Centred on the presentation in the nave of her seminal installation Naming the Money (2004). A key work in the career of the British artist, it consists of nearly one hundred life-size painted plywood cut-outs that bring to life African servants depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European court paintings.

A figurehead of the Black Arts movement in 1980s Britain, Himid has been developing a multi-facetted oeuvre across four decades in which she combines art-making, curating, archiving and teaching to explore the marginalisation of the black diaspora in contemporary society.

By removing the protagonists of Naming the Money from contexts in which they were instrumentalised as signifiers of their masters’ wealth and social status, Himid gives them back a body and a name, thus restoring their agency for collective action. In the installation, these slaves, who were employed in European courts as ceramists, herbalists, toy makers or dog trainers, are heard speaking about their changing identities as they were forced to shed their African names and occupations in favour of the new roles imposed on them. 

Naming the Money, which has recently been donated by the artist to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, extends the experience of slavery to all ‘migrants’ whose personal identities are deconstructed and reconstructed under pressure from global political and economic forces.

Occupying the centre of the nave, the installation also calls to mind the initial purpose of the warehouse that has been housing the CAPC since the 1970s. Built in 1824, nearly ten years after the official abolition of the slave trade, it was used to store colonial goods (coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, rum, wine, cod, spices, etc.) in transit to Northern Europe, sustaining the city’s maritime trade for more than a century.

As a counterpoint to this colourful crowd with which viewers are encouraged to mingle, Himid is showing nine diptych paintings with abstract geometric patterns. Inspired by real or inner journeys to her native island, the series of paintings entitledZanzibar is suggestive rather than illustrative, its deafening silence forming a stark contrast to Naming the Money.

• Lubaina Himid : Naming the Money
• Curator: Alice Motard
• 31.10.2019 – 23.02.2020
• CAPC museum of contemporary art – Bordeaux (France)

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Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians…
As part of the original exhibition “City Prince/sses”, a good fifty artists will be exhibiting at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (France) from 21 June to 8 September 2019.

Without any geographical grouping, the artists of this brand new exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo are presented most of the time with new productions and in situ interventions.The exhibition “City Prince/sses” is presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed.

DHAKA, LAGOS, MANILA, MEXICO CITY and TEHRAN are expressions of a tissue of contradictions, as seen in their saturated traffic which coexists with digital networks which supposedly work fluidly.

Quite clearly, these megacities are very different from one another. Their cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.

Between skyscrapers and shacks, urgency and patience, megacities are undergoing a chaotic expansion, mingling transfers of capital with technological connexions in financial centres, generating urban margins with numerous inequalities.

This vast, disorderly movement transforms cities into ceaseless work sites, favouring imaginary deviations. The artists which then emerge are thus the flâneurs of the 21st century, the hackers of our responses to an urban environment which is often functional and standardized.

However, as visitors stroll through the exhibition aisles, they quickly realize that these megacities are not the subject of the “City Prince/sses” exhibition. They are in fact a context of research, a playground, where creators sample the multiple layers that constitute it to extract an excessive hybridization, in constant metamorphosis.

Raw and head-spinning hangings, mysterious landscapes, luminous or opaque zones, backrooms and traps: the presentation of the show has been conceptualised by the architect Olivier Goethals, according to the rhythms of day and night, from profusion to desaturation, alternating between monographic zones and terrains for encounters. He has elaborated an architectural pathway which reveals and accentuates the lines of force in the building, which is here being envisaged as an immense common area.

