Narrating the Climate, Season 1
April 5 – July 7, 2025
Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare, 1876, Paris, collection du Musée d’Orsay, (c) Musée d’Orsay
The Musée Gassendi’s collections in conversation with masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay
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Narrating the Climate offers a fresh look at the Musée Gassendi’s collection of nineteenth-century landscape painters by considering them in the context of climate change and putting them in conversation with two masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay: La Gare Saint-Lazare (The Saint-Lazare Station), by Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Journée de décembre (December Day), by Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905).
Focusing on waterways and the modernization of transportation, this new exhibit reveals transformations to the rural world, particularly in Upper Provence.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, works by Realist and Impressionist Barbizon painters continued to reflect a certain harmony between people and their environment. But landscape paintings gradually changed as a result of industrialization. Smoky locomotives, metal bridges, and the smokestacks of factories and steamships appeared – the first visual markers of a world that was gradually abandoning natural energy sources like wind, water, and animal power as it grew more and more dependent on fossil fuels. Nineteenth-century museum collections contribute to telling the story of how natural resources were increasingly mobilized to support economic growth and urban expansion.
More locally, Provencal landscape artists painted portraits of the rural world that allow viewers to detect changes that resulted from industrialization, as well as the vulnerability of the biodiversity and landscapes that inspired them.
Beyond alarming reports, these works of art lay the groundwork for reflections on a low-carbon future by inviting us to observe the past in order to better understand our current challenges. This reinterpretation of the works gives rise to a critical but optimistic vision in which museums have a role to play in a transitioning world – not only as sites of heritage preservation, but also as actors of change.
