An exhibition on witches and femininity

In the semi-penumber of the first room, we move forward haggling towards a woman, all dressed in black, with scary grin, who points her finger towards us. Under this oval portrait signed Gustave Moreau, an inscription: “Victim.»Victim, really? Or guilty designating his prey?

The ambivalence is in order, with this witch as with all the others. We will observe it along the exhibition of the Pont-Aven museum (Finistère) which leads us from mysteries to astonishment.

What is this woman with a mutin face now, dressed in a hemmanal heemome and painted in 1906 by Edgar Maxence? It is a fairy sitting under the red moon, near Korrigans dancing around a fire. But, to look more closely, we realize that this magnificent creature has feet of … goat! Would it be evil? No doubt, because by his side, on the web, a young Breton seems terrorized.

The vast majority of the works on display date from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, which saw the imagination of witchcraft evolve. The publication, in 1862, of a test by Jules Michelet, The witchhas a lot to do with it. The historian insisted on the proximity of these women with the primordial forces of nature, to give a more positive vision.

“It is quite the work of witches: to weave links between the worlds,” notes in a commentary Leïla Jarbouai, curator at the Musée d’Orsay, partner of the exhibition. We are then in the century of romanticism, as a set of drawings by Victor Hugo, staging Esmeralda, reminded the a little witch of a witch of Notre-Dame de Paris.

But let us leave the night to enter the second part of the exhibition where the bodies of witches are sometimes eroticized, sometimes degraded by time. In full symbolism, these creatures are represented with audacity and sometimes even with excess.

The most striking of the figures, signed Arnold Böcklin, awaits us at the end of the corridor: a splendid Jellyfish In papier mache, the skull surmounted by a mountain of snakes, which looks at us with its frightened eyes. After the night fire and fire in the body, the third and last part of the exhibition is devoted to the fire of knowledge.

Scientist

What is this silver cup that enamels are shaken with a glow that seems magic? Entitled Nightchopped by Eugène leaves in 1901, she could well contain a poison or a potion. Because the witch, first the object of experience for alienist doctors as “very beautiful specimen of the great hysteria” (as shown The fascinated of charity, by Georges Moreau de Tours, 1890), is a woman of science, mysterious, esoteric or medicinal, which is transmitted in the secret of the cabinets. Paintings, sculptures, lithographs, photographs and literary works bear witness to this, such as this Love potion Directed by Evelyn de Morgan (1903). This red -haired woman with a neighboring pre -raphaélite style on the wall with a magnificent druidesse watching over her magic cauldron.

An exciting, this last part which brings together healing and learned, in osmosis with the gifts of nature, leads us without violence towards increasingly benevolent witches. And even if the fields of knowledge gradually open up to them in this stammering century, it will take a century for witches of a new genre: such this woman covered with foliage, created by the Mongolian artist Odonchimeg Davaadorj, one of the eleven contemporary creators whose works are exposed to those of the past. A woman-plant connecting living beings in a single kiss. Would the witch of the present become compassionate?