Guest artists : Aderemi Adegbite, Mehraneh Atashi, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Biquini Wax EPS, Britto Arts Trust, Chelsea Culprit, Ndidi Dike, Doktor Karayom, Ema Edosio, Kadara Enyeasi, Falz, Dex Fernandez, Dina Gadia, Betzabé García, David Griggs, Ha.Mü, Timmy Harn, La Havi, Amir Kamand, Hoda Kashiha, Lulu (Chris Sharp, Martin Soto Climent et leurs artistes), Tala Madani, Farrokh Mahdavi, Pow Martinez, Arash Nassiri, Leeroy New, Emeka Ogboh, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Adeola Olagunju, Ashfika Rahman, Mahbubur Rahman, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, John Jayvee del Rosario & Maine Magno, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Reetu Sattar, Mamali Shafahi, Reza Shafahi, Justin Shoulder, Mohammad Shoyeb, Manuel Solano, Newsha Tavakolian, Stephen Tayo, Tercerunquinto, Timmy Harn, Traición, Wafflesncream, Maria Jeona Zoleta, Zombra

 

Curator: Hugo Vitrani
Associate curator: Fabien Danesi
Scenographer: Olivier Goethals

www.palaisdetokyo.com

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Faced with the many previous studies and exhibitions, the route favours the Mediterranean East, specific to the French colonial empire. The corpus of works has been organized into two distinct axes: the human figure and the landscape. Two routes announced by “La Petite Baigneuse” (1828, Paris, Louvre Museum) by Ingres and “Innenarchitektur” (Interior Architecture, 1914, Wuppertal, Von der Heydt Museum) by Paul Klee.

These two lines illuminate each other throughout the tour, which is organized into 7 sections. The first section sets up the historical figures of the movement: Ingres and Delacroix are surrounded by their disciples and tributes to their vision. Faced with Ingres’ drawings and in particular his studies for the “Grande Odalisque”, Delacroix and Chassériau bring a more real but no less classic vision.

The second section continues this exploration of the human figure, increasingly carried by a real knowledge of the East but always nourished by tradition and fantasy, because, as Eugène Fromentin points out in his book “Un Été dans le Sahara”: “We must look at this people at the distance where we should show ourselves: men up close, women far away; the bedroom and the mosque, never”.

From Chassériau (“Moorish Woman Out of the Bath”, 1854, Strasbourg, Museum of Fine Arts) to Gérôme (“Jeune Orientale au Narguilé”, n.d., private collection), knowledge through travel does not obliterate the use of iconographic prototypes borrowed from mythology and classical tradition. The figure of harem, the new Venus, cannot be portrayed in a faithful way, because it remains invisible to all. Gérôme, with his “snake charmer” (c. 1879, Williamstown, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) or Édouard Debat-Ponsan (“Le Massage : scène de Hammam”, 1883, Toulouse, Augustin’ Museum), thus renewed a classical and imaginary iconography by presenting it on a background of an Islamic mosaic.

The third section, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (“Le Marchand de couleurs” (Le pileur de couleurs), circa 1890-1891, private collection, on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) to Eugène Fromentin (“Le Pays de la Soif”, circa 1869, Paris, Orsay Museum) and Paul Lazerges (“Caravan near Biskra, Algeria”, 1892, Nantes, Museum of Arts) makes it possible to make a transition from the figure to the landscape, by presenting genre scenes that reveal the artists’ simultaneous interest in the figure and its context. This is the beginning of a transformation that leads to an increasing attention to light and the structure of ever purer landscapes.

In this perspective, the fourth focuses on this progressive geometrization of the landscape, which reduces narrative data to the essential, concentrates on the composition and rhythm of colours: Jules-Alexis Muenier and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Albert Marquet and Camoin. The geometry and whiteness of the city of Algiers thus inspired Muenier (“Le Port d’Alger”, 1888, Paris, Orsay Museum) to create forms that announced those of Camoin in “Le Golfe de Sidi-bou-Saïd” (1923, private collection) and Marquet in “La Mosquée de Laghouat” (1939, Albi, Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, CNAP deposit).

Faced with this, the fifth section establishes a parenthesis around light and impressionist and neo-impressionist artists: Renoir, with “Le Ravin de la femme sauvage” (1881, Paris, Orsay Museum), paved the way for Théo van Rysselberghe in an essential work on the stain of colour that remained without posterity, but which contributed to the emancipation of colour.

