The two oval rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris that house Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) grand Water Lilies paintings invite consideration on multiple levels. First there is the work itself: Monet’s late Impressionist style with dissolved forms spreading out in large swaths across the canvas. Then there is the panoramic format: a tradition rooted in nineteenth-century history painting recontextualised within the minimalist white rooms of modernism.
Monet donated the works to the French state after the First World War, envisioning the rooms as a place for meditation and reflection. During my visit, the space was crowded, and the museum guard loudly hushed the visitors. Some sat quietly on the benches in the centre of the rooms, while others joyfully used the paintings as backdrops for selfies.
The exhibition Dans le flou – une autre vision de l’art de 1945 à nos jours (Out of Focus – Another Vision of Art from 1945 to the Present Day), currently on display in the museum’s lower level, highlights another aspect: the pronounced blurriness in Monet’s vast water surfaces. The starting point is that the blurriness has often been oversimplified, dismissed as an effect of the cataracts that severely impaired the artist’s vision before he finally dared to operate on one eye in 1923.
While Monet’s impaired vision undoubtedly affected his work – he testified, for example, that red appeared murky and brownish to him – it does not fully explain an aesthetic that preoccupied him and many of his contemporaries for decades. In this way, the exhibition seeks to examine the blurry as the result of an artistic intention, especially after the Second World War.
At first, I thought it all sounded somewhat contrived. But as I spent more time in the exhibition, I became increasingly absorbed by the elusive quality of blurriness, and the curators’ ambition to foreground its political potential.
Describing something defined by its lack of clear boundaries is, of course, challenging – not to confine le flou to too narrow and tight descriptions or definitions, and yet to formulate something. This has been solved by trying to place artists and theorists side by side in crosswise and probing ways. For example, a vibrant 1960s Op Art-like painting by Polish artist Wojciech Fangor (1922–2015) is placed next to a confusingly similar work by Ugo Rondinone, created thirty years later.
Also, a quote from Edmund Burke (1729–1797) about the poetic gaze’s overwhelming strength has been placed next to Alfredo Jaar’s Six Seconds (2000), an image where a woman he is to interview about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda turns away. The image’s blurriness is an effect of the sequence of events embodied by this movement, by the woman’s refusal to represent what she has witnessed. This discussion is furthered in Mame-Diarra Niang’s deliberately blurry “non-portraits” from 2021, created in a refusal to portray the Black body; they exemplify how the blurry can have its own sharpness.
The extensive exhibition is structured around thematic rooms that guide the viewer through various approaches to blurriness. First, a prologue with historical examples of how blurriness has been used as a deliberate device long before the period that the exhibition focuses on. These include the Renaissance’s sfumato (a visual effect named for its ‘smoky’ quality), or how photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) and Edward Steichen (1879–1973) experimented with blurriness as an artistic device.
Notably, William Turner (1775–1851) appears, whose dissolved motifs in many ways anticipate Impressionism. Further, Symbolists and Surrealists who used the diffuse and fluid to depict inner states – that which the eye cannot grasp. “My drawings establish nothing,” wrote Odilon Redon (1840–1916) in 1912, “they place us in the world of the indefinite and the ambiguous.” On view here is Redon’s L’oeil au pavot (1892), which depicts an eye accompanied by a poppy bud drawn into a spatiality that evokes both the drawing’s two dimensions and the three-dimensional space’s diffuse depth.
In the exhibition’s other parts, the artists are grouped under different headings: “At the Frontier of the Visible”, “Erosion of Certainties”, “In Praise of the Indistinct”, and the concluding “Uncertain Futures”. When I think back on the exhibition, the parts blend into each other, which should please the curators. The first part focuses on artists who in various ways investigate vision, “destabilise the gaze,” which ties into the second part’s focus on the possibilities (and impossibilities) of representation, and the third part’s connections between that which cannot easily be defined and identity politics.
Gerhard Richter appears throughout the exhibition, his hazy photorealistic paintings aligning with postmodern critiques of fixed meaning. In the catalogue, he remarks: “I cannot describe anything about reality more clearly than my own relationship with reality. And this has always been associated with haziness, insecurity, inconsistency, fragmentariness, and I don’t know what else.” Indeed, at times the exhibition feels somewhat like a review course in the theoretical discussions of the late 20th century. That said, Richter’s remark is one of many formulations that underscore the exhibition’s desire to get the viewer to step out of the comfort of clear definitions, and instead explore the image, the reality, we face in other ways.
A politically charged section explores how blurriness became a post-war artistic strategy, raising questions about representation after the Holocaust – how to represent, as it were, that which cannot be depicted in images. Zoran Mušič (1909–2005), Jean Fautrier (1898–1964), and Christian Boltanski (1944–2021), are here examples of artists who have all carried on that struggle through their images and continued to create, despite everything. This “despite everything” evokes art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, whose book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (2003/2012)discusses the possibility of confronting overly clear or unbearable images.
Several of the formulations in the exhibition also resonate with Didi-Huberman’s discussions in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990/2004), where he highlights how something has been systematically excluded in the dominant narrative of art history informed by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968). Panofsky’s work in particular is described as an “empathetic closure” protecting the discipline so that art history can be safely practiced within the bounds of reason.
Didi-Huberman seeks another way to interpret images, beyond iconography’s schemes, another way to “confront” the image. In one of the analyses, he highlights how Fra Angelico (1395–1455) in his Annunciation fresco in the San Marco convent in Florence worked with a white colour field in a way that cannot really be assessed with the means of “visibility” and “legibility” that he traces as a recurring foundation in the aforementioned art history. The white “emptiness” in Fra Angelico’s fresco is not empty, but precisely the moment in the image that, through its materiality and spatiality rather than an idealising conceptuality, presents the scene’s indescribable divine moment.
In the exhibition, the aesthetics of the blurry are formulated in a similar way as the intermediate state, the “point of anxiety” or oscillation that Didi-Huberman repeatedly highlights as an asset for the interpretation.
The exhibition focuses largely on still images, such as painting, photography, and a selection of sculptures. Yet, the aesthetics of blurriness also emerge in moving image works, such as Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Waiting for the Barbarians (2013), where a film camera pans over and zooms in on still images from Beirut. As an attempt to move between the general, the expected in the depiction, and an unexpected detail.
If the blurry is often thought of in relation to the figurative, then we can see the exhibition as a tribute to the blurry abstraction. Like Mark Rothko’s (1903–1970) paintings, on view here, which embody the indistinct in itself rather than dwelling on the opposition between figuration and abstraction, between figure and ground.
Maybe it’s in this sense that le flou differs from l’informe (the formless), a key concern in Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s extensive book and exhibition project L’Informe: mode d’emploi (1996). Similar to that project, Musée de l’Orangerie’s show connects to Georges Bataille’s ideas about the limitations of clear form, but with a shift away from the formless as something abject. Indeed, Dans le flou appears intent on presenting the indeterminate not as lack, but as its own modality. The English title, “Out of Focus,” is somewhat misleading in this regard, as it suggests deficiency, while the most interesting thing about the exhibition is precisely the investigation of the blurry as a form with its own clarity and force.
