In line with exhibitions dedicated to painters particularly well represented within its collections – 37 works – or those who have maintained a particular link with Le Havre and the Normandy coast, this summer, the MuMa presents Marquet en Normandie. The exhibition, dedicated to Albert Marquet, explores an as-yet unexplored part of his work – his stays in Normandy.
Today, Albert Marquet (1875–1947) is an artist particularly well represented within the MuMa's collections, with no less than 14 paintings and 23 drawings. Since the beginning of the 20th century, he found great success among Le Havre art lovers, who then went on to donate their collections to the museum. Charles Auguste Marande's bequest in 1936 brought the first Marquet Fauvist pieces to the municipal collections, with Le Port de la Ponche à Saint-Tropez, Quai de la Seine à Paris and Vue d'Agay, les rochers rouges. Another Le Havre collector, Olivier Senn – whose collection was donated to the MuMa by his granddaughter in 2004 – acquired up to 15 paintings and a number of drawings. Georges Dussueil (who owned no less than 13) and Peter van der Velde were also great lovers of Marquet's painting.
The Marquet en Normandie exhibition presents around 60 paintings and drawings taken from prestigious public and private collections, both French and international, brought together for the first time. These works are presented in dialogue at MuMa with those of his friends: Dufy, Matisse, Friesz, Camoin and Valtat, etc.
This exhibition, whose theme has never before been tackled by a museum, will present his first maritime sensations that he almost obsessively transformed into series and variations, giving his paintings a dimension that is both modern and timeless. This taciturn wonderer simply and silently observes landscapes that are similar, yet never the same. As the art critic Itzhak Goldberg underlines, "Marquet reinserts light to stay as close as possible to reality […] far from trying to grasp the passage of time […] he, as a subtle observer, freezes the view before him".
A painter of water, the sea and rivers, Albert Marquet discovered Normandy and Contentin in 1903 and found there an exceptional field of experimentation for his pictorial research and use of colour. After his participation in the famous Salon d'Automne in 1905, he joined his friend Raoul Dufy in Le Havre, then in Fécamp, Honfleur and Trouville, where the two companions painted side by side, multiplying perspectives of these pools and the sea, like the paved streets of the city or the walls covered with advertising posters.