Finally, the sixth and seventh sections, again focusing on the opposition of the figure and the landscape, focus on a radicalization of geometry that coincides with the emergence of new pictorial means. On the one hand, Émile Bernard, Jules Migonney, Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse renew the theme of the human figure by simplifying it. Muslim decorative arts then took on an increasingly important place and made it possible to move into a two-dimensional space. Thus, Bernard’s “Abyssine en robe de soie” (1895, Paris, Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum) or Marquet’s “Intérieur à Sidi-Bou-Saïd” (1923, Le Havre, MuMa) accompany Matisse’s experiments (“Odalisque à la culotte rouge”, 1923-1924, Paris, Orangerie Museum).

On the other hand, Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee cross the line of abstraction, linked to the experience of pure colour and glare. This section is an opportunity to rediscover some of Kandinsky’s lesser-known works, such as “Arab City” (1905, Paris, MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou) or “Oriental” (1909, Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau), which are gradually changing into pure colour. As Paul Klee notes in his diary during the trip to Kairouan in April 1914: “Color possesses me. There is no need to try to grasp it. She owns me, I know that. This is the meaning of the happy moment: color and I are one. I am a painter.”

Faced with this, Vallotton ends the tour with a tribute to Ingres, “Le Bain turc” (1907, Geneva, Museum of Art and History), strange in its composition as much as in the absence of orientalist motifs. Through the figure or landscape, Orientalism gives way to a radical experience, at the origin of modern art. In both cases, the East disappears to give way to pure painting.
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The exhibition “Oriental Visions, from Dreams into Light” is presented at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, until July 21, 2019 

Curator: Emmanuelle Amiot-Saulnier, Doctor in Art History

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« I am interested in transformation and artifice. My newest exhibition will engage with the history of France and its outward facing relationship to black and brown bodies, specifically relating to sexual proclivity. Gauguin features heavily in the imagination of France and her global interface – with that comes an entire history of complicated gazing. I interrogate, subsume, and participate in discourse about Māhū, about France, and about the invention of gender. » .– Kehinde Wiley, 2019

Kehinde Wiley, star of the American art scene, official portrait painter of Barack Obama, and founder of the multidisciplinary artist residency program “Black Rock Sénégal” is back in Paris. For his first Parisian exhibition since the 2016 show at Petit Palais, he will be unveiling a new series of paintings and a video-installation based on his time spent this past year in Tahiti.

Wiley’s new works are focused on Tahiti’s Māhū community, the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender, between male and female.  The Māhū were highly respected within their society until they were banned by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

Wiley’s portraits of beautiful, transgender Tahitian women reference and confront Paul Gauguin’s celebrated works, which also feature subjects from the transgender community, but are fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification.

Building off of Wiley’s earlier portraits that addressed issues of masculine identity and virility, these new portraits explore issues of identity through the lens of transformation, exploring both artifice and artificiality as a trans-cultural phenomenon.

Over the past fifteen years, Wiley has developed a remarkable body of work that at once questions and participates in the western art-historical canon of portraiture. Wiley’s encounter with Tahiti joins with the artist’s continued journey across the contemporary world, following his explorations of North America, South Asia, and West Africa.

Wiley’s focus on Tahiti now offers the opportunity to re-examine France, its colonial history, and its image through the prism of Gauguin’s work. True to his oeuvre, this exhibition presents a uniquely political and aesthetic perspective on the power of art to shift perception and to make visible history’s forgotten figures.

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GALERIE TEMPLON
28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare
75003 Paris – France
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 7 pm

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Where the sun burns the skin: the presence of women artists from Latin America at Art Paris Art Fair 2019, a reflection…

“ no son todas las que están, ni están todas las que son ”

For its 2019 edition, Art Paris Art Fair presents “Southern Stars”, an exploration of Latin American art from 1960 to the present day, offering a historical and contemporary tour of the artistic production of this territory with its multiple tensions: artistic, political and existential.

