Flaran Abbey: Exhibition - Towns and Countryside In the Simonow Collection

New exhibition in the Simonow Collection: Towns and Countrysides... (Fine Arts, 16th-20th century)

To be discovered from February 1, 2024 to January 11, 2026, at Flaran Abbey, Monks' dormitory.

Pivotal of the cultural policy of the Department of Gers and, for two decades, the most visited public and paid site in the Gers, the Abbey of Flaran bases its work of cultural irrigation of the territory through a rich and diversified program of events, which range from Archeology to Contemporary Art.
Until mid-January 2026, the new biannual exhibition installed within the walls of the heritage center, thanks to the wealth of the funds deposited by its owner with the Department of Gers, aims to evoke the duality of the theme of CITIES and CAMPAIGNS which has its roots well before the Middle Ages and asserted itself in the XNUMXth century.

If we agree, in fact, that the landscape constituted a theme as such in European painting quite early on, most authors agree on the late appearance, only in the 19th century, of the city.
This is, curiously, to forget that a representation of an urban settlement has reached us over the millennia since the Turkish Neolithic and that an extraordinary testimony from the Bronze Age comes to us from the site of Akrotiri in Santorini; finally, subsequently, ancient Rome, an urban civilization par excellence, provided us with many illustrations through frescoes and mosaics, stigmatizing “Roman-style” luxury.
The medieval period partly perpetuates ancient traditions but the vision is then subject to the prevalence of religious fact, dominated by the figure of the “heavenly Jerusalem”; it is indeed the Renaissance, with aesthetic research and perspectives, which restores its rank to the city, from Italy to Flanders and then Holland; its representation will thus underline the economic growth and the evolution of sponsors, with the appearance of a class of merchants and bourgeois, before they constituted a real counter-power to the Church and the royalties in place.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the influence of the travels of the Nobility and the upper middle class (Grand Tour, Venice (17th century) emerged towards the more precise representation of the city as well as the countryside and their inhabitants, opening onto a new and elsewhere fascinating which will culminate with Orientalism in the 19th century.

The paradigm was definitively transformed in the 19th century under the influence of the Barbizon School for a return to the values ​​of the countryside, notions extended by the Realist and then Naturalist movements, thus eliminating all sentimentalism in favor of a form of expression of truth. . But, in view of the social harshness of the Industrial Revolution, its pollution, the successive economic crises and the precariousness resulting from the rural exodus, Art (and its sponsors) often look with condescension on a sub-proletariat mixed with folklore and miserabilism, symbolized by the paradoxical figure of the peasant.
These paradoxes are also those of Impressionism where the artist, who works on the motif outside the cities, takes note, concomitantly and rather optimistically, of urban evolution, of its explosion (Hausmanian development and appearance of the path of iron) without the two worlds coexisting in this modernity displayed and claimed even in photography.
By feedback, the countryside has now become a space for vacations and rest, maritime or mountainous, while the vision of the city continues its swirling and cacophonous movement pointed out by the Dadaists, the Futurists and the Cubists before Mondrian...
Like the previous ones, this event offers our delight more than fifty works, over a long chronology (16th-20th centuries), some little known or never shown, through an original presentation in Occitania.

An editorial line of catalogs, richly illustrated and intended to preserve traces, accompanies these exhibitions.
Young or old, individually or as a family, this exceptional dive into the History of European Art is intended for you…
Exhibition designed and coordinated by the Departmental Conservation of Heritage and Museums/Flaran.

Opening hours:
From June to September, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 14 p.m. to 18 p.m., and from September to early January
In July and August, from 10 a.m. to 19 p.m.
Closed on December 25, January 1 and May 1.

Information on 05 31 00 45 75 or on www.abbayedeflaran.fr