Lecture - Géraldine Lefebvre, Director of MuMa

*Le Fond de la mer* (The Bottom of the Sea) is one of the first major public commissions awarded to Jean-Francis Auburtin (1866–1930) and a major work in his career as a decorative painter. In 1897, Henri-Paul Nénot, the architect of the New Sorbonne, entrusted Auburtin with the creation of a vast panel for the zoology lecture hall, then known as the Milne-Edwards amphitheatre. This commission was part of the Sorbonne's extensive decorative programme, in which each lecture hall received a décor related to the discipline taught there.  

Painted between 1897 and 1898, Le Fond de la mer is an immense underwater landscape intended to serve as a backdrop for the teaching of zoology. The work depicts a marine world teeming with aquatic plants, shells, fish and underwater organisms, observed with a degree of scientific rigour but transposed into a Symbolist decorative idiom. The artist prepared for the commission by studying marine fauna and flora at the biological stations and aquariums of Roscoff and Banyuls-sur-Mer, from which he brought back numerous preparatory drawings. The décor reflects the late nineteenth century's fascination with the natural sciences, oceanography and the discovery of underwater worlds. Auburtin, however, offers a poetic vision rather than a strictly scientific record. The work also reveals the influence of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose great monumental decorations he admired.  

The décor remained in place in the lecture hall for nearly seventy years, until it was removed in 1968. Unfortunately, the work was subsequently largely dispersed or destroyed. According to recent research carried out at the Sorbonne, a single fragment is thought to survive today in the municipal storage facilities at Ivry, while the rest of the décor is considered lost and survives only through the preparatory watercolours. Early photographs taken by the Moreau brothers nevertheless give us an idea of its overall appearance. This commission marked the beginning of Auburtin's reputation as one of the great decorative painters of the Third Republic. It preceded his work for the Palais Longchamp in Marseille and, later, for the Conseil d'État.  

Several historians regard Le Fond de la mer as the founding act of his marine imagination, which would go on to nourish his great compositions of shorelines, nymphs, and Mediterranean and Norman landscapes. It stands as one of the first monumental attempts at an artistic representation of the underwater world, at a time when it remained largely invisible to the general public. Auburtin drew directly on the advances of the nascent fields of marine biology and oceanography to create a décor that combines scientific knowledge, pedagogical ambition and Symbolist poetry. A couple of translation notes: I kept the French title with an English gloss on first mention, as is standard in art-historical writing; and I rendered "décorateur" as "decorative painter" rather than "decorator," which in English suggests interior design rather than monumental painting.

Géraldine Lefebvre

A graduate of the École du Louvre, Géraldine Lefebvre began her career at the MuMa as heritage conservation officer and deputy director between 2004 and 2015. During this period, she contributed to major projects for the institution, such as the Senn-Foulds donation, the exhibition Pissarro in the Ports in 2013 for the second edition of Normandie Impressionniste, and the preparation of the exhibition Eugène Boudin: The Studio of Light. Géraldine Lefebvre continued her career within the Museums of Art and History of the City of Le Havre. In 2018, she defended a doctoral thesis on Le Cercle de l'art moderne du Havre (*) at the University of Paris-Nanterre — a subject that had been the focus of an eponymous exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2012–2013 — and earned her doctorate in art history. She then requested a leave of absence to carry out several exhibition and publication projects. Three of these proved especially significant for her career, among them Monet-Auburtin, the exhibition marking the tenth anniversary of the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny. In 2020, she produced the Catalogue Raisonné of Claude Monet's Pastels in collaboration with the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. Then, in 2023, she presented the exhibition Léon Monet: The Artist's Brother and a Collector at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. Now at the helm of the MuMa, Géraldine Lefebvre will be responsible for shaping the institution's new scientific and cultural vision.

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