This article is a reflection on the particularities of Latin American art made by women. From a historical, contemporary, social and commercial point of view.  Discussions with Valentina Locatelli, curator, and Catherine Petitgas, collector, were essential for the development of this reflection.

Tupi or not tupi

To be, in Latin America, unfolds in two ways: on the one hand the definition of an essence and on the other hand, a changing state. This duality of the first verb brings a fluidity dear to the artistic production of this territory where the sun burns – sometimes – the skin. A tension between being and not being, between essence and body, suggestion and affirmation, between tupi or not tupi⁽¹⁾ ?

This sun that burns – sometimes – the skin, forces us to be in constant movement, to create life strategies, refuges. Encourages us – sometimes – to look elsewhere to build our own territory. Latin American women actively participated in the act of sculpting 20th century art. Conversely, some of these artists have been kept in the shadows. This is partly due to latent sexism, conservative ideas that are gaining ground and diluting slowly, but also because of a system that defines the quality of the work through the artist’s visibility and success.

Woman artist / Woman of artist

At the beginning of the century, some figures pushed their branches towards the light, such as Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfati and Frida Kahlo for the modernist avant-gardes. Lygia Clark for the neo-concretists. Lygia Pape and Ana Mendieta for various mediums. Continuously perceived, for some of them, as the woman of an artist and not as a woman artist.

These names now printed in art history books (some, not all – names, and books) synthesize a constellation of artists that deserved to be considered as stars and not as satellites around other stars.

In order to establish a link with today’s production, we exchanged with curator Valentina Locatelli, based in Switzerland and exhibition curator for “Etoiles du Sud”. Locatelli believes that “contemporary art plays an important role in the image we have abroad of Latin America. First of all from a discovery point of view, because the richness of the production is impressive and deserves to be seen”, but specifies that this is only a “portrait of 8 female artists”, referring to the parallel presentation of a selection from Catherine Petitgas’ collection, named “Amazones” and which presents the work of women from the countries of the Amazon basin, mainly Brazil (Beatriz Milhazes, Maria Nepomuceno, Rivane Neueunschwander, Lygia Clark, Anna Bella Geiger), Colombia (Liliana Angulo, Beatriz González, Nohemí Pérez), Peru (Sandra Gamarra, Ximena Garrido-Lecca), Venezuela (Lucia Pizzani and Sol Calero).

Place of speech 

For Locatelli, curating an exhibition on the art scene in Latin America, being herself born and based in Europe, does not seem to him to be a barrier or create tensions at a time when questions related to the place of speech are becoming more and more present.“In my opinion, this will bring great richness for both sides; a very interesting dialogue between cultures. This will be an opportunity to broaden horizons and points of view. Especially since this selection was established “in constant consultation with artists and galleries”, says the curator.

Politeness of materials / Poetics of improvisation

Catherine Petitgas, collector, art historian and philanthropist, presents a selection from her collection in the exhibition called Amazons, as these 8 women on display share the fact that they come from countries in the Amazon region. For Petitgas, as the collection grows, the more crucial the research work becomes. “I work without a consultant. However, I find that to be a collector it is essential to be well informed, to know, to be aware. This research and reflection effort is therefore necessary”.

This relationship to a knowledge put into practice, active and sensitive, dialogues precisely with the particularities of the contemporary art scene in Latin America, according to the collector. The particularity of these angles of view (or attack?) transcends borders. First,“There is a resonance outside Latin America. We find megacities in America but also in Southeast Asia. This urban chaos, inequalities, exacerbated wealth, creates a particular art form,” Petitgas explains.

