VASARELY BEFORE THE OP: European abstraction, 1945-1955

Fondation Vasarely, Aix-En-Provence

The Vasarely Foundation continues its partnership with the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle for the 4th consecutive year, with the summer exhibition “Vasarely avant l’Op, une abstraction européenne, 1945-1955”. From June 17 to October 15, 2023, a selection of 35 major works on loan from the Paris museum, the Musée départemental Matisse, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, the Marta Pan Foundation, the Denise René Gallery and private collections will be presented in Aix-en-Provence, at the Vasarely Foundation for four months.

Exhibition with works by Agam, Jean-Michel Atlan, André Bloc, Simone Boisecq, Robert Breer, Geneviève Claisse, Jean Dewasne, Jean Deyrolle, Cesar Domela, Etienne Gilioli, Hans Hartung, Auguste Herbin, Robert Jacobsen, Berto Lardera, Alberto Magnelli, Richard Mortensen, Pablo Palazuelo, Marta Pan, Ideo Pantaleoni, Alicia Penalba, Edgar Pillet, Serge Poliakoff, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Victor Vasarely and Nicolaas Warb.

Curator of the exhibition: Michel Gauthier

An exhibition in partnership with the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou

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Jean Paul Riopelle | Essence of studios

The Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence

Anna-Eva Bergman, A Journey Within

MAM | Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

The Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris is presenting the first major retrospective devoted to Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–1987). This key figure in postwar painting was a free, visionary artist whose work, characterised by the use of gold and silver leaf, is a powerful celebration of the beauty of nature, the landscapes of the Far North, and the Mediterranean.

Exhibited all over the world during her lifetime (notably at the Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris in 1977, but also in Italy, Germany and Norway), Anna-Eva Bergman nonetheless remains under-appreciated in Europe today. Her work, with its singular painterly language based on a vocabulary of pure forms, merits considerably more attention in art history terms, alongside the work of such other great women artists as her contemporaries Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe and Sonia Delaunay.

With its panorama of her entire output, the exhibition Anna-Eva Bergman, A Journey Within brings a decisively new slant to the rediscovery of this major artist. Comprising more than 200 works, the exhibition follows in the wake of MAM’s October 2019 retrospective devoted to Bergman’s husband Hans Hartung.

As part of the exhibition, the museum is presenting N°2-1964 Stèle, acquired during the artist’s lifetime, as well as the hundred or so works making up the Hartung-Bergman’s Fondation remarkable donation to MAM in 2017. This ensemble is rounded off by photographs, drawings and archival documents from the Fondation’s collections in Antibes, many of them never shown before.

In the Paris Musées catalogue edited by Hélène Leroy essays by French and Norwegian specialists detail the wealth of media used by Bergman and the highly individual deployment of metal leaf – gold, silver, aluminium, tin, copper, lead, bismuth – that became her maker’s mark. Other essays look into Bergman’s relationship to drawing and caricature, architecture and the golden mean, together with the exhibition and reception of her work after the war, and her kinship with the great masters of the past and such contemporaries such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko.

The Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris has collaborated closely on this project with the Fondation Hartung-Bergman in Antibes and the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, which will in turn devote an exhibition to Anna-Eva Bergman from 16 November 2023 to 25 February 2024.

Curator : Hélène Leroy

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Germaine Richier

Centre Pompidou, Paris

In homage to Germaine Richier, the first female sculptor exhibited in the National Museum of Modern Art, in 1956, this retrospective brings together nearly 200 works – sculptures, engravings and drawings. 

Drawing on previously unpublished research, the exhibition demonstrates the degree to which Germaine Richier occupies a central position in the history of modern sculpture, as a link between Rodin and the first César. Having trained in the tradition of Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle, over a period of little more than 25 years, between the 1930s and her premature passing in 1959, Germaine Richier asserted herself as profoundly original and radical in scarcely more than 25 years. The layout of the exhibition traces her artistic trajectory in chronological order, highlighting the major themes (the human, the animal, myths) that nurtured her practice as a sculptor. It reveals how Richier effected a revitalisation of the figure, forging new images of men and women in the post-war period.

Curator : Ariane Coulondre

The exhibition is organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

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Victor Brauner: Inventions and Magic

Timișoara National Museum of Art, Romania

On the occasion of the opening of the cultural program “Timișoara 2023: European Capital of Culture,” the Timișoara National Museum of Art is hosting the most important and comprehensive exhibition in Eastern Europe dedicated to the surrealist artist of Romanian origin Victor Brauner.

The Official Opening of the exhibition is on February 17, 2023 at 16:00 in the Baroque Hall of the National Museum of Art Timișoara.

One hundred and twenty years after the birth of Victor Brauner in the Kingdom of Romania and curated by Camille Morando, this retrospective exhibition aims to pay tribute to a central figure of Surrealism, an artist little known until now in his country of origin. The curator has selected over 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures, illustrations, and documents covering Brauner’s entire artistic career, from Bucharest to Paris, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. All these invaluable works are brought together for the first time in a retrospective exhibition with a design signed by the architect Attila Kim.

“Victor Brauner: Inventions and Magic,” the most important retrospective exhibition in Eastern Europe dedicated to the surrealist artist of Romanian origin is financed by the Timiș County Council and is co-organised in the European Capital of Culture by the Centre Pompidou, the Timișoara National Museum of Art, the Art Encounters Foundation, and the French Institute in Romania–Timișoara branch, with the support of Comité Brauner and Fondation du Judaïsme Français.

