Toulouse. “La Dame à la Licorne” attracted 809 visitors
Great crowds, this Saturday, at the Musée des Abattoirs for the first day of exhibition of this jewel of medieval art.
It is a great pride to see until January 16, 2022, the six tapestries of “The Lady with the Unicorn” deployed in the heart of this major institution of contemporary art that is the Musée des Abattoirs “declared, during of the opening, Friday evening, Séverine Lepape, director of the Cluny museum, who is lending these works to the Toulouse museum for a while. It was an important event and the people of Toulouse were not mistaken. Yesterday, the first day of the exhibition, they came in numbers – 809 entries registered at closing – and 159 of them even rushed to the explanatory conference which detailed the works and explained their history. Thus Jocelyne, place with Eve, her granddaughter in literary preparation History of the Arts in Lyon.
“It is a well-known work” underlines the young girl “These tapestries are magnificent worldwide, I am delighted to have seen them. As I am currently working on the issue of art and animals, I took advantage of the holidays to come and see my grandmother in Toulouse and come to admire them ”.
On a red background, in an abundant decor in dazzling colors, with flowers, plants, trees and a multitude of animals, including the marvelous unicorn, each tapestry is an allegory of the five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste smell. The sixth tapestry, placed in front of Picasso’s stage curtain, a strong work from the Abattoirs, is called “My only desire”. Free will ? The heart that rules everything? Courtly love or an injunction to rise above material pleasures?
Sandrine is there with her niece Inès. “I knew the work. We were spoken to in CM1 ”remembers the young girl in front of her aunted aunt.
At 5.30 p.m., just before the next closing, Fayçal, a young director, rushing to the cash desks “I really want to see the work, the texture, its material” he explains to the clerk who nevertheless points out to him that he has little time left.
Manuel himself is more dubious “Simply, I saw these works more than thirty years ago at the Cluny museum. I came to see them again, but a work takes on the aura of the place where it is exhibited. And that was the time of my youth with everything that goes with it. So, I inevitably have less the feeling of marvelousness, of esotericism that I then felt. But, that is me, and it is a fact, that does not detract from their beauty. These tents are fantastic ”