This exhibition brings together for the first time the three paintings by Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1590-1664) depicting Saint Francis of Assisi standing mummified.  These works are held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The subject matter of these emblematic works contributes to their singularity, as does their masterly execution. The body of Saint Francis (c. 1182-1226) appears here as Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455) is said to have discovered it in the crypt of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi (Italy) in 1449: standing, eyes open and turned towards heaven, like a living person.  

Present before the French Revolution in Lyon's Convent of the Colinettes, on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse hill, the painting of Saint Francis in Lyon's Musée des Beaux-Arts was the first work by Zurbarán to join the collections of a French museum in 1807. Since then, it has become one of the centrepieces of the museum's  paintings collection and continues to impress visitors with its expressive power and remarkable quality.

This exhibition explores the inspiration and sources of this highly original creation, as well as the prodigious reception of Zurbarán's Saint Francis paintings by artists from the 19th century to the present day. It questions the meaning of the avatars of these three iconic works from the Golden Age, Spain's period of cultural influence in Europe (1492-1681).

The celebration of the beauty of Zurbarán's work, of its "modernity", goes hand in hand with the demonstration of the timelessness of these masterpieces which offer matter for reflection, enjoyment and new creations in every era.  

Reduced rate on presentation of  your macLYON admission ticket (less than 6 months old).
Reduced admission to the exhibition for TCL pass holders, on presentation of your valid pass. 
Reduced admission to the exhibition for Renfe travellers on presentation of your ticket (valid from 5 December 2024 to 2 March 2025).  

The exhibition’s catalogue is for sale at the museum’s bookshop
El Viso editions. 336 pages, 38€ 

• From March 10, 2025, the exhibition Zurbarán (sobre) Natural will be presented at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Zurbarán. Reinventar una obra maestra

Por primera vez, la exposición reúne las tres pinturas de Francisco de Zurbarán de San Francisco de pie y momificado, actualmente en el Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, el Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) de Barcelona y el Museo de Bellas Artes de Boston, respectivamente.

La exposición explora los motores y las fuentes de esta creación, e identifica y cuestiona el significado de los múltiples avatares de estos iconos del Siglo de Oro, reuniendo un centenar de obras creadas entre los siglos XVI y XXI: pinturas, esculturas, dibujos, grabados, fotografías y piezas de alta costura. La exposición pone de relieve la prodigiosa recepción de las obras icónicas creadas por Zurbarán por parte de artistas de los siglos XIX, XX y XXI. La exposición estará abierta del 5 de diciembre de 2024 al 2 de marzo de 2025 en Lyon.

The  exhibition Forms of the Ruin has its origins in the book by art historian and archaeologist Alain Schnapp, Une histoire universelle des ruines. Des origines aux Lumières, published in 2020 by Éditions du Seuil, of which it is a variation. The aim of the exhibition is to make this history visible, from a global and comparative perspective, from prehistory to the contemporary period.

Why are some works considered to be memorials while others arouse no interest at all until they are rediscovered ? The Greeks looked at the ruins of Egypt or the remains of the palaces of Assyria with unparalleled enthusiasm. The Romans were mad for about Greek works of art and flocked to the sanctuaries to admire them. The clerics of the Middle Ages regarded Roman remains with both admiration and concern. During the Renaissance, curiosity about the Greco-Roman world and the civilisations of America took hold. During the Enlightenment, this interest spread TO include Asia, Africa and Oceania. This Western scenario differs from that of China, Japan and the Arab-Muslim world, which developed their own uses of ruins.

Drawing on a selection of over 300 works, this exhibition is designed as a journey through ruins, in an ongoing dialogue between civilisations and is centered around four themes: memory and oblivion, the tension between nature and culture, the link between the material and the immaterial, and the confrontation between the present and the future. Its ambition is to question societies through history and at the same time to confront the research of contemporary artists in their desire to interpret the ruins of our industrial societies and imagine their future.

This exhibition devoted to American artist Robert Guinan (1934-2016) is the first to be held in a French museum since an exhibition at the Museum of Grenoble in 1981 and another at the Academy of France in Rome in 2005. Exhibitions of his works at the Albert Loeb Gallery (Paris) between 1973 and 2008 made the artist known in France.

