PARIS, FRANCE.-Galeries nationales du Grand Palais present Melancholy - Genius and Insanity in the West, on view through January 16, 2006. This exhibition has been organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux of France and the Staatliche Museen of Berlin, with the support of the Picasso Museum of Paris. It will be on show at the Neue National Galerie in Berlin, from 16 February to the 7 May 2006. No mental state has so occupied the Western mind as melancholy; going to the heart of the problems that preoccupy us today - from history to philosophy, from medicine to psychiatry, from religion to theology, from literature to art. Melancholy, traditionally the cause of suffering and folly has also, since antiquity, been considered one of the elements in the temperaments of those marked for greatness, in our heroes and geniuses. Its description as a sacred illness implies a certain duality and melancholy is still mysterious even though today, with its new name of depression, there is a medico-scientific approach to it. The iconography of melancholy is extraordinarily rich and it is therefore not surprising that it is history of art that has been in the forefront of the establishment of a new approach to the cultural history of this saturnine malaise.
The exhibition will offer the public a glimpse of these little-known riches by showing over 250 works divided into eight themes (Melancholy in Antiquity / The devil’s pool; The Middle Ages / The children of Saturn; The Renaissance / The anatomy of melancholy; The age of enlightenment / Light and shadow; The eighteenth century / The death of God; The romantics / The naturalisation of melancholy / The Angel of History; Melancholy and Modern Times), constants and variations on this sacred theme. From Attic stele to contemporary works, from Dürer to Ron Mueck via La Tour, Füssli, Goya, Friedrich, Delacroix, Rodin, Van Gogh, Munch, De Chirico, Picasso and others this exhibition emphasises the vital role played by melancholy on the different forms of artistic creation throughout Europe
