Paris museum show celebrates artistic use of blurriness

A new exhibition at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie explores the use of blurriness as an artistic technique from the 19th century to the present.

Featuring 83 works by 61 artists, Out of Focus demonstrates how blurring, intentional or not, can both conceal a subject or draw the viewer’s attention: The smeared palette of Hans Hartung’s T1982-H31, for example, so “dominates the space” it occupies that, “for a moment, it is all one sees.”

Some artists blur their subjects because they are never to be seen clearly, as in the case of “nightly dreams and visions, both mystical and those aided by psychotropics.”

The result is a profound “disruption,” Le Monde wrote, compared with the “ideal of complete visibility.”