FANTASTIQUE ! L'estampe visionnaire de Goya à Redon

 After the Musée du Petit-Palais in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux will stage the exhibition Fantastique! L’estampe visionnaire de Goya à Redon during the summer of 2016, with nearly 160 prints (lithographs, etchings and woodcuts) belonging to the Etchings and Photography department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

This exhibition in Bordeaux of some of the most beautiful prints belonging to the illustrious Parisian institution resonates with the museum’s collection, endowed with 15 etchings by Goya (who died in Bordeaux in 1828), including the only known copy of Combat de taureaux (1825), 14 by Bresdin and 28 by Redon. For the latter, it will also complement the proposed exhibition and symposium to mark the centenary of his death.

The extraordinary etching fashion in the first half of the 19th century was part of a romantic sentiment for the fantastic which was seen as a way to conceive and portray the world. In a 19th century that saw itself as rational and positive, some of the great engravers (Delacroix, Doré, Bresdin and Redon), and others less well known, used the genre to illustrate an abundant literature on this theme.