From the Chamber to social networks

A fascinating journey into the heart of our secret gardens through a history of intimacy from the 18th century to the present day! 470 works, paintings and photographs, as well as decorative, everyday and design art objects, reveal how intimacy has evolved. From the bedroom seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Nan Goldin, from wrought iron beds of the 19th century to the Bouroullec Brothers’ box bed, from the commode to the women’s urinal, from objects from the dry toilet to the bathroom, from aristocratic beauty to mass consumption, from licentious books to sex toys, from the Walkman to social networks and influence, including surveillance and protection tools, the exhibition shows how intimacy has become established and then profoundly changed. The boundaries between private and public have become more blurred and porous, giving rise to many debates.

In the 19th century, with the emergence of a bourgeois class, professional and family life separated: women were then mistresses of the domestic and the intimate. Painters, mainly male, such as Edouard Vuillard, who opened the path, often represented them in their interiors. It was only gradually, thanks to feminist revolutions, that the “mystified woman” shown in Betty Friedan’s book dissociated herself from the enclosed space.

The exhibition continues in the nave with a spectacular scenography centered on twenty-five masterpieces of 20th-century design around the theme of the nest and shared intimacy. Design from the 1950s to today, through seats, sofas and beds, illustrates a constant dialectic between a desire for isolation and a chosen promiscuity. Pieces such as Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair bear witness to the protective withdrawal of the 1950s and 1960s, while creations by Superstudio, Archizoom and Memphis reflect the desire for gathering typical of the 1960s and 1970s.

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The tour continues at the back of the nave and in the galleries of the rue de Rivoli, addressing six themes that explore the most contemporary changes, from sexuality to social networks, including content creation and surveillance techniques. It also questions the issue of intimacy in times of precariousness and ends in a room dedicated to the most precious of intimacy, this conversation with oneself that the personal diary offers. Finally, a work by Thomas Hirschhorn, quoting the philosopher Simone Weil, invites us to reflect on the possibilities of social networks and to consider a new humanism.

October 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025

MAD

107 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris

An exhibition that offers to discover the major designers who led the artistic developments of the Italian Renaissance. Pisanello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Veronese, Correggio… Thanks to research work carried out at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in collaboration with international experts and the Fondation Custodia, discoveries have been made about these sheets and some have been reattributed to leading artists such as Pontormo, Federico Zuccari, Aurelio Lomi, or Pellegrino Tibaldi.

The drawings of the precursors of the Italian Renaissance, at the beginning of the 15th century, now rare, are one of the highlights of the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Several studies by Pisanello, Parri Spinelli, or Benozzo Gozzoli introduce the exhibition. From then on, we can see the pre-eminence of Florence and Venice. As the main centres of artistic creation at that time, these schools also dominate the Rotterdam collection. The latter is also world-renowned for its exceptional collection of drawings by Fra Bartolomeo: thirteen sheets out of the 400 that the institution holds are presented in Paris, as the heart of Florentine production. Venice is not to be outdone, and the exhibition brings together its greatest representatives: Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto and their workshops, as well as that of the Bassano.

Drawings by the three great masters of the Renaissance – Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo – form the highlight of the exhibition and lead to the works of artists from Rome (Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo), Emilian (Parmesan, Correggio) and other schools, who assimilated and appropriated the influence of these artists. As an opening, the exhibition ends with the generation of draftsmen active at the end of the 16th century and at the turn of the 1600s, actors of the bella maniera, heralds of the Baroque and Classicism. Among them, the Baroche, the Zuccari, the Cavalier d’Arpin, the Carracci…

October 12, 2024 – January 12, 2025

FONDATION CUSTODIA

121 rue de Lille 75007 Paris

The Simultaneous

Continuing its commitment to highlighting Sonia Delaunay after an exhibition in the spring of 2021 at the gallery, as well as a notable presentation at Art Basel in June 2023, Galerie Zlotowski presents Sonia Delaunay, la Simultanee, the third highlight dedicated to the pioneer of abstraction, who devoted 70 years of her life to her creations.

