Azur

In 1993, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented Azur, an experience that brought together works from the 19th century to the 1990s that bear witness to the diversity of representations artists make of infinity and absoluteness, from Claude Monet to James Lee Byars, Edvard Munch or Yves Klein. While the word azure has long qualified a blue of especially bright density, from the 19th century the experience of azure linked a metaphysical notion to this especially deep and fertile dimension of art: grasping what cannot be represented.
The iconography of the exhibition catalog brings together over 200 masterpieces from the 19th century to the 1990s, selected from private collections and the reserve collections of international museums. All were chosen to display the diverse representations artists have made of the sky, light, clouds... The book also features the texts and thoughts of major figures in art history, philosophy, literature, and science, inviting the reader to peruse the visible poetics of the inaccessible.