The art world is paying a visual tribute to the ravaged cathedral by posting their favorite depictions of Notre Dame throughout art history.
Javier Pes
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As flames consumed the roof of Notre Dame and threatened to destroy the great Gothic cathedral, curators, architects, artists and other figures in the art world took to social media to express their horror at the destruction and hope that it could be saved.
They posted images of Notre Dame in an art-historical tribute that range from Picasso’s darkly cubist painting of the cathedral, which he completed at the end of World War II, to the monument’s famous silhouette as painted by Matisse in 1914, which is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The curator Marco Livingstone, who was among the first responders, posted Edward Hopper’s 1907 oil on canvas in the Whitney Museum’s collection, and another apt painting, Robert Delaunay’s watercolor of the spire under a glowering sky.
Other Instagrammers reached for great photographers’ images of Notre Dame before the fire to convey to their sadness, including classics by 19th-century pioneers Hippolyte Bayard, and Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey.
Damien Hirst, meanwhile, is thinking of the French capital the day after the great fire, posting Paris (2014), one of his surgical scalpel cityscapes. The artist did not refer to Notre Dame, which is out of the aerial view, but it’s the thought that counts.
Here are nine of the best.