Abstract artist, fashion designer, design designer, graphic designer, successful entrepreneur, godmother of abstraction, explorer of mediums, Sonia Delaunay had, almost simultaneously, all these facets. This frenzy can be explained by a conception of art that goes beyond the traditional framework of drawing and canvas to conquer life itself. Sonia Delaunay has constantly abolished the boundaries between visual art and decorative art, while remaining faithful to the principles of “simultanism”, a conception of abstraction focused on the interaction of colours, which she developed with her husband Robert in the 1910s. The exhibition presents emblematic works of this colourful abstraction, recognisable among all, with works on paper and paintings on canvas (from 1907 to 1979, the year of the artist’s death). But Sonia Delaunay, la Simultanee ventures further, by showing pieces emblematic of this appetite for innovation and exploration, which makes the artist’s career so original: fashion drawings of course, but also book covers, tapestry projects, graphic design essays, lithographs and, even more unexpected, mosaics and playing card designs!

The first section of the exhibition focuses on the unparalleled collaboration that united Sonia and Robert Delaunay, who married in 1910. It shows the works of the Spanish and Portuguese stays (1914-1918), a blessed period for Sonia despite the tragic context of the war, made of meetings with local artists and intense work, inspired by the light of the Iberian Peninsula. The “simultaneism” of the 1910s does not reject figuration but extracts geometric shapes from bodies, faces or objects that organize color combinations. Beyond this ideal of creating as a duo, Robert and Sonia never ceased to support each other. While Sonia launched into the marketing of clothing in Paris in the early 1920s, Robert Delaunay executed a series of portraits of ladies dressed in Sonia Delaunay’s creations, as many tributes to his wife’s inventiveness in terms of fashion. Conversely, after Robert’s premature death in 1941, Sonia led a fierce fight to ensure that her husband found his rightful place as a pioneer in the history of abstraction that was then being written, organizing exhibitions, making donations to institutions and publishing numerous works.

The second part of the exhibition is devoted to drawings related to the fashion that dominated Sonia Delaunay’s work in the 1920s. It is titled after the poem by Blaise Cendrars, a dear friend of Sonia, On the dress she has a body (1913), the inversion of the body and the dress underlining the revolutionary character of the Delaunay style. This vision of a redefinition of fashion is confirmed by Guillaume Apollinaire’s comment, “You have to go see in Bullier, on Thursdays and Sundays, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Delaunay, painters, who are in the process of reforming the costume there.” It was certainly material reasons that pushed Sonia Delaunay to move from avant-garde and experimental clothing to the Haute Couture entrepreneurship that would impress even Gloria Swanson, the star of Cecil B. de Mille’s films at MGM. As she lost her income from her uncle’s properties with the Russian revolution of 1917, Sonia Delaunay became, in spite of herself, an entrepreneur by creating the Casa Sonia store in Madrid (1918) and then the Maison Sonia in Paris (1925). She would not stop designing textile patterns until late in her career, notably for the Dutch house Metz & Co. The Delaunays were strategists in order to assert their place in their time and demonstrate that they were stakeholders in the changes underway. Robert theorizes: “We see a simultaneous rising fashion wave that corresponds to a desire. Fabrics, advertisements, furniture are undeniably evolving towards living color.”

Sonia’s gouaches show that fashion, invested by “simultaneism”, is the coherent extension of an artistic conception connected to life. This frequentation of “less noble” arts will nevertheless cost Sonia Delaunay her place in the history of art for a time. However, more recent exhibitions have challenged this hierarchical and dated vision. A turnaround is palpable in the retrospective Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014) and at the Tate Gallery (2015), confirmed more recently with Sonia Delaunay at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen (2022) and Living Art at the Bard Graduate Center in New York (2024). All these exhibitions celebrate the audacious crossings of boundaries that characterize Sonia Delaunay’s career. Thanks to them, we realize that Sonia Delaunay has succeeded in creating a living and vibrant art that operates a convincing synthesis of simultaneist arts.

