VIENNA.- For a few weeks, the Albertina is affording its visitors a glimpse into an archive of dreams when the Musée d’Orsay opened its vaults to lend the graphic gems of its collection for the first time ever to a museum outside of France from 30 January to 3 May 2015. This major presentation of 19th-century French art features 130 works.

Delicate pastels by Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and Odilon Redon, painterly gouaches by Honoré Daumier and Gustave Moreau, fine watercolours by Paul Cézanne, and works by salon artists who were highly esteemed in their day come together to provide a sweeping look at the French art of drawing.

Politically oriented realism is being seen as realised by its most prominent protagonists: social conflicts dealt with in the era’s courtrooms are exaggerated and contorted to the point of caricature by Honoré Daumier, while Gustave Courbet and Ernest Meissonier document barricade battles and significant political turning points on sheets of sketch paper. Giovanni Segantini and Jean-François Millet, on the other hand, bathe monumentally portrayed farmers and fisherfolk in a mystical light and show workers frozen still in poses that aestheticise their repetitive gestures.

These socially motivated compositions contrast provocatively with works by impressionist painters including Paul Cézanne with his sundrenched landscapes from the south of France, or Eugène Boudin with his airy, atmospheric market depictions. Both artists allow the bright radiance of their paper to shine through in places, and they bring a skilful lightness to bear in constructing their motifs out of nearly geometric surfaces. Light is also a key element in the works by Edgar Degas: his drawings observe dancers from hidden vantage points as they work through their private exercises and play out intimate scenes. And like Aristide Maillol, Degas also devotes himself to the classical genre of the nude, infusing it with seemingly banal everyday activities to give rise to something like a modern feminine divinity, a modern Venus.

Alexandre Cabanel and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, on the other hand, show that despite all modern efforts, the 19th century’s second half still saw the traditions of the academie française held high: Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus represents the zenith of classicism after Ingres or Raphael, celebrating the classical ideal of beauty as well as the rules and tastes of the salon. And literary figures inhabit narrative masterpieces by Edward Burne-Jones, Jean Léon Gérome, and František Kupka, which this presentation places in dialogue with drawings that were created as book illustrations. These include Jean-Paul Laurens’s grisailles for Goethe’s Faust, a drawing by the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt for John Keats’s Isabella, and finally Maurice Denis’s illustrations for Les fiorettis de saint François d’Assise [Little Flowers of St. Francis].

Odilon Redon conjures up mysterious and puzzling depictions by breathing life into the technique of charcoal drawing: his “noirs” give form to a suggestive, spiritual world akin to the equally dark but pointillist drawings by Georges Seurat. These, done in black Conté crayon, are lent definition not by lines but by the contrast between the subtle nuances of the black drawing utensils and the whiteness of the paper - resulting in hazy and mysterious silhouettes. Felicien Rops and Gustave Moreau peer into the abysses of the human soul: their works show monsters and chimeras, and their reinventions of Salomé, Medea, and Medusa serve well to illustrate the notions that surrounded the turn-of-the-century femme fatale.

Curator: Prof. Dr. Werner Spies