In Draguignan, the exhibition “Ulysses, voyage in a Mediterranean of legends”, a new stage in Ulysses’ wandering

Until this year, the city of Draguignan (Var) was mainly known for its two military schools, one for infantry and the other for artillery. It should now be for its Departmental Exhibition Hall in Var, shortened to HDE Var. This new cultural site was built from a building built in 1890 for the archives of the Var, near the monumental prefectural palace built in 1830, when Draguignan was the prefecture.

The architect Frédéric Pasqualini wrapped the stone building, whose street facade remains intact, with a concrete exoskeleton to house the escalator that connects the three levels of exhibition rooms, for a total area of ​​650 square meters. With a rather modest budget of 6.8 million euros, the city now has an effective cultural tool. Many cities of the same size would advantageously follow this example.

A few symbolist canvases from the second half of the 19th century are pleasantly pompous by dint of emphasis.

The building was to be inaugurated in January but, pandemic obliges, it has just been and the opening exhibition which was to end in May has been moved to last all summer. Her hero is Ulysses, the tireless and subtle traveler ofOdyssey whose return to the island of Ithaca, of which he is king, and to his wife Penelope lasts a decade: the twenty-four songs written by Homer around the VIII^e century BC AD, a major work of literature and an abundance of subjects for the arts, from Antiquity to today.

Greece and symbolist painting

This abundance is at the same time the reason, the difficulty and the luck of the exhibition. The reason: the Odyssian iconography is a subject of the most consistent study, the opportunity to observe the persistence and modifications of the representations inspired by the poem. The difficulty: from the XVI^e in the XIX^e century, these representations, through painting, engraving and sculpture, are all the more numerous as theOdyssey, universally known and translated masterpiece, offers many interesting situations to figure, from the metamorphoses of Circe the sorceress to the wiles of Penelope weaving and unraveling her tapestry and the final settling of scores, when an Odysseus unwilling to liquidate all those who claimed to marry his supposed widow with this bow that he is the only one to know how to tender and of which he makes devastating use.

An exhaustive inventory is therefore impossible: it would require loans that are difficult to obtain and an area much greater than that available to the curator of the exhibition, art historian Milan Garcin. But, in this abundance, there were little-known works to be found for him and he succeeded by drawing mainly from two types of representations: painted vases and sculpture from ancient Greece on the one hand, academic painting or Symbolist of the second half of the XIX^e century on the other hand. From this second category fall some canvases of a pleasant pompierism by dint of emphasis: the dramatic Ulysses recognized by Euryclée (1849), by Gustave Boulanger, the Recognition of Ulysses and Telemachus (1880), by the little known Lionel Royer, or Ulysses and the Sirens (1909), by Herbert James Draper, also little known. They are the anticipatory film version of theOdyssey of which the works of Johann Heinrich Füssli or Odilon Redon are dreamlike versions, less spectacular and more moving.

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