The title of this compendious essay exhibition was borrowed from “Romance de la luna, luna” (Ballad of the Moon, Moon), the opening poem of Federico García Lorca’s well-known collection Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1924–27). The lofty atmosphere and passionate commotion suggested by the Spanish line “En el aire conmovido,” supplied the point of departure for philosopher-cum-curator Georges Didi-Huberman’s concerted attempt here to articulate “a political anthropology of emotion in a poetic key.” His thesis was delivered via hundreds of exhibited items as well as a generously illustrated publication anchored by a wide-ranging treatise comprising 160 heavily footnoted pages.
There was no denying the ambition, scope, erudition, and indeed indulgence on display throughout a show that was decidedly bookish—literally so, in an early room dominated by vitrines filled with vintage copies of tracts on the classification of the emotions by Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Darwin, Nietzsche, and others, alongside musical scores by Beethoven and Scarlatti. Prominent elsewhere were artworks by celebrated writers: sketches by Lorca, collages from Brecht’s War Primer (1940–46), an Artaud doodle, a drawing by Kafka, some delectable works on paper by Goethe and Hugo. Several panels of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1927–29, by Aby Warburg, the subject of a previous study by Didi-Huberman, were presented in reproduction. Given the exhibition’s encyclopedic nature, most visitors were more likely to relish its many captivating eddies and asides than to appreciate fully any curatorial through line. That said, well-considered introductory wall panels, at once succinct and suggestive, were provided in every room to guide the casual viewer. The more committed might subsequently delve into the accompanying publication and follow the curator’s meandering line of thought as he drew together Lorca’s understanding of duende, Nietzsche’s notions of the daimonic and the Dionysian, Schiller’s distinction between “naive” and “sentimental” poetry, and much else besides.
The exhibition included two very different rooms dedicated to the childhood gaze. Taking its cue from Lorca’s description of a boy staring at the moon, the first room concentrated on images of children looking—especially of groups enraptured by something lying beyond the image frame (e.g., a Robert Capa photo taken in Barcelona in 1939, a short film sequence by Herz Frank from 1978, an excerpt from Víctor Erice’s classic 1973 feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive). This grouping led to rooms devoted to the registration of emotion on the human face, with works ranging from sculpted heads by Medardo Rosso (of a laughing girl and a sick child) and Alberto Giacometti (of his brother Diego) to the pairing of the strikingly dissimilar death masks of Nietzsche and Hegel. Subsequent rooms exploring the expressivity of physical gesture accommodated a plethora of dancing bodies (from Man Ray to Maria Kourkouta) and gesticulating hands (from Rodin to Harun Farocki via Hans Bellmer).
At a turning point, both literally and figuratively, roughly halfway through were two notable rooms Didi-Huberman intended to conjure “a field of tension between distances and proximities.” In one, Fred Sandback’s tenuous and tensile yarn sculpture Untitled (Diagonal Construction), 1970/2002, was set against a single-slash, off-white Concetto spaziale by Lucio Fontana from 1960. The other was a concerto of line and fold featuring two similarly hued pliage paintings by Simon Hantaï, one expansive and one tiny, placed in uneasy proximity, while two large, spare works on paper by Joan Miró faced off on opposing walls, one evoking dancing poppies (La dance des coupillots, 1973), and the other a bird in flight (Oiseau dans l’espace, 1976).
While images of the devastation wrought by war and conflict, from Goya’s agonized response to the Iberian Peninsular War (1808–14) to press photos of street riots during the Northern Irish Troubles, recurred throughout, they came to a poignant climax at the exhibition’s close with a selection of turbulent, heart-wrenching drawings made by survivors of dramatic moments in history, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and the destruction of Aleppo. These constituted a powerful reminder that if, as Lorca wrote, “one must look with a child’s eyes,” that means sharing responsibility for what the children of our world are destined to see.
