The archives of creation

Fondation Hartung Bergman

With Anna-Eva-Bergman as with Hans Hartung, the fact of archiving and archiving everything (sketches, letters, photographs, press…) was at the heart of their life and their work. It is one of the common dominators of the two artists, who are otherwise so autonomous in their aesthetic approach. The Hartung Bergman Foundation which emanates from their will is the embodiment of this obsession. Rich in an exceptional collection of canvases, drawings, notebooks, innumerable documents, the Foundation makes it possible to trace almost from day to day the intertwining of the creative process and the daily existence of this couple of painters among the most outstanding. and originals of the modern period. From May 11 to September 30, 2022, the exhibition “Les archives de la création” is a dive into the secrets of their production, whether free gesture, mathematical meticulousness, sometimes even the memory of an ancient craft. From a simple tool to the entire structure of the workshop, passing through contemporary or classical sources of inspiration, the “factory” of their respective and common universes is revealed here for the first time in the sumptuous setting of their villa in Antibes. .

Curator: Juliette Persilier

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Simon Hantaï – The centenary exhibition

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

To celebrate the centenary of Simon Hantaï’s birth (1922-2008), Fondation Louis Vuitton is organising an unprecedented retrospective exhibition curated by Anne Baldassari. It includes more than 130 of Simon Hantaï’s works, many of which have never before been shown, and the majority of which are large format works from 1957 to 2000.

Simultaneously, the Fondation will present La couleur en fugue exhibition, in which paint is free to escape the limited scope of the canvas.

The starting point for the didactic circuit is the painting Écriture rose (1958 – 1959, which was donated to the government by the artist. Musée national d’art moderne / Pompidou Centre). It goes on to explore the successive periods of his work: Peintures à signes, Monochromes, Mariales, Catamurons, Panses, Meuns, Études, Blancs, Tabulas, Peintures polychromes, Sérigraphies and Laissées, before concluding with the “last workshop”.

Hantaï’s works are shown alongside the works of other major artists that had an influence on the artist, including Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock, whose artistic influences were decisive in Hantaï’s development, and Michel Parmentier and Daniel Buren, who were Hantaï’s peers in the 1960s scene at the Cité des Fleurs. An unprecedented in situ intervention by Daniel Buren, called Mur(s) pour Simon (“Wall(s) for Simon”) and designed as a tribute to Hantaï, is on display.

CURATOR
Curator and manager of the catalogue: Anne Baldassari

Fondation Louis Vuitton
8, Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi Bois de Boulogne, 75116 Paris

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La luce nel nero

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri

“La Luce del Nero” is the title of the upcoming exhibition hosted in one of the two museums of Fondazione Burri, the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco in Città di Castello, Italy. Here, the color Black shifts from the concept of dark and absence to becoming an actual color. This event has been designed to be inclusive for a public with visual impairment, besides offering an immediate and highly stimulating sensorial experience to all visitors.

Bruno Corà, curator of this exhibition and President of Fondazione Burri, highlights how Black “between the Middle Ages and the XVII century was no longer considered a color. Artists restored its chromatic value and among them, in particular Kazimir Malevič, author of the well-known “Black Square on white background” (1915), a print of which is present in our exhibition”.
Among the artists of the second half of the XX century, Burri is the one who most used the color Black, to the extent of painting the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco completely black. These industrial buildings became the museum hosting its major pictorial cycles.

Together with Burri, other artists included in this exhibition created artworks using black, such as Agnetti, Bassiri, Bendini, Castellani, Fontana, Hartung, Isgrò, Kounellis, Lo Savio, Morris, Nevelson, Nunzio, Parmiggiani, Schifano, Soulages and Tàpies. Each one of them with different modalities, intentions and meaning, all capable of arousing in the visitor different feelings, perceptions, sensations. Eventually, poets feelings as well are turned on Black and caecitas to explain the inner gaze of the psychic and poetic look in opposition to the actual vision.
The exhibition “La Luce del Nero” has been organized within the framework of the Creative Europe programme, through the “Beam Up” project (Blind Engagement In Accessible Museum Projects), which addresses the issue of accessibility of contemporary art for a public with visual impairment at an international and inclusive level.

This exhibition crowns the reopening of the venues of the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco after 7 years of constructions, which fully upgraded these exhibition areas. As stated by Mr. Corà “in the world, there are very few artist’s museums such as the Burri museum in Città di Castello, which can pride itself on having a museum itinerary that starts from Palazzo Albizzini and ends to the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco without fearing comparisons with any other museum”.

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Vieira da Silva, l’oeil du labyrinthe

Musée Cantini, Marseille

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Harmonie des sphères

Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis

Auguste Herbin, Geneviève Claisse ou encore Jean Dewasne, artistes abstraits géométriques originaires du Nord et férus de sciences exactes, dont le musée départemental Matisse possède une importante collection, ont utilisé le cercle comme un élément récurrent de composition.

Le travail de ces artistes entre en résonance avec les photographies que le spationaute français Thomas Pesquet a faites pendant ses loisirs à bord de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS). Quand il nous montre la Terre depuis l’espace, nous sommes frappés par l’extrême beauté de notre planète. De même, quand il photographie son environnement, l’absence de pesanteur donne à son Habitacle une sensation de sphère ou de cercle.

Cette exposition établit un rapprochement de ces deux visions : celle de l’artiste qui s’inspire de la science et celle du scientifique qui traduit sa fascination de l’espace par la photographie. L’une et l’autre dialoguent et se complètent mutuellement.

