Summer Art Trip (FR): Pinault Collection: Corps et âmes (till Aug 25)
Paris: Pinault Collection: "Corps et âmes" (Body and Soul)
To put it lightly, “Corps et âmes” is an elaborate exploration on body representations in art. Drawing from over a hundred pieces by some forty international artists from the Pinault Collection - from Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), May Ray (1890-1976) to Philip Guston (1913- 80), Miriam Cahn (1949), Michael Armitage (*1984), Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (*1993), and many more.
All the artists have used human bodies as the subject matter to reflect on the impacts of socio-political and metaphysical topics through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and drawing. Thereby, illustrating how our body bares witness of our time, environments, and its mental states.
Yet, it is hard not to miss the political nature of the show, viewing from the origins of the selected artists and the works being shown. Specially, the topics of blackness, otherness, racism and suppression were given a public platform to voice their concern.
This is especially clear in the section “Body as Witness”, where Kara Walker’s once censored drawing “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos” (2001) and Kerry James Marshall’s monumental piece critiquing Western canon, Beauty Examined (1993) are shown.
While Walker’s controversial piece which was once censored, portrays black life in the South. Lynchings, the burning of a cross, Ku Klux Klan members, and sexual violence are all shown in the image; Marshall’s Beauty Examined, is more on critiquing the oppressive Eurocentric values. Both works, are a loud outcry against “subjugation of the black”. Fortunately, they are in good company to voice their discontent in this large-scale exhibition. (by HT)
Selected highlights from Gallery 4 “The Body as Witness” (Excerpts from exhibition text):
Duan Hanson (1925-1996) was a major artist of hyper-realist sculpture. He sought to portray the disarray of his era through these life-size figures. The works from the 1960s depict the problems of that time in a very raw manner: the police brutality inflicted upon black people, young people sacrificed in the Vietnam War, and women who died from receiving abortions in secret because that was still illegal.
Philip Guston (1913- 80) returned to a cartoonish style, after several decades of making abstract paintings. He denounces a civilisation haunted by its own racism, the artist portrayed himself and others as members of the Ku Klux Klan, as shown in the images in the display cases. These artworks depict the loneliness of the artist at a time when he had been heavily criticized for his new style and the overall state of the country had overwhelmed him.
Selected highlights from Gallery 4 “The Body as Witness” (Excerpts from exhibition text):
Inspired by the struggle for consciousness and the resistance movements of the 1960s, artists use the body as a seismograph and privileged witness to a form of socially committed art that voices the anger of our contemporary world and the ongoing threats to individual integrity.
Kara Walker’s monumental drawing, has written an abbreviated history of American that zooms in on the crimes of slave owners, segregationist society, and the sense of hope that former president Barack Obama embodied. (Obama is depicted as giving his famous speech A More Perfect Union in 2008 before his election)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s fictitious portraits of uprooted, decontextualized black figures who express various legacies of Western painting.
Selected highlights from Gallery 7 “The Body Exposed” (Excerpts from exhibition text):
The potential of the female body’s recovery of its energy traverses the works of Niki de Saint Phalle. The above piece, Nana noire, which was probably inspired by Rosa Parks, icon of the African American civil rights movement.
Kerry James Marshall’s Beauty Examined, revisits both Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson (1632) and possibly the inhuman fate of Saartjie Baartman, known as the “Hottentot Venus”, whose body was exhibited for sexual and racist purposes, in life and in death.
Marlene Dumas’ Birth reconsiders the figure of Venus, in which she paints the body of a young, pregnant woman as the goddess of beauty and fertility.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is a London-based Zimbabwean painter whose work explores sexuality, race, and gender. Her work is autobiographical in nature and combine visual fragments from various sources, such as online and archival images, and personal photographs, which collapse past and present.
Contemporary painting does not hesitate to explore a more symbolic and spiritual dimension, without forsaking any political commentary, as in Mira Schor’s unreal paintings, which nevertheless grapple with very real issues.
In Michael Armitage’s Dandora, music becomes both an earthly and a dreamlike presence, a balm for the soul, as the musicians depicted who are playing the Yalam in an open-air dump in the heart of Nairobi, Kenya.
In Armitage’s piece “Cave”, a man and a woman blow into what appears to be the rounded curves of an organic, unknown instrument. Their mixed breaths seems to give birth to life within a conch, as two figures from within the instrument in a swirl of colors. The piece somewhat symbolically suggest the emergence of life through the fusion of spirits. Furthermore, the painting also alludes to the grottoes on the Laikpia Plateau in Kenya, a stronghold of Mau Mau resistance to the colonial regime, and it proclaims Africa as the original cradle of humanity, capable of breathing life back into the world.
At the end of the exhibition, Georg Baselitz’s monumental “Avignon” completes this dance of bodies. In the darkness, the eight dramatic and spectacular paintings hung in this space form a huis clos, a theatre in which the artist’s aging body is the sole protagonist. Inspired by Picasso’s last paintings as well as works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Egon Schiele, and Edvard Munch, these bodies seem to “dance upside down”, in the poet Antonin Artaud’s words.
All images: taken by City Transit Arts, except otherwise specified. Courtesy of respective artists, artist estates and Pinault Collection.