The third part of the exhibition focuses on Sonia Delaunay’s pictorial production in the post-war period. She is a rare case in the history of women artists in the 20th century who achieved success and recognition during her lifetime, albeit at an advanced stage in her career. Gradually, the “woman of Robert Delaunay” established herself, placing herself at the heart of the post-war avant-garde movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, major museum exhibitions highlighted her work: she was the first woman to exhibit during her lifetime at the Musée du Louvre in 1964. And three years later, in 1967-68, a major retrospective was devoted to her at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Within the exhibition, the work that embodies this renaissance is the large gouache Rythme couleur from 1961, shown in an exhibition at the innovative Galerie Denise René.

This piece is the original version of a stencil produced for this same exhibition. If its abstraction is geometric and always organized by color, the forms are free, rhythmic, never totally clear. Far from the exactitude of the contours typical of concrete art, for which the pictorial gesture must disappear and subjectivity dissolve, the very application of the flat areas of color is palpable, as if the artist were asserting her presence. This is a characteristic that applies to all of Sonia Delaunay’s work: her presence in the work. The trace of the hand that applies the color is obvious and color modifications are sometimes visible. The series of color rhythms from the 1970s presented here are therefore emblematic of this freedom, which results in a radical synthesis of forms, as if Sonia Delaunay were going to the limits of the possibilities of “simultaneity.” But this programmatic character of an abstraction pushed to its limits is combined with an assumed imperfection, which always recalls the “profession” of the artist and his hand in full action.

The last part of the exhibition is devoted to works that do not fall within the field of drawing or painting strictly speaking. These are playful and surprising projects, in which Sonia Delaunay ventured throughout her long career. The diversity of Sonia Delaunay’s production is astonishing. Publishing, poetry illustration, graphic design and advertising would fascinate her, to the point, for the latter field, of carrying out projects not requested by the company for which she was “advertising”. The significant production of projects linked to publications would begin very early, with the catalog cover projects of 1916, then that for the famous Album n°1 (1916) and the magazine Ararat (1917).

Sonia’s inclination towards more accessible and visible media also responds to her desire to collaborate with her allies and friends. Illustration or fashion allow her to connect with poets she admires and loves deeply, such as Blaise Cendrars or Tristan Tzara. And to attach herself to them, what could be simpler than illustrating or dressing them? This need for proximity, for cooperation with chosen beings, by affinities and affection, is the common thread of all the “off-limits” initiatives that Sonia Delaunay undertakes, as her feelings guide her production.

Sonia remained active until her last breath in December 1979. Her last gouaches are striking. She had never been so fully present in them. We can see the trembling of the old lady’s hand in the outline of the squares of this checkerboard, from the collection of Jacques Damasse, executed in 1979. The black seems to want to invade the other colours which, for once, seem on the point of being absent…

October 3 – November 15, 2024

Galerie Zlotowski

20 rue de Seine 75006 Paris

Galerie Roger-Viollet

6 rue de Seine 75006 Paris

A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) created an original and evocative body of work, drawing on the indigenous, popular and modern imaginations of a country in full transformation.

In Paris, in the 1920s, she put her iconographic universe to the test of cubism and primitivism, before initiating, in São Paulo, the “anthropophagic” movement, advocating the “devouring” by Brazilians of foreign and colonizing cultures, as a form of both assimilation and resistance.

His brightly coloured landscapes then give way to unusual and fascinating visions, before a more openly political dimension appears in his paintings from the 1930s. The dreamlike gigantism and almost abstract geometry of his latest compositions only confirm the power of a work anchored in its time and always ready to renew itself.

Filling a lack of recognition of the artist in Europe and presenting some new aspects of his work, this retrospective invites us to the heart of modern Brazil and its divisions between tradition and avant-garde, centers and peripheries, learned and popular cultures.

October 9, 2024 – February 2, 2025 

MUSEE DU LUXEMBOURG

19 rue de Vaugirard 75006 Paris 

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From the Middle Ages to the Romantics

Studied by social and cultural history, the fascinating figure of the madman, who was part of the visual culture of men in the Middle Ages, has rarely been studied from the point of view of art history: yet between the 13th and the middle of the 16th century, the notion of madness inspired and stimulated artistic creation, both in the field of literature and in that of the visual arts.

For the general public, medieval art is essentially religious. However, it was the Middle Ages that gave substance to the subversive figure of the madman. While it has its roots in religious thought, it flourished in the secular world to become an essential element of urban social life by the end of the period.