Ce projet a été enrichi par des prêts émanant de deux autres musées du Département du Nord : le Forum antique de Bavay par celui de statuettes de Mars et d’Atlas, le Musverre par celui d’œuvres contemporaines. Le Forum départemental des Sciences nous a en outre apporté un précieux concours scientifique et pédagogique, sans oublier le partenariat avec l’Abbaye de Vaucelles.

L’exposition met en regard, dans un dialogue qui se veut aussi formel que poétique :

• 21 œuvres d’Auguste Herbin,
• 19 œuvres de Geneviève Claisse,
• 5 œuvres de Jean Dewasne dont le monumental Habitacle rouge,
• Un bronze de Joan Miró,
• Quelques extraits de revues et de livres illustrés édités par Tériade et photographies des artistes exposés,
• 2 statuettes antiques prêtées par le Forum antique de Bavay,
• 9 œuvres contemporaines prêtées par le MusVerre,
• 32 photographies et une courte vidéo de Thomas Pesquet et de la NASA, vues intérieures et extérieures de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS), de la planète Terre et d’aurores boréales.

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JEAN DUBUFFET: ARDENT CELEBRATION

Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

At the end of World War II, Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) began exhibiting paintings that defied entrenched artistic values. He rejected principles of decorum and classical beauty, along with pretentions of expertise. Instead, he looked to the commonplace and the unheralded, employing crude materials, mundane subjects, and a style that spurned any outward sign of academic training. In this approach, Dubuffet was challenging norms that he believed obstructed authentic expression and devalued everyday experience. However, his goal was not only to reveal how threadbare cultural conventions were; he also wanted to illustrate the vitality of life freed from them. As he once claimed, “I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and . . . make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.”

Throughout his career, Dubuffet’s output was characterized by this celebratory impulse, as much as it was by his commitment to critiquing culture. His work of the 1940s and 1950s invited audiences to fundamentally reconsider the concept of beauty, and it demonstrated how worthy of admiration ordinary things could be—whether rocks, crumpled aluminum foil, or thickened paint. From the 1960s through the mid-1970s, Dubuffet showed the potential for adventure, creativity, and discovery that can be unleashed by diving into fantasy. For the last decade of his life, he strove to inspire a rethinking of the most basic structures of the mind, as he imagined the possibilities of approaching the world without the constraints of learned categories. This exhibition, drawn entirely from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, offers a survey of his production from these defining decades. It seeks to affirm that across Dubuffet’s shifts in focus, he kept his ever-evolving project grounded in its dedication to sharing new and revitalizing perspectives with viewers.

Curator: David Max Horowitz

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FROM FAUVISM TO SURREALISM. MASTERPIECES FROM THE MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE PARIS

Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao present a selection of nearly seventy masterpieces by significant artists that illustrates the history of the MAM collection while offering an overview of the avant-garde artistic movements born in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The MAM was built on the occasion of the historic Exposition Internationale (1937) to be a home to the collections of modern art of the city of Paris, which expanded rapidly in the following years thanks to major acquisitions of works by important artists of the Parisian art scene. However, MAM was only formalized as a museum in 1961. Patrons were an integral source of support for this project, especially Dr. Maurice Girardin, whose museum bequest of 1953 became the nucleus for the collection of modern masters, including the Fauves, Cubists, and representatives of the School of Paris.

Organized chronologically over three successive sections, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the period following World War II, the selection of works in this exhibition presents an historical perspective of the main protagonists involved in these pivotal artistic movements. The exhibition begins with representative works of Fauvism and Cubism, emphasizing those artists whose audacious freedom revolutionized art and changed traditional perception of landscape, human figure, and still life; followed by the generation of international artists who gave birth to the School of Paris during the interwar period; and finally a presentation of artists involved with Surrealism, which was led by the poet André Breton since its founding in 1924 in its historical home of Paris.

Through the present day, MAM continues its dynamic approach to acquisitions through its artistic and cultural policy of gathering exemplary representations of historical avant-garde movements. Many of these works are presented in Bilbao for the first time in this exhibition.

Curated by Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d´Art Moderne de Paris in cooperation with Hélène Leroy, curator of the Musée d´Art Moderne de Paris, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, curator of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris Musées

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Jean Dubuffet

Fondation Gianadda, Martigny, Switzerland

La magnifique rétrospective Jean Dubuffet présentée à la Fondation Pierre Gianadda, en collaboration avec le Centre Georges-Pompidou à Paris, propose une relecture du travail du grand défenseur de «  l’Art Brut ». Bien qu’il ait, paradoxalement, refusé la culture dominante, les écoles, les courants et les techniques enseignées, son œuvre occupe une place majeure dans le paysage artistique de la seconde moitié du XX^e siècle.

De par sa diversité, cette exposition témoigne de l’inépuisable créativité de cet artiste prolifique – né en 1901 et décédé en 1985 – qui sut faire évoluer son style tout au long de son existence. Érigeant le non-savoir en principe pour créer une œuvre singulière, rythmée par des séries successives, Jean Dubuffet ne cessa de développer de nouvelles recherches aux « tonalités » audacieuses, toujours déconcertantes. Insoumis aux normes en vigueur, « le vrai art », selon lui, « est toujours là où on ne l’attend pas. Là où personne ne pense à lui ni ne prononce son nom. »

Riche de plus de dix mille œuvres répertoriées au catalogue raisonné, le travail polymorphe de Jean Dubuffet couvre six décennies du XX^e siècle. Aussi, pour rendre compte de tous les aspects de sa création, l’exposition présentée à la Fondation Pierre Gianadda s’articule autour de temps forts, faisant alterner chefs-d’œuvre de sa peinture et ensembles majeurs de travaux sur papier (dessins et gouaches), présentés selon un déroulement chronologique.

En collaboration avec le Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION

Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

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