https://lesfranciscaines.fr/fr/programmation/bleu-profond-locean-revele

Les Franciscaines in Deauville is partnering with Jean de Loisy, the French art critic, curator and specialist in modern and contemporary art, to organise an exhibition on the theme of the deep seas from 28 June to 21 September 2025.

The exhibition will be organised as a history of the imaginative world, from the effects of the sea shore to admiration for the fragile beauty of the undersea world, and showing how imagery developed and influenced artists from the 19th century to today. It will be a chance to understand the excitement that took hold of scientists, novelists, poets, painters and most of all of the public between 1850 and 1914, and made the undersea world a romantic refuge for pleasures involving knowledge and terrors. We should note the perfect match in time between the interest in the cosmos and in the sea depths. It is as if there were two movements, towards the deep sky and the fathomless sea, corresponding to the same thirst for the unknown. So, Jules Vernes, Victor Hugo and Hergé, for example, created masterpieces about the starry skies and the undersea world.

It was a dream of Antiquity to peer into the sea's hidden depths. The dream came true through individual exploits and surprising devices recounted in Mesopotamia, Greece,

the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But it was above all in the late 18th century and the 19th century that the wonders and terrors hiding in the depths of the oceans became part of our imaginary world. Although deep-sea divers and various undersea machines helped to reveal fragments of the unknown worlds and to disperse mysteries and fantasies to some extent, fascination for the undersea world was really triggered by Victor Hugo and Jules Verne. In their wake, the world's aquariums competed to show off strange creatures, terrifying fish, electric rays, wonderful corals, lace-like jellyfish and above all the star of the sea monsters, their limp queen: the octopus.

The emotional history of the world of silence, with its delicious terrors and sublime beauties, must now be written with a balance between aesthetics and technique,

between art and science, between sociological history and art history. But the long story and the enjoyment we draw from it is offset by the fragility of a precious world that has been deeply impacted by human activity, with a threat that runs through all the exhibition and is perhaps even more terrifying than the hidden monsters of the deep.