In 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque founded the Cubist style in France, and still life creation became the favorite painting theme of the two masters. Picasso created the painting Still Life with An Ancient Head in 1925, and Braque created Guitar and Fruit Bowl in 1919. A century later, these two monumental works of Cubist style came to the banks of the Huangpu River for the first time to be viewed and gazed at by Shanghai audiences at close range.
On July 28th, the second permanent exhibition "The Voice of Everything", in cooperation between the West Bund Art Museum on the Xuhui Riverside and the Pompidou Center Five-Year Exhibition in France, will officially debut. This is the second major exhibition of the trilogy of "time", "everything" and "space" in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou since its opening in 2019, and most of the more than 160 masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou have been exhibited in Shanghai for the first time, leading the audience to touch the development of modern and contemporary art in the world since the 20th century with "things" as the medium.
Trace the development and flow of modern and contemporary art
"The Voice of All Things" is divided into 18 exhibition chapters, tracing the development and flow of modern and contemporary history, leading the audience to gain an insight into the hinterland of the art avant-garde movement from the early 20th century to the background of globalization. The exhibition covers the pioneers of Cubism, the pioneers of Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as the avant-garde representatives of contemporary conceptual art, such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Legger, Marcel Duchamp, Manne Ray, Jean Dingoli, Tatiana Trovi, Liang Huigui and other important works of art masters and well-known modern artists, all of which are displayed in chronological order in the exhibition hall space.
Mu Qing, the exhibition guide, introduced that diversity, rarity, coherence and relevance are the four highlights of this permanent exhibition. In terms of expression, "The Voice of All Things" presents works created by artists from different fields such as painters, writers, sculptors, directors, photographers, designers, architects and other artists relying on rich media, showing the diversity of artworks and art genres.
Le Corbusier, Still Life, 1922.
Man Ray, The Indestructible Thing, 1923, 1959. Courtesy photo: All are West Bund Art Museum
René Magritte, The Double Secret, 1927. Shu lyrical photography
The permanent exhibition is mainly divided into two parts, the first half of which presents the world belonging to the avant-garde artists, represented by the "ready-made art" created by Duchamp, so that people who come to the exhibition can perceive how the artist can overthrow all the "old formulas" with creativity. The second half of the exhibition shows the role of "objects" in art through the artist perspectives of pop art, neorealism and the Fluxus movement.
As the most important part of the exhibition, Dadaism and Surrealism, two major genres that have had a profound impact on the history of world art, both originated and grew up a hundred years ago today. The "Voice of All Things" brings together the leading figures of the two major genres as never before.
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Ancient Heads, 1925. Courtesy photo: West Bund Art Museum
In 1916, the Dadaist movement was officially launched in Zurich centered on the poet Tristan Challa. From Paris to New York, Marcel Duchamp launched an artistic revolution in the early days of World War I with "ready-mades", stripping away the original use functions of daily necessities, and making ordinary "ready-mades" into the ranks of works of art by the artist's decision alone, subverting the concept that works of art must be created by artists for thousands of years. Later, Duchamp's friend Man Ray and artists of the genre continued to explore the artistic path pioneered by Duchamp by giving objects new roles, names, and functions.
In the First Permanent Exhibition of the West Bund Museum, "The Shape of Time", the Centre Pompidou selected Duchamp's first "readymade" art " Bicycle Wheel " created in 1913 to exhibit in Shanghai. In the permanent exhibition "The Voice of All Things", the audience will see Duchamp's other "ready-made" art masterpiece "Hat Rack" created in 1917, and further understand Duchamp's questions about artistic value and artistic posture from the perspective of daily consumer goods.
Marcel Duchamp, Hat Rack, 1917, 1964.
Martin Parr, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2004. Courtesy photo: All are West Bund Art Museum
The origins of Surrealism are similar to those of Dadaism. In 1924, the poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris, which articulated the basic ideas of this Art Nouveau movement and influenced a large number of artists in the decades that followed. By flexibly combining, creating and using objects, surrealist artists make objects concrete and accurately display the "other world of the supernatural". To this day, the whimsical creation of surrealism still makes today's audience feel mysterious and mysterious.
