The strange new painting in the Fabre Museum
About the Fabre Museum's new acquisition, unveiled in the "La Beauté en Partage" exhibition until 13 March 2022 and then visible in the permanent collections.
You can't miss it. Here is a mouth as spectacular as the new work of art revealed to visitors to the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, on the occasion of the exhibition "La Beauté en Partage", looking back on a rich policy of acquisitions and extended until 13 March. The mouth of Holofernes, contrasting so strangely with the Olympian calm of Judith, who is busy cutting his throat, could not but catch the eye of Isabelle Manca-Kunert, who is devoting an interesting focus on this major work of Italian painting in the new issue of the magazine published by Artclair.
Represented here by the very Caravaggio-like Neapolitan painter Filippo Vitale (1585-1650) around 1598, "Judith and Holofernes" have definitively joined the Montpellier collection of Italian painting via this large oil on canvas measuring 126 x 154 cm. But it was not a painting for sale. After having admired it, and had it admired, for many years in the entrance of his own home, its owner Didier Malka, a lawyer at the Paris bar and art collector, wished to donate it to the establishment, which has been doing its utmost to establish itself as "the" great museum of Occitania since its renovation at the beginning of the 2000s. And it is succeeding very well: with an annual budget of 400,000 euros, the Fabre Museum is now one of the most proactive establishments in terms of exhibition and acquisition policy, we learn in the article in L'Oeil.
Because "over time, collectors' tastes inevitably change", explains Didier Malka in one of the short videos that can be seen throughout the exhibition, and no doubt because it is necessary from time to time to make room to renew the display, even if one has a vast interior, he has chosen to make a private object the object of a common heritage. The collector wished on the one hand that this very strong painting remain in France, and on the other hand the Fabre Museum having repeatedly proclaimed its taste for Neapolitan Baroque painting, notably by organising major events such as the 2012 exhibition on Caravaggio, the 2015 exhibition on Neapolitan painting, or by recently publishing the exhaustive catalogue of its Italian collection, the meeting could not but take place. By offering this well-known painting, the lawyer hopes that it will become one of the nuggets that bring art lovers to the Musée Fabre, in the same way as "La Déploration sur le Christ mort" by Leonello Spada (1576-1622) for example, a painting acquired in 2012 that perfectly satisfies the contemporary public's taste for the masterly and pathetic expression of Caravaggio's painting.
"The Deploration of the Dead Christ" by Leonello Spada (1576-1622)
As Isabelle Manca-Kunert points out, even if Filippo Vitale was indeed greatly influenced by Caravaggio's naturalism, we are nonetheless faced with a very personal style, somewhere between Baroque and Classicism. And on closer inspection, we even end up wondering whether this work of art is not more impressive than truly beautiful. The character of Judith, the young Palestinian widow who seduced the Assyrian leader who was attacking his people in order to behead them in private, is cut out almost like a collage on the red wallpaper. And if this version takes up the composition of Caravaggio's "Judith and Holofernes", albeit a little less bloody, and if the article in L'œil evokes "a powerful light sublimating seductive colours", the fact remains that the strange expressions of the two main characters, as much as these outrageous colours, perhaps finally play down the significance of the painting. All the more reason to take a closer look!
Valérie SUSSET