Animal !?

Exhibition at the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc pour la culture, Landerneau, 14 June - 2 November 2025

Probably one of the earliest subjects in the history of art, the animal appears as early as cave art and has remained just as important down the centuries. Subsequently, animal painting was a subject of excellence in academic art and, at the turn of the twentieth century, the animal became the vector of successive avant-gardes. From physiognomy and its racist offshoots to mimicry and anthropomorphism, artists have used their work to show the other side of the human from a different angle, and to point beyond our differences to what brings us together.

This exhibition catalogue offers a cross-disciplinary and transhistorical approach to the place of the animal in artistic representations, through 150 works by 130 artists, including Arcimboldo, Chardin, Goya, Matisse, Rosa Bonheur, Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager. Focusing on the links between the human and non-human animal, it explores two millennia of masterpieces of artistic creation, starting with the animal as the 'subject' of art history and examining the decisive role it plays in different artistic movements.