The Choice of Painting

Tessé Museum, Le Mans

The Tessé Museum is presenting the exhibition “The Choice of Painting, Another History of Abstraction, 1962-1989” from February 10th to June 9th, 2024. It offers a panorama of three decades of abstract painting in France, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

How did artists kept on painting when the trend, starting from the 1960s, gazed towards pop art, non-art, conceptual art, or minimalism? Through about sixty works, the exhibition explores this interrogation by reflecting the diversity of new pictorial approaches based on a different conception of gesture, the role of colour, and the notion of painting.

Victor Vanoosten, exhibition curator

Musée de Tessé
2 avenue de Paderborn
72000 Le Mans
Tél. 02 43 47 38 51

Free Admission
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Catalogue: THE CHOICE OF PAINTING Another history of abstraction in France 1962-1989.

Learn more

Americans in Paris | Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962

Grey Art Museum, NYU

Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. “Americans in Paris” explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962.

While the U.S. art scene was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Americans working in Paris experimented with a range of formal strategies and various approaches to both abstraction and figuration.

Showcased here are some 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper by nearly 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendency of the New York art scene.

Debra Bricker Balken, Lynn Gumpert, curators

Travelling exhibition: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy: September 3, 2024–January 5, 2025; The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery: February 11 2025, –June 1, 2025

Learn more

Léonce Rosenberg’s apartment. De Chirico, Ernst, Léger, Picabia…

Musée Picasso, Paris

The Musée national Picasso-Paris presents its new temporary exhibition, “Léonce Rosenberg’s apartment. De Chirico, Ernst, Léger, Picabia…”. In the form of evocation of a vanished setting, the exhibition will bring to light a previously unpublished and little-known pictorial ensemble, by major artists of the inter-war period.

Claude Viallat, Et Pourtant Si…

Carré d'Art, Nîmes

For the first time, Le Carré d’Art in Nîmes, Viallat’s birthplace, presents an exhibition dedicated to this artist, founder of the Support/Surface movement. The exhibition focuses on recent works by Viallat, taken directly from the artist’s studio. Paintings, sculptures and assemblages are presented to demonstrate the talent of this exceptional colorist.

A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group and historic figure of French abstract art, Viallat is tirelessly developing a body of work which is at once instantly recognisable and constantly on the move. In addition to his paintings, the exhibition will feature numerous objects, somewhere between sculpture and fortuitous assemblage that are always at once precariously balanced and consummately elegant. Their playful simplicity dialogues constantly with the intense formal and chromatic pleasures of his painting.

CARRÉ D’ART-MUSÉE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN
PLACE DE LA MAISON CARRÉE – 30000 NÎMES

Open daily except monday, from 10 am to 6pm

More information

Miró – Picasso, Celebración Picasso 1973-2023

Picasso Museum and Miró Foundation, Barcelone

On the occasion of the “Celebración Picasso 1973-2023” program, a total of fifty events celebrating Picasso are being organized around the world, including an exceptional collaboration between the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation. Focusing on two themes, the friendship between the two artists and their attachment to Barcelona, the exhibition brings together over 250 works to be discovered at both the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation.

The exhibition is organised around six major chronological and thematic axes and will bring together a set of more than 250 works from public and private collections from all around the world with the aim of exhibiting, one beside the other, two artists who transformed 20th century art with their own voice and an unprecedented plastic intensity. From the time they met in 1917 in Barcelona to their last monumental projects, including the episode of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic in Paris in 1937 or the interest in the ancestral technique of ceramics, the visitor will also discover how these two artists and friends shared many transcendental moments of their careers.

Miró-Picasso forms part of the events of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023, which includes a total of 50 exhibitions dedicated to Picasso that will take place around the world between the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2024.

More information

Mark Rothko, Retrospective

Fondation Louis Vuitton

The Fondation Louis Vuitton hosts the first mark Rothko retrospective in France since 1999. Bringing together over a hundred works from major collections, the exhibition chronologically traces Rothko’s fruitful career, from his first figurative canvases to his famous Color-Field all-over canvases.

The exhibition’s co-curator, Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, offers an intimate look at Rothko’s work.

More information

Judit Reigl 100 | Judit Reigl and the Second School of Paris

Mucsarnok, Budapest

To celebrate the centenary of Judit Reigl’s birth, the Mucsarnok in Budapest is presenting a collection of over 60 works representing the artist’s fine career. The exhibition retraces Reigl’s major periods, including her rare figurative paintings executed during her stay in Rome. It will also be an opportunity to rediscover the impressive canvases in Jean Claude Gandur’s collection, commemorating the Second School of Paris, a movement to which Reigl was associated with as soon as she arrived in the capital in the 50s.

More information

Nicolas de Staël

Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris

The Museum of Modern Art in Paris is dedicating a major retrospective to Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), a key figure in the French post-war art scene.

The retrospective brings together a selection of about 200 paintings, drawings, prints, and sketchbooks from numerous public and private collections in Europe and the United States. Alongside iconic masterpieces such as Le Parc des Princes, it presents a significant body of rarely, if ever, exhibited works, including around fifty pieces shown for the first time in a French museum.

Curators: Charlotte Barat-Mabille, Pierre Wat

Full price: €15
Reduced price: €13
Free: Under 18

Learn more

Nicolas de Staël | Retrospective in Paris

Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents a major retrospective dedicated to Nicolas de Staël, an emblematic figure on the post-war art scene. Bringing together over 200 works, including some never-before-seen pieces, the exhibition chronologically traces the artist’s development towards the pure, singular abstraction.

The exhibition will run at the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne from February 9 to June 9, 2024.

More information