The aesthetics of blur, which began in the 18th century, emerged after the Second World War as a means of expressing a world of instability and blurred visibility, in opposition to classical rigidity. Faced with the range of possibilities open to them, artists proposed new approaches in a variety of media, making transience, disorder, movement, the unfinished and doubt their subject matter. From Edvard Munch to Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter, the blur is both a symptom and a remedy for a world in search of meaning.

The book takes the blur as a key to an entire section of modern and contemporary art, and brings together contributions from curators, art historians, philosophers and ophthalmologists, each of whom, through their own eyes, questions the place of the blur in artistic production from 1945 to the present day. Through a richly illustrated corpus of paintings, videos, photographs and installations, Dans le flou initiates a dialogue between a diversity of works.

Like the exhibition, the book is thematic rather than chronological. An introductory section is devoted to the aesthetic roots of vagueness in the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, following the intellectual, scientific, societal and artistic upheavals with which Impressionism grew up. The book is then organized into three main sections, combining paintings, videos and photographs. After an exploration of the limits of perception in “At the frontiers of the visible”, “The erosion of certainties” approaches blurring from a historical and political angle, questioning the memory and status of images in the light of the tragic episodes that have punctuated our contemporary history. This recourse to the blurring of images goes beyond the collective dimension, however: it takes on a poetic, even dreamlike character when it touches on the question of identity and “praises the indistinct”. An epilogue opens the piece, questioning the possibility of a re-enchantment of the world, in response to artist Mircea Cantor's trembling affirmation of “unpredictable future”.