Around ten works by Gustave Courbet will be exhibited, all from the collection of the Petit Palais, facing fifteen monumental paintings by Yan Pei-Ming, mostly made in Courbet’s workshop in Ornans.
The Petit Palais has one of the largest collections of paintings by Gustave Courbet thanks to purchases made by the City of Paris starting from the end of the 19th century, enriched at the beginning of the 20th century with the donations of his sister, Juliette Courbet and the art critic Théodore Duret. The exhibition includes major works by the leader of Realist artists such as Le Sommeil, Les Demoiselles de Bord de Seine, Proudhon et ses enfants, L’Autoportrait au chien, as well as La sieste pendant la saison des foins… Yan Pei-Ming discovered the work of the French painter in a black and white propaganda book during his first years of studies in China. Settled in France since 1980, he rediscovered the work of the artist for whom he has developed a great fascination. In this exhibition presented in the large formats gallery of the Petit Palais, the materiality of Yan Pei-Ming’s and Gustave Courbet’s paintings interact with each other.
