Agenda

For the first time in the world, a museum will be displaying the feminine side of its own collections. This new presentation of the Centre Pompidou's collections will be entirely given over to the women artists from the 20th century to the present day.

elles@centrepompidou is the third thematic exhibition of the National Modern Art Museum's collections, following Big Bang in 2005 and the Mouvement des Images (Image Movements) in 2006-2007.

This will be the occasion for the institution, which has built up the very first collection of modern and contemporary art, to show its commitment to women artists, nationality and discipline taken together, and place them at the core of modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Key figures such as Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Mitchell and Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva rub shoulders with today's great female creators some of whom, including Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois have been featured recently in monographic exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou.

The programming cuts across disciplines to take a deeper look at the place occupied by women in the culture of the last century, from literature to history of thought, from dance to cinema.


EXHIBITION ITINERARY


The show is hung in chronological order by themes. It brings together a selection of over 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day.

Pioneer
Level 5. Abstract, primitive, functional, urban, mixed media, surreal, amazons, objective... Eight rooms display the works of these pioneers who were at the forefront of change in all the artistic media: Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia S. Gontcharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Judit Reigl, Suzanne Valadon, Diane Arbus, Dora Maar.

Free Fire
Opening level 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Karen Knorr, Rosemarie Trocket, among others, represent those who played historic roles, feminists, critics, photographers and performers, with their personal visions of reality.

Body slogan
Level 4. Precocious and inventive in photography and video, women artists have lately transformed the art of drawing, revitalising the very notion of body. ORLAN, Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta worked on the representation of the body and its stereotypes, notably that of the life drawing genre, as well as ways of staging it in their early performances.

The Activist Body
Level 4. Women artists played a key role in redefining visual and theoretical categories, and explored and commented on ways of bridging the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the systematic, the conceptual and the sensual. Typical among these was Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnar, Valérie Jouve, Hanne Darboven.

A room of One's Own
Level 4.Borrowing Virginia Wool's title of her book dealing with questions about the conditions of art production, this part of the exhibition is gathering the works of artists exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space. Here we find Dorothea Tanning, Tatiana Trouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Sophie Calle.

Wordworks
Level 4. From story-telling to listing, through autobiography, quotations, legends and the many facets of the artist's book, creative women like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Natacha Lesueur, Cristina Iglesias, Eija-Liisa Ahtila explore the various uses of language in art. Concept Art, urban myths, appropriation and post-modernism all use words as a medium while video installations redefine the idea of story-telling.

Immaterials
Level 4. Matali Crasset, Alisa Andrasek, Tacita Dean, Louise Campbell, Isa Genzken, Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Geneviève Asse and more leave us with one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary art, namely its disembodiment. The title refers back to one of the Centre Pompidou's cult exhibitions, "Les immatériaux" (Immaterials).


The English version of the exhibition catalog will be available late June 09


May 27 2009 - February 21 2011
11h00 - 21h00

Museum

A reconstitution of the Paris workshop where one of the masters of modern sculpture lived and worked.

January 27-25 2011
14h00 - 18h00

Galerie de l'Atelier Brancusi

The Museum is dedicated to modern and contemporary art and covers two levels with a regular turnaround of works on display.

Contemporary collections: elles@centrepompidou

Modern collections: new hanging

The exhibition presents around fifteen of the artist's major sculptures belonging to the Centre Pompidou's collection, to which is added a selection of drawings that reproduce, in the form of diagrams, the real-life and dreamed layout of his native home in Loriol. Finally, a selection of previously unseen archives belonging to the Musée d'art moderne of the City of Paris, and photographs of her legendary artist's studio on rue du Pot-de-Fer, complete the presentation. Identified from 1960 onwards by his Demeures, strange sculpture-habitats designed to be visited "in the imagination" by the spectator; famous for being the author of Le Manteau [The Coat] (1962, see opposite), the first fabric sculpture from the history of modern art, Étienne-Martin (1913-1995) remained, despite this, a figure long excluded from the world of Parisian art, both debonair and enigmatic. Today, the Centre Pompidou pays tribute to him through the presentation of a collection of fifteen sculptures, drawings, personal notebooks and photographs from his artist's studio. The exhibition presents around fifteen of the artist's major sculptures belonging to the Centre Pompidou's collection, to which is added a selection of drawings that reproduce, in the form of diagrams, the real-life and dreamed lay-out of his native home in Loriol. Finally, a selection of previously unseen archives belonging to the Musée d'art moderne of the City of Paris, and photographs of her legendary artist's studio on rue du Pot-de-Fer, complete the presentation.

