Paris et nulle part ailleurs

Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration

24 artistes étrangers à Paris. 1945-1972

The exhibition Paris et nulle part ailleurs (Paris and Nowhere Else) immerses the public in the years of post-war tumult that saw the emergence of new artistic visions, in the fields of abstraction, figuration and kinetic art, between 1945 and 1972.
In the first half of the 20th century, Paris was the world capital of the arts, a hotbed for avant-garde movements, attracting artists and intellectuals from across the world. After World War 2, despite the increasing appeal of New York, Paris and – for many people – nowhere else, was still the place you had to go to be trained, to create, to exhibit, to compare your work with that of others, to write the very history of art.

The exibition
Of the 15,000 artists active in Paris at this time, 60 to 65% of them were foreigners. Whether they spent a few months, a few years, left and came back, or settled there definitively, why did these artists come? How was their work impacted by this change in environment, how does it express that? Are their migratory paths similar to those of their compatriots? Paris et nulle part ailleurs examines 24 artists of various origins (Europe, Africa, Latin America, USA, Asia) who came to Paris and whose work helps us grasp the key issues of migration.

Organised into four themes: going into exile, blending home culture and host culture, reacting to the strangeness of the world they were discovering, building a universal language without borders, the exhibition covers the motivations for leaving, the experience of settling in, socializing, and a sometimes difficult everyday life in a more or less welcoming and cosmopolitan city, now their new home..

The exhibition features around one hundred works from private and public collections – drawings, sculptures, paintings, collages – by Shafic Abboud (Lebanon), Eduardo Arroyo (Spain), André Cadere (Romania), Ahmed Cherkaoui (Morocco), Carlos Cruz-Diez (Vénezuela), Dado (Montenegro), Erró (Iceland), Tetsumi Kudo (Japan), Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Julio Le Parc (Argentina), Milvia Maglione (Italy), Roberto Matta (Chile), Joan Mitchell (USA), Véra Molnar (Hungary), Iba N’Diaye (Senegal), Alicia Penalba (Argentina), Judit Reigl (Hungary), Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Daniel Spoerri (Romania), Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), Victor Vasarely (Hungary), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), Zao Wou-Ki (China).

Exhibition curated
Jean-Paul Ameline

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At the heart of Abstraction Works from the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art

Fondation Maeght

The exhibition at the Fondation Maeght will show works from the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art from the 2nd of July until the 20th of November 2022 and offers an immersion in the vibrant creation of the years 1945 to 1980.

Home to a collection of more than 13,000 works, Fondation Maeght is always keen and honoured to showcase other collections, some of which are rarely accessible to the public, as it has consistently done in the past. This summer, from 2 July to 20 November, it is unveiling some 120 works from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art (Geneva) and offering a riveting immersion into abstraction from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In the wake of Second World War, as many European artists exiled in the United States headed back to France, Paris regained its status as a hotbed of creativity and a global cultural capital. Driven by a thirst for freedom and a craving to rethink painting in the post-war years, artists from all over the world returned to their studios, abandoned during the German occupation, and engaged in an era of creative effervescence, be it in the arts, literature or filmmaking. While the breakthroughs by the vanguards of the first half of the 20th century were an invaluable post-war stimulus, abstract art renewed itself from the most gestural expression to the interrogation of materials, mediums and techniques.

The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art’s outstanding collection displayed at Fondation Maeght reveals the variety of forms em- braced by abstraction during these creative years. Works by Hans Hartung, Martin Barré, Simon Hantaï or Pierre Soulag- es trace the evolution of non-figurative art over four decades. In a thematic and chronological layout, the exhibition invites the viewer to discover lyrical and gestural abstraction by Georges Mathieu, abstract expressionism by Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, geometric abstraction by Victor Vasarely, kinetic works by Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, through to the rethinking of painting by the Supports/Surfaces group. The 1980s ushered in an era of revitalized abstract art, building on the hectic experimentation of earlier years.

Guest curator: Yan Schubert, the Gandur Collection pour l’Art curato

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Modernités portugaises

Musée Caillebotte

Embrassant une vaste période, des années 1910 aux années 1960, l’histoire du modernisme portugais, dont le poète Fernando Pessoa fut la figure tutélaire et son principal fondateur, se déroule entre le Portugal et Paris : la capitale française, centre artistique international depuis le XIX^e siècle, attire les Portugais en quête de modernité.

Cette histoire méconnue s’insère dans un contexte international bien plus vaste et met en lumière, à partir d’artistes de générations et de styles différents, un modernisme de tous les pays, de tous les continents.

Avec plus d’une centaine d’œuvres d’artistes portugais célèbres ou peu connus en France, mais qui tous ont contribué à l’art moderne lusitanien comme international, cette exposition nous amène à déplacer notre regard, à le faire voyager, et à penser l’histoire de l’art en dehors de ses grandes figures.

Sont exposées, les œuvres de Sarah Affonso, José de Almada Negreiros, Mário Cesariny, António Dacosta, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Ofélia Marques, Santa Rita Pintor, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Árpád Szenes, Eduardo Viana, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

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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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