For medieval man, the definition of the madman is given by the Scriptures, in particular the first verse of Psalm 52: “Dixit insipiens…” (The fool has said in his heart: “There is no God!”). Madness is above all ignorance and absence of love for God. Conversely, there are also “madmen of God”, such as Saint Francis. In the 13th century, the notion is therefore inextricably linked to love and its measure or excess, first in the spiritual domain, then in the earthly domain.

The theme of the madness of love haunts chivalric romances (that of Yvain, Perceval, Lancelot or Tristan) and their numerous representations, notably in illuminations and ivories. Soon, the character of the fool interferes between the lover and his lady: he is the one who denounces courtly values ​​and emphasizes the lewd, even obscene, character of human love.

From mystical or symbolic that he was, the fool becomes “politicized” and “socialized”: in the 14th century, the court fool becomes the institutionalized antithesis of royal wisdom and his ironic or critical speech is accepted. A new iconography is established and the fool is recognized by his attributes: hobby horse, striped or half-striped coat, hood, bells.

The 15th century is that of the formidable expansion of the figure of the fool, linked to carnival festivals and folklore. Associated with social criticism, the fool serves as a vehicle for the most subversive ideas. He also plays a role in the torments of the Reformation: in this context, the fool is the other (Catholic or Protestant). At the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, his figure has become omnipresent, as shown by the art of Bosch and then that of Bruegel.

In the modern era, the figure of the institutional fool seems to be gradually fading, replaced in the courts of Europe by the jester or the dwarf. From the middle of the Age of Enlightenment, madness takes its revenge to appear in other, less controlled forms. The exhibition concludes with an evocation of the 19th century’s view of the Middle Ages through the prism of the theme of madness, but with the tragic, even cruel, light that political and artistic revolutions gave it.

October 16, 2024 – February 3, 2025

MUSEE DU LOUVRE

Drawings

Dina Vierny’s connection with Matisse dates back to the 1940s, when Maillol recommended his model to the master with the words: “Matisse, I am sending you the object of my work, you will reduce it to a line.” The latter then embarked on an ambitious project: revisiting Manet’s Olympia. But Maillol quickly called her back, and the project remained in draft form.

This time spent together gave rise to a friendship that lasted until Matisse’s death in 1954: “I was twenty-two years old, I posed with pleasure, Matisse’s words enchanted me. As with Maillol, not a dull moment with him.” Matisse played a fundamental role in the genesis of the Dina Vierny gallery because it was also he who advised the young dealer and accompanied her in the creation of her exhibition space. He convinced Auguste Perret, busy at the time rebuilding Le Havre, to design the small gallery at 36 rue Jacob, which has not undergone any changes since its opening in 1947.

Henri Matisse’s drawings were presented four times at the Galerie Dina Vierny: in 1966, 1970, 1980 and 1982. This exhibition is therefore the fifth devoted to Matisse’s drawings at Dina. Some of them have also had their place on the gallery walls during previous events.

For Matisse, drawing is not only a preparatory tool, but an art in its own right, where each line translates all the sensitivity and depth of his artistic approach. It is a way to explore the essence of forms and the human figure, to get to the essential without being distracted by the superfluous. His mastery of line is recognized for its fluidity and elegance. Each line, refined but precise, captures the essence of the subject. Matisse opened the way to a new approach to drawing, in which figure and background coexist harmoniously and complement each other. In 1989, in the catalog of an exhibition organized by Dina Vierny, Pierre Schneider wrote on this subject : “The line traced by Matisse animates the figures, but also the background. In truth, we should no longer speak here of figure and ground, since the line that qualifies one also qualifies the other, since the pen, the pencil, by naming the latter, do not relegate the former to anonymity. The furrow of ink divides without separating. The whiteness that it encloses and that which encloses it weigh the same. It is rare that Matisse does not leave in these lines, at their crossroads or at their points of convergence, gaps, barely perceptible openings, through which they communicate, exchange their substance, and this substance is common to them. Matisse puts an end to the war between black and white, the limited and the unlimited, the full and the empty.

October 1 – December 21, 2024

GALERIE DINA VIERNY

36 rue Jacob 75006 Paris