The exhibition is open to the public between February 17 and May 28 2023.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog (Romanian/English) co-edited by the Arta Grafica printing house and the Art Encounters Foundation. Coordinated by Camille Morando, the exhibition’s curator, this catalog includes texts signed by prominent names of the cultural scene, such as Cătălin Davidescu, Catherine Hansen, Radu Stern, Bernard Blistène, Irina Cărăbaș, Andreea Foanene, Diana Marincu, as well as a Victor Brauner biography and old photographs selected by the editor.

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Action, Gesture, Paint | Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70

Whitechapel Gallery, London

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.

Reaching beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, this exhibition celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It is often said that the Abstract Expressionist movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.

The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner(1908-1984) and Helen Frankenthaler(1928-2011), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes(1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi(1940-1985). More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK.

Artists:
Mary Abbott, Etel Adnan, Maliheh Afnan, Ruth Armer, Gillian Ayres, Ida Barbarigo, Noemí Di Benedetto, Anna-Eva Bergman, Janice Biala, Bernice Bing, Sandra Blow, Dusti Bongé, Chinyee, Wook-kyung Choi, Jay DeFeo, Martha Edelheit, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Asma Fayoumi, Lilly Fenichel, Perle Fine, Else Fischer-Hansen, Audrey Flack, Elna Fonnesbech-Sandberg, Juana Francés, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Gloria Gómez-Sánchez, Elsa Gramcko, Sarah Grilo, Grace Hartigan, Lilian Holt, Buffie Johnson, Yuki Katsura, Helen Khal, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Bice Lazzari, Lifang, Bertina Lopes, Margaret Mellis, Marta Minujín, Joan Mitchell, Aiko Miyawaki, Yolanda Mohalyi, Nasreen Mohamedi, Emiko Nakano, Lea Nikel, Tomie Ohtake, Fayga Ostrower, Mercedes Pardo, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Pat Passlof, Alice Rahon, Carol Rama, Marie Raymond, Judit Reigl, Deborah Remington, Britta Ringvall, Erna Rosenstein, Behjat Sadr, Nadia Saikali, Zilia Sánchez, Fanny Sanín, Miriam Schapiro, Sarah Schumann, Ethel Schwabacher, Sonja Sekula, Toko Shinoda, Sylvia Snowden, Janet Sobel, Vivian Springford, Franciszka Themerson, Alma Thomas, Yvonne Thomas, Hedwig Thun, Nína Tryggvadóttir, Elsa Vaudrey, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Michael West

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OSSIP ZADKINE. UNE VIE D’ATELIERS

Musée Zadkine, Paris

Ouvert en 1982, grâce au legs de Valentine Prax, peintre et épouse du sculpteur Ossip Zadkine, le musée Zadkine célèbre cette année son quarantième anniversaire. À l’occasion de cet événement, le musée présente l’exposition Ossip Zadkine. Une vie d’ateliers qui entraîne le visiteur au cœur de l’atelier des deux artistes. Près d’une centaine d’œuvres en constitue le parcours, rassemblant une belle sélection de chefs-d’œuvre de Zadkine, mais aussi des peintures de Prax rarement montrées et de nombreuses photographies inédites, certaines de photographes de renom tels André Kertész ou Marc Vaux. L’exposition bénéficie également d’un prêt exceptionnel du musée de Grenoble, une Tête de jeune fille, parmi les premières têtes taillées dans le marbre par Zadkine à la Ruche. Le parcours occupe l’ensemble des salles du musée dans une scénographie renouvelée, qui évoque « l’esprit d’atelier ».

Pendant quarante ans, les murs et les arbres de cette demeure ont été témoins du quotidien et de la création du couple d’artistes. Depuis quatre décennies, le musée Zadkine conserve et valorise leur œuvre respectif, et plus particulièrement celui du sculpteur, artisan du renouveau de la sculpture au XXe siècle. À la fois lieu physique et espace mental, autant nid, abri que poste d’observation, cette maison-atelier se déploie comme habitacle des œuvres. Scène de la création, elle sert aussi de cadre aux mémoires de Zadkine et de Prax, et de décor aux nombreuses photographies qui font partie des archives du musée aujourd’hui.
L’exposition Ossip Zadkine. Une vie d’ateliers est l’occasion de révéler une partie de ces précieux témoignages et ainsi d’offrir au public une évocation incarnée de l’atelier des deux artistes. Dans un jeu de miroir, les photographies sont associées à des sculptures, des peintures et des dessins de Zadkine et de Prax, principalement issus de la collection du musée, pour faire apparaître leur lieu de vie et de création comme un tout ; car « autant qu’un morceau du monde, la maison est un monde en soi : celui que son propriétaire porte dans sa tête et qu’elle matérialise » (Mona Chollet, Chez soi : une odyssée de l’espace domestique, 2015).

Depuis les premiers ateliers que Zadkine a peuplé de ses sculptures dès son arrivée à Paris en 1910 jusqu’à l’atelier du jardin que le sculpteur s’est fait construire après-guerre, le parcours de l’exposition suit un principe chrono-thématique. Une partie introductive raconte les premiers ateliers dans lesquels Zadkine a vécu et travaillé, au cœur du quartier Montparnasse. Le second chapitre est consacré à la maison-atelier de la rue d’Assas où il s’installe en 1928 avec Valentine Prax, qu’il a épousée en 1920. La troisième et dernière section propose de se plonger dans le processus de création et l’effervescence de la vie de l’atelier.

Commissariat :
Cécilie Champy-Vinas, directrice du musée Zadkine;
Pauline Créteur, chargée de recherche à la BnF

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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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