In Landerneau, the animal as an inexhaustible artistic vein

A vast subject, a plethora of exhibitions. The subject is the representations of animals in the arts, all animals, from the humble fly to the glorious lion, and all the arts of all times, from prehistory to the present day. The exhibition is "Animal!? An exhibition of masterpieces" at the Hélène & Edouard Leclerc Fund for Culture in Landerneau (Finistère). It brings together more than 150 works, in the most diverse materials, styles, and sizes. Even if it were to bring together ten times more, it would not exhaust the questions it poses. What the human species calls animal, that is to say, the totality of living beings that do not resemble it, worries it, seduces it, makes it dream, feeds it—or sometimes feeds on it—clothes it, or works for it since the genus called "Homo" appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago. The exhibition cannot therefore be criticised for being incomplete and proceeding by allusion: there is no way of doing otherwise.

The grievance would be all the more excessive since there are almost as many artists as there are works: many. The ^20th and ^21st centuries prevail by a wide margin, with masterpieces by Constant (1920-2005) and Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). Among these modern artists, however, slip in some old masters of some repute, Veronese, Rembrandt, Chardin, Goya. And, well before them, the anonymous artist who, in the Magdalenian period, in the shelters of Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne), engraved on a shoulder blade the hybrid figure of a man with a bird's head holding a fish. Whoever made this drawing had a sure hand and took advantage of the reliefs of the bone to reveal the scene, the meaning of which, obviously, is unknown. One of the characteristics of the animal being that it partly escapes understanding, it could be the emblem of the exhibition.

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