The rich and varied exhibition itinerary features 150 artworks by 70 artists including major French painters such as Monet, Pissarro, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlein, Bonnard, van Dongen and Sonia Delaunay and artists from other parts of Europe who may be less familiar to French visitors such as the Swede Eugène Jansson, the British painter Atkinson Grimshaw, the Pole Jósef Pankiewicz and the Spaniard Darío de Regoyos. Their depictions of these new light ambiences offer indirect insights into their preoccupations in the midst of a period of profound upheaval. Taken together, at the same time as providing a highly contemporary subject for reflection, in broader terms, these artworks invite us to meditate on our intimate relationship with night.
  Street lamps symbolize the «City of Light»
The arrival of street lighting greatly altered the appearance of town centres. The unfamiliar shapes of street lamps, gas jets and globe lights began to be seen in city streets. Artists were highly sensitive to the way the city was changing. They began by incorporating the new designs into their compositions and went on to give them pride of place. Charles Marville’s first series of photographs of street lamps reveals a dazzling variety of shapes. Street lamps became a symbol of modernity and an emblem of the «City of Light».

A patchwork of light and dark
Despite the advent of artificial lighting, night-time atmospheres varied considerably. Some places remained in darkness. Paris’ brilliantly-lit quarters had their shadowy counterpoint in the working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city, where street lighting was scarcer, uneven and patchy. According to their differing sensibilities, some artists celebrated the brilliance of Paris’ shops and night-time entertainments, while others endeavoured to convey the darkness of the slums.
  New visual experiences
Artists for whom light was a central preoccupation were bound to be intrigued by the scope for visual experiments offered by the city at night. Street lighting, be it gas or electric, warm or cold, blinding or soft, still or moving, varied and altered the scene it lit up. The City of Light was far more complex than it appeared at first sight: dark and brightly-lit streets co-existed side by side. Presently, night took on new colours with the first neon advertising signs.

Nocturnal reveries
Not all artists were fascinated and enthused by the way night was being transformed. Some found it disturbing that natural darkness was gradually being banished by increasing prevalent electric lights. The Symbolists responded by inventing an imaginary city of darkness and silence, in which night once again became a space for reverie.

Night-time photographs
At the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, photography and later cinema offered a new way of depicting night. Artificial light allowed photographers to capture nightlife by playing on contrasts in a way that was totally new, and electricity provided the first cinematographers with a unique tool for developing filming techniques. Even so, to film night-time scenes, they used the subterfuge of day for night.
  Light reigns supreme
By the eve of the First World War, electric street lighting was ubiquitous, although gas was still being used for street lighting as late as the period between the wars. The avant-garde artists’ fascination with all expressions of modern life led them to stare head-on at light, dazzling themselves in the attempt to capture pure energy and producing artworks that deconstruct, fragmenting into an abstract, prism-like interplay of colours.

Le Havre, an apt choice of venue
In several respects, the seaport city of Le Havre played a pioneering role in the history of street lighting. Electric arc lighting was installed in the lighthouses at La Hève in 1863, making them among the first in the world to be lit by electricity. Le Havre was one of the first cities to opt for electricity over gas, granting a concession to supply electricity to its network to the Société Havraise d’Énergie Électrique in 1889. It also provided the setting for one of the earliest of the very few Impressionist depictions of night - Claude Monet’s 1872 painting Le Port du Havre, effet de nuit (The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect). The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view this picture, which is now in a private collection.

Over the last twenty years, MuMa has explored the ways in which artists incorporate transformations of their surroundings and scientific discoveries into their aesthetic innovations and experiments, taking major works from its collections as starting-points. «Electric Nights» follows on from exhibitions such as «Vagues. Autour des paysages de mer de Gustave Courbet» (Waves - Gustave Courbet’s seascapes”, 2004), “Sur les quais. Ports, docks et dockers” (On the docks - Ports, docks and dockers”, 2008), “Nuages…là-bas les merveilleux nuages. Autour des études de ciel d’Eugène Boudin. Hommages et digressions” (Clouds... Over there, the wonderful clouds. Tributes to and digressions from Eugène Boudin’s sky studies, 2009), and more recently “Né(e)s de l’écume et des rêves” (Ocean Imaginings”, 2018).

Curator :
Curated by Annette Haudiquet, the director of MuMa,

The exhibition brings together a group of oil and watercolour paintings, prints, photographs and films that have never previously been seen in conjunction with each other, loaned by major French and foreign collections both public and private including the Musée d’Orsay, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Cinémathèque française, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims, the Bemberg Foundation in Toulouse, Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, the Petit Palais de Genève, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the National Museum in Kraków and Göteborgs konstmuseum.
 













The exhibition "Electric Nights" is recognized as being of national interest by the French Ministry of Culture (Museums of France Department, Directorate General of Heritage) and as such has been granted exceptional funding by the State.
 

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Exhibition is organized as part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2020.

Exhibition produced with the exceptional support of :
     





The MuMa particularly thanks the patrons who contributed to this exhibition :
  EDF
  Dalkia - Groupe EDF
  Matmut pour les arts
  CIC Nord Ouest

 
F.P.H



  The MuMa Patron Circle





Partner : Printemps Le Havre




 














This exhibition is part of the programming of Un Eté Au Havre 2020, a cultural summer season under the artistic direction of Jean Blaise and coordinated by the GIP Un Eté Au Havre.