creatures from the deep. How have artists incorporated or anticipated the series of upheavals that have redrawn the mental grid humans use to comprehend an immense watery territory that extends from beaches to the ocean depths?

The layout of the show offers visitors a narrative. They will discover how a collective desire to preserve the mystery and beauty of the sea is anchored in an emotional and aesthetic relationship to the natural world, one that has taken shape in a story and a history that have been told in images. On the museum’s first floor and continuing on the second, three themes are developed in turn, the shore, the deep, and the abyss.

Taking shape in the 19th century, these themes, however much dramatized, reappropriated, even deconstructed, remain no less identifiable in contemporary art. Today when we are increasingly aware of the role we humans play in degrading ecosystems, when maritime borders are causing a number of conflicts, they form a theatre of questions that are proving absolutely relevant to our day and age.

This event has been made possible by many generous loans from private collections and public institutions, in Europe (Ajaccio’s Palais Fesch; Lyon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts; Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Petit Palais, and Musée de la Vie romantique; Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum Wien; and Baden-Baden’s Museum Frieder Burda), and in Switzerland (Geneva’s Ariana and Musée d’art et d’histoire, Lausanne’s Musée cantonal vaudois de zoologie, Musée historique, and Collection de l’Art brut; the Kunst Museum Winterthur; and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen).

Curators of the exhibition:
Catherine Lepdor, chief curator, MCBA, and Danielle Chaperon, professor of French literature, University of Lausanne, with the help of Camille de Alencastro, research assistant, MCBA