This important selection of nearly eighty paintings and drawings is completed by two series of lithographs, one treating the theme of slavery while the other was inspired by the war poems of English pacifist poet Wilfred Owen. Originally from Watertown, New York, Guinan moved to Chicago in 1959. After having worked in Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art styles during his training, he adopted Realism in the 1970s, essentially using underprivileged members of society as his models. Deeply attached to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, the artist is sometimes compared to Edward Hopper.

However, while Hopper depicts anonymous characters, Guinan paints portraits which reveal a sense of brotherhood with his models. In 1977, the museum acquired Portrait of Nelly Breda from the Lyon gallery Le Lutrin. This painting represents the mother of musician Emile Breda, Guinan’s friend and nightlife companion, who introduced him to most of his models. Notably through his bar scenes and portraits, Guinan delivers a traightforward reality of those living on the fringe of the American dream.

Exhibition curators

Sylvie Ramond, Director General of Pôle des musées d’art de Lyon MBA | macLYON. Chief Curator, Director Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and Albert and Sonia Loeb.

From the 12th of May to the 10th of September 2023, Lyon Museum of Fine Arts will be presenting a selection of works from Oman National Museum as part of the exhibition ‘Journey to the land of frankincense: Collections from the Oman National Museum'.

Lyon Fine Arts Museum and Oman National Museum have devised two parallel exhibitions which give a glimpse into their respective collections. Oman National Museum in Muscat will display artefacts from Lyon Museum of Fine Arts, in an exhibition entitled ‘Fragrant Journeys’ built around the theme of perfume and incense (17 October 2022 - 7 May 2023). In May, visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts will be invited to discover Oman's historic and artistic heritage.
 
The Sultanate of Oman is quite rightly famed for the beauty of its landscapes with their mountains, sea, and desert, and has a rich history going back thousands of years with traditions that have fortunately been preserved. With around twenty pieces from Antiquity to the present day, including incense-burners, architectural fragments, metal artworks, manuscripts, and jewellery, this exhibition bears witness to Oman's rich culture.
 
The photographs of Ferrante Ferranti provide a highly evocative backdrop, transporting visitors into the heart of this captivating country.

The genius of Nicolas Poussin still has a few secrets to reveal. Poussin is an artist who has always been thought of as difficult, severe. He is the master of the classical French school, an archetypal painter-philosopher. Few people today know that he also gave himself over to the pure pleasure of painting, portraying some of the most sensual iconography, and that some of his paintings were deemed so erotic that they were defaced, cut up, even destroyed, from the 17th century onwards.

Through the theme of Love, which has rarely been so central to an artist's work, the museum aims to reveal this little-known side of Poussin: sensual, charming, seductive. The artist discovered Ovid before actually travelling to Rome, while under the influence of the audacious poet Giambattista Marino, in what would be a seminal encounter. Poussin then became famous for the Titianesque hedonism of his first Roman paintings, where the way Love takes control of men and gods alike is depicted in scenes taken from Ancient Greco-Roman myths. Love was a recurring theme and a constant source of inspiration for the artist right up until his final masterpieces, pictorial meditations on the wellspring of love's enduring power, as destructive as it is creative. A far cry from the austere image of the painter-philosopher which he showed to the public, the exhibition reveals a sensual, even erotic Poussin; a painter-poet who offers us a profound exploration of the universal and tragic power of love.

This exhibition dedicated to Poussin and love is an opportunity for the museum to give a prominent place to Nicolas Poussin's The Death of Chione, acquired in 2016, as it had been the case in 2008 with the exhibition about The flight to Egypt, a masterpiece acquired in 2007. Nicolas Poussin often stayed in Lyon and developed a large network of friendships and business connections which linked him to the city. This is how The Death of Chione came to be painted for Silvio I Reynon, a silk merchant from Lyon, during a visit to the city in around 1622. The exhibition is divided into five sections/parts, and displays around forty of Poussin's paintings and sketches. Two sections develop more specific focusses around a painting and a series of related sketches; the first around The Death of Chione from the museum’s collection, the second around Apollo in love with Daphne from the Louvre.

Curators

Nicolas Milovanovic, Conservateur en chef du Patrimoine, Département des Peintures, musée du Louvre
Mickaël Szanto, Maître de conférences, Sorbonne Université
Ludmila Virassamynaïken, Conservatrice en chef du Patrimoine, en charge des peintures et sculptures anciennes, musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

With the exceptional cooperation of the Louvre.

The Club du musée Saint-Pierre is the main sponsor of the exhibition. The Club du musée Saint-Pierre enabled the acquisition of The Death of Chione in 2016, since then exhibited in the museum's collections.