“An art form between Arte Povera and ready-made. There is a certain politeness towards the social context. A politeness resulting from the choice of materials. We are not going to create a golden work, it is not ethical”. This ability to find poetry in chaos is very present in Latin American production. The question of mood also finds its place in a pioneering way among these artists; would it be a strategy to sublimate difficult realities? To be voluntarily sonso, sneaky, phony, as the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector suggests, would it be an escape from a latent violence of reality? Establish a poetics of the improviser, a manual for the use of the gambiarra⁽²⁾ ?

Building or severing bonds?

The modern and contemporary Colombian scene is for Catherine Petitgas a case study. Plunged into an acute crisis and fractured from the interior, the country found common ground thanks in part to art. The artist Doris Salcedo, for example, offers a very powerful memory work. Beatriz Gonzales is also responsible for this great work of memory and (re)building relationships: “Art tells what history cannot,” the artist often says. A memory not necessarily connected to nostalgia, but closely linked to the present.

Today, having to present an exhibition focused on women so that women can be exposed is, to some extent, tragic. It would never seem, when referring to any exhibition, that these are “male artists from Brazil, China, Cameroon”. On the other hand, this today encourages us to take this tragic burning in our hands and move forward. It is necessary to expose the fractures of a system that is certainly reinventing itself. To create a close link between arte e vida. Where the sun burns the skin, where it is hot even in the shade…

*Special thanks: Catherine Petitgas, Valentina Locatelli, Talisson Melo, Rafaela Sales, Joao Vitor Maturana.  

Art Paris Art Fair from 4th to 7th April 2019 – Grand Palais, Paris (France).

*For more information, please consult the following links: 

→ Art Paris Art Fair 2019 – Between discovery and diversity

→ www.artparis.com

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⁽¹⁾Tupi or not Tupi, from the ” Manifeste Anthropophage “, published in 1928 by Oswald de Andrade. Tupi is the name of one of the tribes people living in Brazil before the arrival of the Portuguese.

⁽²⁾ A word from Brazilian Portuguese that refers to an improvised solution put in place when trying to fix an object without all the necessary tools. Like using chewing gum to keep the frame of a painting straight.

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To go further : 

• Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 – Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Andrea Giunta (2017)
• Contemporary Art in Brazil – Hossein Amirsadeghi . Catherine Petitgas (2012)
• Contemporary Art in Colombia – Hossein Amirsadeghi . Catherine Petitgas (2016)
• Critica feminista en la teoria e historia del arte, genero y feminismo : perspectivas desde américa latina – Andrea giunta

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” When my eyes got used to the light, the details of the room slowly emerged from the darkness, strange animals, statues and gold, everywhere the glitter of gold.”

Howard Carter

On November 4, 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter made an extraordinary discovery in the Valley of the Kings: the tomb of Tutankhamun, Pharaoh of the 18th Egyptian dynasty, in the 14th century BC. The Tutankhamun, Pharaoh’s Treasure exhibition celebrates the centenary of this legendary discovery by bringing together exceptional masterpieces in a world tour that reminds us for sure the historic exhibition ‘Toutânkhamon et son temps’ (‘Tutankhamun and his times’) from 1967.

« Tutankhamun and his times » a historic exhibition

A few days before Christmas 1966, a French military aircraft landed on the runway of Bourget airport, carrying part of the funerary treasure of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, escorted by the French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, who was at the time a curator in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities in the Musée du Louvre; the heavy objects were transported on a ship. The Egyptian Arab Republic loaned France thirty-two artefacts from the king’s impressive burial furniture, complemented by thirteen objects from the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo, all intended for an exhibition held at the Petit Palais entitled “Toutânkhamon et son temps” (‘Tutankhamun and his times’).

