{"id":18618,"date":"2025-12-01T20:08:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T20:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/12\/01\/review-musee-marmottan-monets-the-empire-of-sleep\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T20:08:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T20:08:36","slug":"review-musee-marmottan-monets-the-empire-of-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/12\/01\/review-musee-marmottan-monets-the-empire-of-sleep\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Mus\u00e9e Marmottan Monet\u2019s \u201cThe Empire of Sleep\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/a>
Federico Zandomeneghi, Jeune fille endormie dit aussi Int\u00e9rieur avec figure f\u00e9minine endormie<\/em>, 1878. Huile sur toile, 60 x 74 cm. Palazzo Pitti \u00a9 Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The mythology of sleep has been intrinsic to human narratives as early as biblical times: Adam was asleep during Eve\u2019s creation, Noah was disabled by catatonic drunkenness, Job suffered from insomnia during a crisis of faith, the apostles dozed in the Garden of Olives. These episodes are all referenced in the exhibition \u201cL\u2019Empire du Sommeil\u201d (or \u201cThe Empire of Sleep\u201d), on view at Mus\u00e9e Marmottan Monet in Paris through March 1, 2026. The show spotlights sleep as a respite throughout all stages of life, from the oblivion of newborns to the haunting specter of aging and death. Monet painted both ends\u2014his baby son Jean clutching a doll (1868) and his ailing wife Camille enshrined in a white veil (1879) at the height of her bedridden suffering.<\/p>\n

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The exhibition text reminds viewers that sleep takes up about a third of our lives; given this significant consumption of hours, it deserves to be pondered and studied. (Wrestling with being unaware consumed both Hamlet\u2014\u201cTo die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream\u201d\u2014and Ottessa Moshfegh<\/a>\u2019s nameless narrator in her breakout 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation<\/i>.) Laura Bossi<\/a>, a neurologist and science historian, curated the show alongside the museum\u2019s director of collections, Sylvie Carlier<\/a>, and curatorial assistant Anne-Sophie Luyton<\/a>. \u201cThe sleeping model is the ideal model,\u201d Bossi remarked, adding that the artist can supply a \u201cvery tender look, trying to preserve a living souvenir\u201d\u2014although \u201cthere is always a sort of ambiguity\u201d in the ethics of that vulnerability.<\/p>\n

In keeping with the focus of the museum\u2019s collections, the exhibition, which comprises 130 works, extends from the Enlightenment to the Great War with a smattering of historical and contemporary works thrown in. One example of the latter is the opening painting hung in the hallway as a prelude to the exhibition: Paula Rego<\/a>\u2019s illustration for Jean Rhys<\/a>\u2019 book Wide Sargasso Sea<\/i>. It was modeled on her own family reposing on a brightly lit veranda in view of cool blue waters in Portugal, preceding the household\u2019s ultimate uprooting to England. Towards the end of the exhibition, Kiki Smith<\/a>\u2019s 2001 work Sleep Walker<\/i>, a woman drawn on Nepalese paper, includes a written component at the lower edge: \u201cshe thought if she just could keep her mind moving through her stillness she could awaken.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>
Michael Ancher, La Sieste<\/em>, 1890. Huile sur toile, 62 x 79 cm. Skagen, Art Museums of Skagen \u00a9 Art Museums of Skagen<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The exhibition otherwise mostly sticks to works from the 19th Century. Its most serene depictions of sleep include Michael Ancher<\/a>\u2019s La Sieste<\/i>, its subject a woman resting alfresco on a bench amidst garden greenery, hung toe-to-toe with Jean-Baptiste Chatigny<\/a>\u2019s young man in repose at the base of a tree. Perhaps no one is as placid as the two portraits of pets\u2014an etching of a snuggled dog by David Hockney<\/a> and a pencil drawing of a comatose cat by Gwen John<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Additionally endearing: John Everett Millais<\/a>\u2019s painting of a little girl who has nodded off in a pew during a sermon, her head tilting above her prim red cape and fur muff. Max Beckmann<\/a>\u2019s 1918 etching of himself and his friends yawning, their mouths collectively open and hands not quite covering the chasm of their oral cavities, is particularly amusing. Louis-L\u00e9opold Boilly\u2019s lithograph Le Songe de Tartini<\/i> depicts Giuseppe Tartini<\/a> making a pact with a horned and winged devil\u2014perched on the end of his bed while he\u2019s tucked in, in a white nightgown\u2014to help come up with his best composition (The Devil\u2019s Trill Sonata<\/i>).<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>
John Everett Millais, Mon deuxi\u00e8me sermon (My Second Sermon)<\/em>, 1864. Huile sur toile, 97 x 72 cm. Londres, Guildhall Art Gallery \u00a9 Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These droll moments, however, are offset by works depicting a kind of feverish limbo. In La Somnambule<\/i>, an 1865 oil painting by Courbet, a young woman\u2019s direct gaze at the viewer belies her seemingly possessed and altered state. The oil painting Le Noctambule<\/i> by Edvard Munch<\/a> is a self-portrait in which the artist\u2019s sunken eyes and concave posture evoke a zombie-like fitfulness, reflective of the artist\u2019s troubles with sleeping and mental health alike. The stuporous women slumped over in a fin-de-si\u00e8cle opium den in a painting by Gaetano Previati<\/a> highlight the hazard inherent in escapist intoxicants.<\/p>\n