PICASSO / POUSSIN / BACCHANALIA

A thematic exhibition follows  the Poussin and love show, examining the role Poussin's heritage played in the development of Picasso's erotic universe, inspired by Antiquity. Between the 19th and the 25th of August 1944, Picasso made a sketch and painted a gouache based on Nicolas Poussin's The Triumph of Pan (1636). Picasso's The Triumph of Pan from 1944 is part of a particularly fine body of work, full of pieces which explore the theme of pleasure and the excesses of Dionysian revelry.

This show is part of the official programme of the Picasso Celebration 1973–2023.

The exhibition was co-organized with the Picasso Museum – Paris

Invité par le musée à travailler à partir des œuvres de ses collections, l’artiste Éric Poitevin a eu carte blanche pour produire de nouvelles photographies en résonance avec les œuvres de son choix : Lucas Cranach, Odilon Redon, Frans Snyders, Francisco de Zurbarán...

L’artiste porte ainsi un nouveau regard sur certaines œuvres connues ou moins connues du public, en les faisant dialoguer avec son propre travail photographique. Éric Poitevin propose ainsi un parcours et un éclairage totalement inédit qui offre des perspectives aussi évidentes qu’inattendues sur son œuvre et sur les collections. 

Né en 1961 à Longuyon (Meurthe-et-Moselle), Éric Poitevin est l’une des figures les plus importantes de la photographie contemporaine française. Diplômé de l’école d’art de Metz en 1985, l’une des seules formations qui proposait alors un cursus en photographie, Eric Poitevin a enseigné à l’Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg puis à l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nancy. Depuis 2008, il est professeur à l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Très attaché à sa région et ses paysages façonnés par les combats de la Première Guerre mondiale, Éric Poitevin vit et travaille à Mangiennes, dans le département de la Meuse.

Éric Poitevin a très tôt privilégié la prise de vue à la chambre photographique. Cette technique implique un matériel lourd et un temps de pause long. Au-delà de ces apparentes contraintes, ce procédé impose à l’artiste d’anticiper la construction de l’image tout en offrant un rapport particulier au temps et la possibilité de développer une véritable relation avec les sujets photographiés. Avec ses séries de portraits, de nus, de paysages ou d’animaux morts, Éric Poitevin semble au premier abord reprendre le fil de la tradition picturale, en réinterprétant les grands genres qui la composent. Cependant, ses mises en scènes qui tendent à l’épure intègrent de subtils écarts vis-à-vis des images rémanentes de l’histoire de l’art : l’artiste joue plutôt avec ces références et réfute toutes filiations trop directes ou littérales. Eric Poitevin renvoie en effet à une autre histoire, celle de la photographie.

Les photographies d’Éric Poitevin sont présentes dans de nombreuses collections publiques françaises et ont notamment été exposées au FRAC île de France, Le Plateau, en 2004 (Eric Poitevin) ; au musée de la Chasse et de la Nature en 2007 (Éric Poitevin. Cerf mort) ; à la Villa Médicis,  à Rome – où il a été pensionnaire en 1989-1990- en 2012 (Éric Poitevin. Photographies) ; au FRAC Auvergne en 2015 (Eric Poitevin) ; au Domaine du Trianon à Versailles en 2019 (Visible, Invisible).

Cette exposition est présentée dans le cadre du Pôle des musées d'art de Lyon, qui réunit le musée des Beaux-Arts et le musée d'art contemporain. 

Commissariat :

Sylvie Ramond, Directeur général du pôle des musées d’art MBA / MAC LYON, Directeur du musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Conservateur en chef du Patrimoine 

Céline le Bacon, Chargée du cabinet des arts graphiques et des acquisitions XXe/XXIe siècles

For the first time, the museum is dedicating an exhibition to contemporary ceramics, presenting an evocative panorama spanning the second half of the 20th century to the present day.

Great works by Jean and Jacqueline Lerat are displayed alongside ceramics by Joulia, Pontoreau, Virot, Dejonghe and Champy. These pioneering artists have mastered the constraints of fire and invented unexpected forms and effects at the surface of their creations, inscribing new volumes in space. In the exhibition, older pieces will be highlighted in confrontation with recent creations, overflowing with creativity and colours. On this occasion, ceramics that have recently been donated to the museum are revealed to the visitors.