Le Spectacle De La Marchandise Ville, Art Et Commerce 1860-1914

Exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, 6 April - 8 September 2024

Defined as the pleasure of comparing and evaluating goods, shopping - a term that first appeared in the 19th century - is a social, cultural and leisure activity. It is fuelled by sales tricks and a soon-to-be omnipresent advertising arsenal. Through a process of contamination, visual and material culture became as much imbued with merchandise as they contributed to its seductive power.

Playing with the confusion of genres and spaces, from the top of a balcony or from a child's height, on the Grands Boulevards or in Old Paris, from inside a shop or in the middle of a market, the artists play with a thousand and one possible ways of looking at things.

This exhibition catalogue looks at the way in which the unprecedented commercial development of towns and cities manifested itself in the eyes of artists from 1860 to 1914. Through around a hundred works - paintings, photographs, films, drawings and engravings - by Jules Adler, Fernand Pelez Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Raoul Dufy, Maximilien Luce and Théophile Steinlen, together with small groups of commercial signs, advertising posters and promotional objects, the book combines different visions of the same modernity and brings to life the hustle and bustle of commercial towns.