Museum Visit

" Arcadia: in the collections of Pompidou Center" is an current exhibition in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Arcadia is a mountainous region of ancient Greece in the Peloponnesus. Its pastoral life and
relative isolation represented as a paradise in Greek
and Roman poetry.
This exhibition begins with Poussin's " The Arcadian Sheperds, 1638", which is projected onto a macrame curtain. Viewers push aside the curtain and enter into the exhibition. The sheperds in Poussin's painting are standing around a tomb,

seemingly pondering the meaning of the inscription. " ET IN ARCADIA EGO", which means
"Even in Arcadia I exist" in Latin. "I" is considered to refer to death. It seems to imply the theme of this exhibition is the modern version of seaching, imagination, and also disillusion of an Utopia.
The exhibition has ten parts, including golden age,
the Arcadia, the Arcadia rediscovered, aboundance, vanities, voluptuousness, harmony etc. It closes with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 2002, by Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, which mimics Manet's "The Luncheon on the Grass", but depictes Cézanne, Monet, and Pissarro etc., all in nude, , in a crowded, Eden-like landscape.
Actually, this is the first time I noticed the relationship between the theme of an exhibition and each individual artwork. I never think of how
artworks are selected and organized under a specific
theme of an exhibition. I usually walked through an
exhibition, enjoyed every single work, and
might be impressed by some of them, but didn not take the theme or the topics into serious consideration.

This time I found it was interesting to appreciate

an exhibition through the theme and the way the artworks were grouped under the theme.