Histoires de familles

Far from being an immutable model, the family is transformed throughout the 19th century, in step with the political, social and moral upheavals of the era. Framed by the Civil Code, embraced by the bourgeoisie and traversed by the first wave of feminism as well as by the Romantic transformations of the couple, it becomes a privileged observatory of the tensions within modern society. Artists, both witnesses and participants in these changes, offer representations of it that are sometimes idealised, sometimes critical, and at times deeply ambiguous.

Drawing on the rich collections of the Musée d'Orsay, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, drawings and archives on the many ways of "making family" in France between 1848 and 1914. From Edgar Degas to Pierre Bonnard, from Victor Hugo to Nadar, from the Lumières to Alice Guy, from Camille Claudel to Rosa Bonheur, the works tell stories of love, filiation, transmission, domination, rivalry and emancipation.

The exhibition opens with the intrinsic links between family and politics, before unfolding across five thematic sections. "Home sweet Home" explores the house as a place where family is embodied and domestic intimacy is lived, from the large portraits of extended families by Degas, Tissot or Bazille to the destitute and wandering families captured by Daumier or Stevens. Rosa Bonheur and her vast menagerie set up at Thomery, like the first films of the 20th century staging emotional bonds between animals and humans, already pave the way for alternative models.

"Sois mère et tais-toi" focuses on the burden of motherhood and the roles assigned to women. Whether they are mothers or wet nurses, workers or artists, young or in the prime of life, "old maids" or grandmothers, women experience in their own flesh or in their fantasies pregnancy and breastfeeding, old age and infertility, adoption, abandonment and the loss of one or several children. The works on ambivalent motherhood by Berthe Morisot, or the fascinating personality of the Comtesse de Castiglione, trace a complex history of motherhood.

With "Au nom du père", the exhibition highlights the omnipresence of the patriarchal system, continually fuelled and reinforced by the mechanisms of transmission: that of the family name, of paternal authority and of material inheritance.