Inaugurated on 16 February 1967, in the presence of André Malraux, then Minister of Culture at this time, and his Egyptian counterpart Saroïte Okacha, the exhibition fulfilled the longstanding ambition of its curator: Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt wished to give the French public an opportunity to view the fascinating objects discovered in November 1922 by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in the pharaoh’s unplundered tomb. Apart from the undeniable aesthetic aspects of the works and objects exhibited, which attested to the finesse and beauty of Egyptian art at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, its main objective was to highlight the splendour of the objects and enable the general public to gain an insight into their true functions. In their desire to contextualise the displayed objects, the exhibition organisers even added floral decorations next to the display cases that resembled the large bouquets offered to the dead in antiquity. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt curated the nine exhibition rooms around the life and death of King Tutankhamun, with a particular focus on the burial rites. At the end of the exhibition’s itinerary, in a carnelian-carpeted room, visitors discovered the king’s famous gold mask, which had been brought under guard to the exhibition site on the eve of the inauguration on board an Air France tourist plane.

From the outset after its inauguration, the exhibition “Tutankhamun and his time” was highly popular, and the contemporary press spoke of the “wonder” and “contemplation” of the general public as they beheld the exhibited works. Such was the popularity of the exhibition that some days up to 12,000 people visited the Petit Palais and the exhibition notices had to be remade in large-format versions and placed above each case so that everyone could see them. The decision was taken to extend the duration of the exhibition, which was initially scheduled to end on 15 June 1967, to 4 September. “Tutankhamun and his times” was viewed by 1,241,000 visitors, with queues extending each day onto Avenue Winston Churchill and the Champs Élysées; for the cartoonist Sempé, working for L’Express, it was a veritable phenomenon of “contemporary life”.

One of the first blockbuster exhibitions, “Tutankhamun and his times” also symbolised the good relations that existed between France and Egypt, after the Suez Canal crisis, and it helped fund the campaign to save the monuments of Nubia—threatened by the construction of the dam at Aswan—, which was largely coordinated by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt and Saroïte Okacha. The profits from the entry tickets and requests to take photos were allocated to the protection and saving of monuments threatened with disappearance under Lake Nasser.

The ultimate world tour

For this final tour, the exhibition Tutankhamun, the Pharaoh’s Treasure, is hosted in the largest international capitals. This world “tour” will pass through 10 metropolises and has started in Los Angeles (LA Science Center), where it was visible from 24 March 2018 to 6 January 2019. Presented by the Ministry of Egyptian Antiquities, the exhibition is currently on display at the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris until 15 September 2019.

This totally immersive exhibition unveils more than 150 masterpieces, 50 of which will travel for the first and last time outside Egypt. For its Parisian stopover, the statue of the god Amon protecting Tutankhamun, from the Louvre Museum’s collections, is part of the scenography. Unfortunately, the Tutankhamun funeral mask, the main piece of the 1967 show, will not be exhibited during the event because an Egyptian law prohibits its removal. Nevertheless, the exhibition remains a unique opportunity to admire a World Heritage collection, a testimony to a fascinating civilization.

At the end of their itinerancy, the objects presented during the exhibition will join the permanent collection of the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) under construction in Cairo, alongside the collection dedicated to Tutankhamun and the history of ancient Egypt. The benefits of this world tour will therefore make it possible to financially support the construction and development of the Grand Egyptian Museum, as well as the archaeological sites in Egypt.

To learn more about the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) follow the link below :

 → The Grand Egyptian Museum is expected to open in 2020

 → Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris

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n just one decade, Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has incubated compelling new models for legacy building, social transformation, and making art. Encompassing sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, performance, and music, his art both derives from and sustains ambitious urban renewal projects, creating hubs and archives for black culture, which serve as catalysts for discussions on race, equality, space, and history.

Theaster Gates works as an artist and land theorist. His practice includes sculpture, installation, performance and urban interventions that demonstrate the tremendous use value in economically destabilized communities. His projects attempt to instigate the creation of cultural capital by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change. Theaster Gates has described his method as “critique through collaboration” – often working with architects, researchers and performers to create works that expand ideas of what visual-based practices can be.

