“The world must be romanticized […] When I give common things an august meaning, usual realities a mysterious meaning, what is known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an air, a reflection, a glow of the infinite: I romanticize them,” wrote the pope of German Romanticism, Novalis, in 1798.
Applied with varying degrees of success, the recipe has had many followers. What about today? Which painter still applies themself to “romanticize” the world? Anxious to bring contemporary art into its collections, the Musée de la Vie romantique has set its sights on the draughtswoman Françoise Pétrovitch.
Resonating with the Abelard and Heloise, Paolo and Francesca and other couples of tragic lovers mourning on its walls, the artist’s teenagers with closed eyes and evanescent bodies stand out in the hushed decor with their strident colors (bright pinks and blues). Playing with clichés and reactivating established motifs (melancholic faces and poses, touches, closed eyelids, dreamy hair…), Françoise Pétrovitch plunges with undisguised delight into the murky waters of the ink wash, which she has made a specialty.
Much more than in her portraits painted in oil, it is in her floating landscapes, and in particular her islands inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s strange and fascinating Island of the Dead, that a certain romantic heritage can appear, through the trembling of the water, the play of reflections and splitting, the stains and drips with random shapes, the undecided and moving forms. And if the romanticism was “this part which escapes us, of indefinite, of provisional…”1?
1. Quote from the artist taken from a filmed interview with Gaëlle Rio, director of the Musée de la Vie romantique.
Françoise Pétrovitch – Loving – Breaking
Until September 10
Museum of Romantic Life
Paris