Terroir painting is popular

About the increasing number of exhibitions devoted by museums to artists from their region.

We are not only witnessing the revenge of painters who had remained on the sidelines of the art history game, often for obscure reasons: it is also that of the provincial museums, whose collections, forgotten for too long in their storerooms, are finally coming out. Regional museums, sorry. We no longer say province. It's a pejorative term. So as far as "regional painters" are concerned, we are not yet finding works of art for sale by these forgotten artists in art galleries... but who knows?

The craze for short circuits, since the difficulties of transport due to the pandemic, the tightening of belts and the increased concerns about carbon tax, does not only concern fruit and vegetables, beef or poultry. Art is benefiting too! And the verb "to benefit" proves to be correct, yes, after reading the article devoted by the magazine L'Oeil in November to this clear tendency of museums to promote the painters of their region. One might have thought, too quickly, that having to "content oneself" with exhibiting locally for reasons as economic as they are ecological would push the cursor of pictorial quality downwards, but no. At least, not necessarily. Because bringing out the paintings of painters rooted in the region does not necessarily mean bringing out the scabs. No, no, not necessarily.

So obviously, for lovers of the only paintings or sculptures signed with the name of an internationally renowned artist on the art market today, it will be neither economical nor ecological, since from now on it will be necessary to be able to access the collections to which they belong everywhere, sometimes in France, often abroad. But for art lovers, in the curious and open-minded sense of the term, this is an excellent opportunity: all one has to do is go to the museum in one's own town or in the surrounding area to discover artists who have worked on their territory, who have fallen into the oblivion of art history, and yet who are endowed with talents that one would not even have suspected.

And it works! "This reorganisation based on the re-emergence of local stars has in fact paid off, since the number of visitors to the establishment has practically tripled, rising from 25,000 to 70,000 per year," writes Isabelle Manca-Kunert, the journalist for L'Oeil, referring to the Orleans Museum of Fine Arts. "The local DNA obviously brings added value to the rediscoveries," notes the museum's director, Olivia Voisin. "There is an appetite among visitors to take ownership of their history, a pride in seeing that great artists have passed through their city or that their museum preserves their works. We observed this a few years ago with the Perroneau exhibition, which was the first of this new policy of programming artists linked to Orléans. The Enlightenment portraitist and pastelist Jean-Baptise Perroneau (ca. 1715-1783) may have been born in Paris and died in Amsterdam, but he was nevertheless a regular visitor to Orléans. Hence the regular acquisition of his paintings for sale by the Musée des beaux-arts orléanais from the second half of the 18th century.

So why had this Perroneau been forgotten? The version put forward on the occasion of the first retrospective devoted to him in 2017 by the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans mentioned his apparently overly pronounced taste for travel, which often prevented him from honouring his commissions, due to a lack of availability, thus wearying his clientele of great Parisian bourgeois. If we refer to other sources, such as the testimony of Diderot, for example, his talent was very soon called into question. Notably by the famous Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788) whose fame would have quickly eclipsed that of Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. Perhaps after the former had slipped a fine banana skin under the latter's foot by commissioning his portrait to be exhibited next to his own self-portrait at the Salon of 1750: in making the comparison, the critics praised Quentin de la Tour, who became a court portraitist, and despised Perroneau, who had to be content with the figures of the bourgeoisie. Unfair? Or is the level of today's Orléans "star" really insufficient?

Everyone will make up their own mind. And in Orléans there is room for the history painter Jean Bardin (1732-1809), who died there and to whom we owe the creation of the museum. In any case, there has never been room for everyone, whether in the pantheon of art history or elsewhere. So since the time is ripe for the economy of "great men", who are too far away and too expensive, we might as well take advantage of it to enhance the value of the little ones. "Local players have understood the tourist potential of local artists. The proof is in the multiplication of labels and events based on a personality associated with a territory," writes the journalist. Citing the example of the Creuse, an oh-so-deserted department that has now been renamed "the Valley of Painters", regularly honours artists who have celebrated its landscapes.

The Val d'Oise is also doing well, setting up its "Oise Valley Impressionist Destination", an association created in 2021 by the towns of L'Isle-Adam, Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise to enable these three local museums to develop a joint programme. Three joint exhibitions will be presented this autumn: Jules Dupré (1811-1889) at the Louis Selecq Museum of Art and History in L'Isle-Adam, the landscape painter's home town; Camille Pissaro at the eponymous museum in Pontoise, the town where the famous impressionist painter lived; and Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878) in Auvers-sur-Oise, the town where the "water painter" first made his favourite home for his Bateau-Atelier before setting up his Maison-Atelier, whose decoration was designed by Camille Corot (1796-1875).

Contemporary art is not to be outdone, with the Lyon Biennial showcasing promising local artists such as Maïté Marra, a visual artist born in 1992, living and working in Villeurbanne, and Pierre Unal-Brunet, a sculptor born in 1993, living and working in Lyon.

"More and more institutions and sponsors see this approach as a way of moving away from blockbuster exhibitions based on international celebrities," writes Isabelle Manca-Kunert. "At a time when everyone is tightening their belts and thinking more about their carbon footprint, it seems less and less relevant to systematically bring in works from the ends of the earth. Especially when you have incredible, untapped resources on the spot. This is demonstrated by the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology in Besançon, in the Doubs region. "Anyone interested in the 18th century knows the importance of Besançon's heritage. The town has preserved an exceptional collection of buildings from the Age of Enlightenment and its museum collections are full of major works from that period," says the journalist. Yet, incredible as it may seem, no exhibition had yet been devoted to this golden age. This has finally been done with "Le Beau Siècle", an exhibition that will be held until 19 March 2023 in Besançon... and which we will tell you about again!