Sade — Attaquer le soleil — Musée d’Orsay — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 14, 2014 → January 25, 2015

Alphonse Donatien de Sade (1740–1814) completely transformed the history of both literature and the arts, first as an underground writer, and later by becoming a veritable legend in his lifetime.

The Divin Marquis’s work is a radical questioning of issues of limits, proportion, excess, notions of beauty, ugliness, the sublime and the body image. He takes the way we look at things and sweeps away all our religious, ideological, moral and social presuppositions.

Following the analysis of the writer Annie Le Brun, a specialist of Sade, the exhibition will be focusing on the revolution of representation opened up by the author’s writings. Topics addressed will be the ferocity and singularity of desire, deviation, extremes, the weird and the monstrous, desire as a principle of excess and imaginary recomposition of the world, through works by Goya, Gericault, Ingres, Rops, Rodin, Picasso…

The violent nature of some of the works and documents may shock some visitors.