Today we’re going to tell you about our last school outing with the European section group. We went to Lyon to visit two museums with two different exhibitions.

The first one was at La Sucrière about hyperrealism created in 1960 in the USA to react against abstract art. Sculptures look so real, it is disconcerting. We saw also sculptures with a lot of details. A space was dedicated to the people from the working class who we rarely see in art exhibitions.  We saw provocative art with a message against Nazism for example. « Woman and child » by Sam Jinks represents an old woman with a new born in her arms and it represents the cycle of the life. We can conclude the more details there are, the bigger the reactions. Some of us even turned themselves into artwork !

The second exhibition at the Musée des Confluences was about the Sioux. A lady told us about the Native Americans’ history.  Our vision changed during the visit because she explained us that the point of view of Europeans about these civilizations is not very realistic. We learnt that when people settled on the new continent, they sent the Native Americans to the west. The artwork « American progress » explains that. We also saw different garbs of Native Americans, most of them had been made by Native Americans for European shows which did not correspond to the reality. For example, they never wore bright feathers because such colours do not exist in nature, or they could not have so many feathers because they got a feather for each act of bravery.

So we must bear in mind that the vision of the Native American peoples is very often erroneous.

We advise you to discover these two museums.

Manon et Zareena