More disturbing are paintings that show sleep as a kind of desperation. Fernand Pelez<\/a>\u2019s painting features a child selling violets in the street, too physically exhausted to uphold himself in his commerce and slumbering in a doorway: \u201cit\u2019s one of the few paintings in this exhibition that takes into account a social critique,\u201d Bossi stated of this depiction of poverty and oppression. Edouard Vuillard\u2019s La Berceuse<\/i>, once in Picasso\u2019s collection, is not of a woman cradling her baby, as the title might indicate in its allusion to a lullaby or soothing rocking motion. Rather, it is an older mother consoling her bedridden adult daughter\u2014shown faceless with chagrin\u2014who has lost her child in a miscarriage.<\/p>\n

More extreme still are the unsettling depictions of death, framed as \u201ceternal sleep,\u201d be it Nadar\u2019s eerie photograph of the deceased French writer Victor Hugo<\/a> (eyes closed and white beard and chest bathed in light), L\u00e9on Cogniet\u2019s T\u00eate de jeune fille morte<\/i> (her lips breathlessly, jarringly agog), or Ferdinand Hodler<\/a>\u2019s model-mistress Valentine God\u00e9-Darel clenched in evident pain from cancer (which the painter chronicled obsessively in a series of 120 paintings).<\/p>\n

\"An\"An<\/a>
Giuseppe Antonio Petrini, Le Sommeil de saint Pierre<\/em>, circa 1740. Huile sur toile, 85 x 115 cm. Paris, Mus\u00e9e du Louvre \u2013 d\u00e9partement des Peintures \u00a9 Grand Palais Rmn (mus\u00e9e du Louvre) \/ St\u00e9phane Mar\u00e9challe<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A less mortal angle mined in the exhibition is the inscrutability of the dream\u2014the sheer enigma of the unconscious. \u201cDreams are really the fabric\u2014the construction\u2014of our creativity,\u201d Bossi noted. In the 19th Century, the scientific study of dreams debuted with the works of French scholar and physician Alfred Maury<\/a> (1861) and Marquis d\u2019Hervey de Saint Denys<\/a> (1867), the latter of whom influenced Freud\u2019s The Interpretation of Dreams<\/i>, published in 1899. Also during the 19th Century, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot<\/a> experimented with hypnosis on so-called \u201chysterics\u201d at the Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re Hospital. For all of these practitioners, publications of which are shown in the exhibition, dreams were deemed revelatory of the past rather than prophetic of the future: a reflection of inner life buried beneath the surface.<\/p>\n

The exhibition suffers most in its Eros section, where the idea of the erotic\u2014including within Greek mythology\u2014avoids critiquing the violence imposed upon women. Some works are hard to parse: Ditlev Blunck<\/a>\u2019s The Nightmare<\/i> from 1846 shows a woman in bed, her chest exposed, her expression one of ecstasy, with a rabbit on her torso and the fabric of her canopy bed askew. Is this a sly, amusing way to champion a woman\u2019s pleasure? Or is she creepily being ravaged and primed for a male gaze? Fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty<\/i> and Cinderella<\/i> are also referenced but not reframed as outdated for their patriarchal nature.<\/p>\n

The final grouping of the show features the bed itself\u2014an all-purpose place of birth, love, illness and death\u2014and a locus of intimacy and surrender. The graphite-and-watercolor work of an unmade bed by Delacroix in 1824 was deployed for the exhibition\u2019s catalogue cover, doubling as an elegant study of drapery but also \u201cevoking something troubling\u201d per Bossi\u2014a restlessness, so to speak. By contrast, Avigdor Arikha<\/a>\u2019s pastel of an empty bed is evidence \u201cof a successful marriage,\u201d Bossi noted, with two pairs of slippers symbolically aligned at the base. Balthus\u2019s La Phal\u00e8ne<\/i>, articulated in casein tempera of a naked young woman about to extinguish the flame of an oil lamp by her bedside, is the concluding work in the exhibition, although in fact the first work Bossi requested to loan for the show. It is fitting that the beginning and the end meet, an exhibition cycle and a sleep cycle in unison.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>
Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix, Le lit d\u00e9fait<\/em>, circa 1824. Graphite et aquarelle sur papier, 18.3 x 29.8 cm. Paris, Mus\u00e9e National Eugene-Delacroix \u00a9 GrandPalaisRmn (mus\u00e9e du Louvre) \/ Rachel Prat<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/b><\/h3>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Mus\u00e9e<\/p><\/div>\n