For his first solo museum exhibition in France, the artist has initiated an entirely new project that explores social histories of migration and interracial relations using a specific episode in American history as his point of departure to address larger questions of black subjugation and the imperial sexual domination and racial mixing that resulted from it. These historical themes and their material realities have given rise to new cinematographic, sculptural and musical perspectives in Theaster Gates’s oeuvre, while enabling Theaster Gates to examine the history of land ownership and race relations in the Northeastern United States.

The starting point of the exhibition, entitled “Amalgam,” is the story of Malaga Island in the state of Maine, USA: In 1912, the state governor expelled from Malaga the poorest population, an interracial, mixed community of about 45 people, considered “indolent” by many of the local white inhabitants. These unfortunate people were forced to relocate throughout the mainland; some were even involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions.

The technical term “amalgam” has also been used in the past to denote racial, ethnic and religious mingling. For Theaster Gates, it has acquired an even more charged significance, impelling his practice towards new formal and conceptual explorations in film, sculpture, architecture, and music.

The exhibition “Amalgam” is curated by Ms. Katell Jaffrès and will be on view until May 12, 2019 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris ( France).

→ Ticket access / Palais de Tokyo

*This exhibition benefits from the support of Regen Projects gallery (Los Angeles), Richard Gray gallery (Chicago) and White Cube (London and Hong Kong). With additional support from Gagosian.

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Who are they, who are these forgotten actors of the great story of the avant-garde?

In about thirty years, “the representation of Blacks” has become a very active historical object on both sides of the Atlantic, and the number of works related to “black studies” has increased. A first name or a nickname, has long been enough, at best, to designate them… They aim, to a significant extent, to show how the world of images was part of the historical process defined by the establishment of the slave trade, the gradual emergence from slavery and finally the slow affirmation of a black identity.Gradually, however, workshop models will move out of their precarious status and become women and men in their own right.

No exhibition to date has attempted to explore this phenomenon of centuries-old civilization through the abundant iconography, all media combined, that it has generated…

Even if we stick to the period that saw the French Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, The Black Model, from Géricault to Matisse, aims to demonstrate how the imagery of individuals of colour has been constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed over the years. Co-organized with the Wallach Art Gallery in New York, the Musée d’Orsay exhibition therefore focuses on the changes that affected the way black subjects were represented, which played a founding role in the development of modern art.

The subject is based on the most revealing works of Girodet, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Géricault, Delacroix, Cordier, Carpeaux, Manet, Bazille, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse (before and after her visits to Harlem in 1930), integrates photography (Nadar, Carjat.), and particularly highlights the work of black artists, Harlem Renaissance (Charles Alston, William H. Johnson…) and post-war generations, Romare Bearden, Ellen Gallagher and Aimé Mpane to this day.

Priority is given to dialogue between the artist who paints, sculpts, engraves or photographs and his model

By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, between art history, history of ideas and anthropology, this exhibition explores aesthetic, political, social and racial issues, as well as the imagination inherent in the representation of black figures in the visual arts. The exhibition, without breaking a narrative, focuses on three main moments: the time of abolition (1794-1848), the time of the New Painting (Manet, Bazille, Degas, Cézanne), the time of the first avant-garde of the 20th century.

A particular development is reserved for Olympia and its avatars, as well as Matisse’s discovery of the Renaissance Harlem and his fascination for creolity, echoing Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, a book he illustrated during the German occupation. Women and men of colour, many of them have crossed paths with artists, painters, sculptors and photographers, of whom we are the direct heirs.

From ignorance to recognition, no other exhibition has ever retraced this long process and attempted to describe a dialogue that is now central to the life of the arts. Discover without delay, this exceptional exhibition of the Musée d’Orsay in the city of Paris (France) visible until July 21, 2019.

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Curators

Cécile Debray, chief heritage curator, director of the Musée de l’Orangerie
Stéphane Guégan, scientific advisor to the president of the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie Denise Murrell, Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Wallach Art Gallery, Isolde Pludermacher, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay

→ www.musee-orsay.fr

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