June 23 2010 - September 13 2010
11h00 - 21h00

Museum Gallery

"It is through emotion that the photographic image engages spectators in this world. Not a soppy emotion but an emotion of power of the living through the bodies represented, and the body that will take up the space of the exhibition populated by these photo compositions/montages. After staying in Israel for a year, both in East Jerusalem and the autonomous Palestinian territories, Valérie Jouve presents a large visual composition which mixes montages of images with "the animated image" and the "documentary image". The artist focused on Arab communities and populations, by examining their relationship to the city and modernity. She makes the most of the space which is offered to her and endeavours to represent this reality by making it 'live' and 'feel'. "To re-enact a lived experience is, for Valérie Jouve, as important as expressing social, political, economic and urban issues." This first personal exhibition by Valérie Jouve develops a reflection on the presence of mankind in the city. "I see this exhibition space as a large visual composition, which doesn't try to make this Arab world understood, but shouts out the lines and colours in an attempt to put the spectator in a physical state of tactility of this world". Since the beginning of the 1990s, Valérie Jouve has built up a unique collection of photographic works on human presence in the city. For her exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, she is presenting around thirty photographs, taken in 2008 and 2009, outside the Western world. In line with a photographic tradition close to that of the American, Walker Evans, Valérie Jouve captures figures between the documentary image and the staged image. "To make felt what I feel. I don't want to make people understand." By this statement, from the Journal de Palestine published on the occasion of the exhibition, Valérie Jouve describes an intuitive approach. "En attente" ("Pending"), the title of the exhibition, evokes moments of rest, as well as the still poses which she demands of her "Characters". These are full-size photographs of men and women in urban settings: their frozen expressions and gestures, as if timeless, are more often than not magnified by a work of 'montage'. Furthermore, most of these photographs have been taken in the autonomous Palestinian territories that she doesn't represent directly, territories which are also "pending". "My intention is also to frame a territory which is overflowing with existence, despite the media clichés", she says, adding: "I have to constantly distance myself. The images cannot do anything really, if not perhaps continue to bear utopias which light up my life." In the interview which follows, the artist goes back over her very particular approach, which makes her encounters with individuals the cornerstone of her work.

June 23 2010 - September 13 2010
11h00 - 21h00

Graphic arts gallery

Theatre
With Un Mage en été [A Magus in Summer], the stage director Ludovic Lagarde and the writer Olivier Cadiot once again employ the 'device' used in the Colonel des Zouaves, created in 1997 – a minimal experience, a written monologue, a circumscribed area of action, a solo actor as well as a sound space built on a voice in situ. The challenges involved require combining the written word with acting performance, making the play come alive on stage and giving substance to the singularity of a lone voice. With Ircam

September 22-27 2010
20h30

Large room

This exhibition brings together nearly 400 works, giving us a rare overview of surrealist photography.

A broad selection of the finest proofs by Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Raoul Ubac, Jacques-André Boiffard, Maurice Tabard will be shown alongside rarely seen images which reveal a number of surrealist ways of using photography, such as publications in magazines or artists' books, advertisements, collections of images, fascination for the raw print, pictures taken in photo booths and group photographs etc.

The event introduces the public to unknown series of collages by such renowned artists as Paul Eluard, André Breton, Antonin Artaud and Georges Hugnet, the photographic games of Léo Malet and Victor Brauner and highlights personalities like Artür Harfaux and Benjamin Fondane.

June 17 2010 - September 12 2010
10h00 - 21h00

Madrid - Fundación Mapfre(2)

Claude Courtecuisse trained as a designer but is perhaps best defined as an object poet now. Raphael's temple and visionary towers, and items from the dishwasher or draining rack, wind up side by side in his work. It shifts the gaze a little and poetry slips in.

July 2 2010 - October 10 2010
12h00 - 19h00

Lille - Gare Saint Sauveur(2)

From the age of 6

As part of the exhibition "Alexander Calder, the Parisian Years, 1926-1933", a workshop exhibition is proposed for the young audiences in the Galeries des Enfants. "What a Circus"…

This area of new awareness focuses on the theme of the circus, where horse-drawn caravans, set up like real play areas, let children experiment with and approach the various themes of the artiste's body-movement language: balance, movement, lines, space and the use of simple and industrial materials.

