Source:  A report by John Lichfield of ‘The Independent’ published Tuesday 19^th January 2016

The Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 

 

Sunday 17th January 2016.  The Location – The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, home of some of the world’s most celebrated nudes.  The Occasion – the last day of the successful Paris Exhibition: Splendour and Misery.  (Art and Prostitution)

Deborah de Robertis, a 31 year-old performance artist from Luxembourg, decides to disrobe and lay down naked in front of Edouard Manet’s reclining nude, Olympia. Imitating the pose of the courtesan in Manet’s celebrated 1865 masterpiece and equipped with a portable camera hung around her neck “to film the public’s reaction”.  According to Miss Robertis’ lawyer, Mr Bouzenoune,”It was an artistic performance”. In Deborah de Robertis’ defence, the performance artist says that her art consists of making people think about art.

In reality, the sight of a real naked woman was too much for the museum authorities. The security guards responded well, closed the room and asked Miss De Robertis to get dressed.  When she refused, she was forcibly removed and subsequently arrested for indecent expose.

THE DEPICTION OF ‘THE NUDE’ OVER THE CENTURIES

Since the fifteenth century the practice of life drawing has fostered the idea that the naked body is an unfailing test of the artist’s skill.

By the early sixteenth century, the mythological contexts of Renaissance nudes such as Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ Giorigone’s’Sleeping Venus’ released images from the Christian association of the body with sin and shame. Despite their sensuality, their nudity was also coloured by Classical humanist thought, where the viewer might hope to learn through their beauty the way to truth.

The sensuality in the nudes of Henri Matisse as with Titian’s nudes, is both intensely present and poetically abstract, as though intending another form of truth other than the physical, the truth of line and colour rather than humanist philosophy.

 

 

 

 

 

The Musée d’Orsay has since made a formal complaint against Deborah de Robertis for indecent exposure

BREAKING NEWS!

 “Deborah de Robertis released without charge“

Tuesday 26th January 2016

Last week the Musée d’Orsay made a formal complaint against De Robertis for “Indecent exposure”.  She was detained from Saturday 16th to Monday 18th January but then released without charge.   The Paris state prosecutor’s office gave her a “caution” and reminded her that public nudity is illegal in France – even in an exhibition full of images of nude women.  Only 18 months ago, again in the Musée d’Orsay, the former art and drama student sat naked in front of Gustave Corbet’s, ‘The Origin of the World’ .

Unrelenting, Miss Robertis claims “I am reversing the relationship between the artist and the model, or between the public and the model, or between the power structure of the art world and the model.  In my work, the model becomes not just the subject but active – an artist in her own right.

Miss Robertis’ performance as ‘Olympia made flesh’ at the Musée d’Orsay  was her most elaborate to date.   Lasting 20 minutes and accompanied by fifteen friends and fellow artists, De Robertis says “The public were completely on my side.  Anyone who objected could just have left the room, but no one did.  The museum security guards ordered me to get dressed and, when I refused they called the police.”

QUE FAIRE ENSUITE?

De Robertis and a French artist friend, Rim Battal are collaborating on a “more political” project.  Robertis declines to say what this will involve, “Nudity is a large part of my work but it is not the whole of my work” she says.

The name of the project is ‘Intriguingly, Je Suis President’

 

Claire Moore BA(hons)

Gallery Manager

The Fletcher Gate Fine Art Gallery