The permanent exhibition mode opens up new perspectives for the audience
Less than three months after its opening, the West Bund Art Museum has welcomed 800,000 visitors in the past year or so after resuming its daily operations in March last year. Among them, the permanent exhibition "The Form of Time" has a cumulative number of visitors to 450,000. On social platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, it is easy to search for the evaluations of art lovers and ordinary audiences. "Ten years ago, I was first shocked by the avant-garde of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and now I come to the West Bank to relive this avant-garde, which is more characteristic of Shanghai in the context of the 'magic capital'." A netizen from Dianping commented on this.
Bernard Buffy, Interior, 1950. Shu lyrical photography
This summer, Shanghai's art exhibition market is particularly hot. After the Pudong Art Museum opened on July 8, the number of appointments quickly reached nearly a month later, and its cooperation with the Tate Gallery in the United Kingdom was particularly eye-catching. Earlier, the West Bund Art Museum across the river and the Centre Pompidou in France went through four years of run-in exploration, and for the first time after the opening of the museum in 2019, the "permanent exhibition" of exhibition and cooperation was launched in China. In each one-and-a-half-year exhibition cycle, the development of modern and contemporary art in the world since the 20th century is comprehensively and systematically sorted out.
Paying attention to the combing of the context, so as to guide the public to become interested in a certain stage of world art, and even a certain cycle of world history, and then have a deep understanding, is a major original intention of the birth of the form of "permanent exhibition". In addition, the "Permanent Exhibition" also contains in-depth and sustainable international artistic cooperation, which provides an important cornerstone for domestic art museums to launch in-depth and coherent public education content.
Fernand Legger, The Composition of Hands and Hats, 1927. Shu lyrical photography
Taking "The Sound of Everything" as an example, the 1927 composition of hands and hats by Fernan Léger in the exhibition hall attracted many viewers. This large-scale painting is a masterpiece of "purism", which originated after the end of the First World War and was founded by Ahmed Ozanfang and Le Corbusier between 1918 and 1925. Purism opposed the over-deconstructive decoration of Cubism and Futurism, with the goal of blending figurative objects and geometric elements into the unadorned, standardized everyday things, while expressing a celebration of ancient Greco-Roman art and modern industrial design.
From 1924 to 1927, Léger painted a series of imposing still lifes, painting various common objects in large formats in isolated and close-up forms. In The Composition of Hands and Hats, Legger combines the most common elements such as hats, wine bottles, and playing cards with the silhouettes of the famous Actress of Montparnasse at that time, and collages them disproportionately, making the content of the painting seem to be on film film, alluding to the fast-paced modern life. At the bottom of the picture is a "figure" holding a bowler hat, a tribute to Léger to the master Charlie Chaplin, who drew him to the world of cinema.
Guy Orenti, The Touring Table, 1993. Shu lyrical photography
The permanent exhibition is also the finale of Bernard Breisten, director of the National Museum of Modern Art- Industrial Design. He and co-curator Pamela Stichett adopted the English translation of the 1942 poem "Taking a Stand on Things" by the French poet Francis Ponger as the title of the exhibition. The French poet delicately and poetically depicts ordinary things, leading the audience to open a new perspective and experience of "things".
During the exhibition, West Bund Art Museum will continue to pay attention to the cultivation of humanistic qualities of young people, and through the forms of museum-school cooperation, academic lectures, "body performances" and workshops, the public will participate in the occurrence and practice of art in a variety of ways, so that the West Bund Art Museum will gradually become an open and warm interdisciplinary cultural center and an ideal "third space" in the eyes of the public.
Exhibition Information:
"The Voice of All Things" Centre Pompidou Collection Exhibition (II)
Curators: Bernard Brestren and Pamela Sticht
Exhibition period: July 28, 2021 - February 5, 2023
Time: 10:00 -17:00 (last admission at 16:00, closed on Mondays)
Venue: West Bund Art Museum, Exhibition Hall 1 & 2 (No. 2600 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai)
Tickets: 100 rmb
Column Editor-in-Chief: Tang Ye Text Editor: Shu Shu Title Image Source: West Bund Art Museum
Source: Author: Shu Shu