Alexander Calder and his work will be showcased through photographic documents, quotations and films. With a series of fun devices that call for skilful handling, creation, installation, research and observation, children step inside the lyrical world of the artiste.

On Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays and during the school holidays, a mediator will accompany young and old through this trail of discovery.

September 15 2010 - October 2 2010
14h00 - 18h00

Le Chesnay - Parly 2 C.C.(2)

Rediscover a young artist of genius who contributed to the revival of sculpture at the beginning of the 20th century and who fascinated the London art scene at the time of Vorticism, before being killed during the First World War at the age of 23… This is what the Centre Pompidou is offering in presenting around twenty sculptures and forty drawings by the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

From 1911 the young artist sculpts or models portraits, nudes, animal subjects, decorative pieces and quasi-abstract works, applying an original synthesis between cubism and primitivism. He settles in England between 1911 and 1914 and makes a spectacular entrance on to London's avant-garde art scene. Throughout this period, the artist multiplies the drawing studies for his sculptures, and also produces impressive autonomous drawings which are all powerfully graphic. His creations are first of all marked by the influence of Rodin, from whom he takes the humanist vision and expressive modelling, then by his contact with Jacob Epstein and Constantin Brancusi, through which he becomes a supporter of direct carving which involves sculpting marble or stone directly.

From 1913, his active contribution to Vorticism, a British variant of Futurism, establishes him as an influential figure of this movement. Captivated by the exuberant personality and genius of Gaudier-Brzeska, the American poet Erza Pound, who then leads the English art scene, dedicates a first monograph to him the day after his death, which reads: "Gaudier is irreplaceable. Nobody has appeared capable of succeeding him. Brancusi continued the marble conquest alone".

An exhibition in cooperation with the Museum of Fine Arts in Orleans where it will be presented from 15th october 2009 to 10th january 2010.

A work-cum-game by sculptor Miquel Navarro to heighten children's awareness of urban space. "In the moonlight II" is an imaginary city which can be read in a thousand different ways: here, factory chimney stacks and irrigation canals, elsewhere, skyscrapers or ordinary houses... A game too, "a vocabulary for a city" to be invented whose units are like words that can be assembled by hand. Children are invited to reshape space which they can transform following tracks and rules that are constantly renewed.

September 29 2010 - November 17 2010
14h00 - 18h00

Meyrin - Forum Meyrin(2)

The Centre Pompidou is putting on a large scale retrospective to celebrate the work of the greatest painter on the current French scene, Pierre Soulages. As he nears his 90th birthday, Soulages, the "painter of black and light", is recognised as one of abstract art's major figures.

The Centre Pompidou held its first large scale exhibition of Pierre Soulages in 1979, following on from the show given at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1967, before the Centre was opened. This autumn's show looks back over more than 60 years of painting and offers a new reading of the artist's oeuvre, with the emphasis on the more recent developments in his work.

The exhibition brings together over a hundred major works dating from 1946 to the present day, from the striking walnut stain works painted between 1947 and 1949 to the paintings of recent years, most of them shown for the first time, which display the dynamism and diversity of his constantly evolving approach.

Learning more

The exhibition Erró, 50 years of collages presents this little-known, but prolific and original aspect of the Icelandic artist's work for the very first time. The National Museum of Modern Art, which has just received a donation by Erró of 66 collages, is offering the public the chance to discover a very representative sample of his cut and paste work.

Erró's collages, the oldest ones of which date back to 1958, up to the most contemporary, are drawn from a variety of sources, but mainly from the press. Erró combines, (particularly in his Meca-Make-Up series), the faces of models cut out from women's magazines with mechanical components such as camera lenses or car body parts. American 'comics' and Chinese, Russian or Cuban propaganda appear alongside masterpieces of classical painting, scientific journals and advertising images.

Favouring visual shock and merging time with space, Erró's creations are comical, disturbing, and largely imbued with humour and mockery. Eminently political and critical, his work denounces war (from that of the Vietnam War to the American invasion of Iraq), totalitarian powers and mass consumption. The spatial conquest also inspires in him numerous collages where astronauts rub shoulders with Ingres' odalisques.

October 2 2010 - January 16 2011
10h00 - 18h00

Dole - Musées des Beaux-Arts(2)