Picasso Soulages, Brassaï to Penck, of Arp Miró, Nicolas de Staël to Joseph Beuys, Miquel Barceló Giuseppe Penone, they all looked back. Very far. In the long history of mankind, which reads, before writing, in the caverns where the human hand prints on the wall, where the beasts roar again, where the hunters are dancers purposes, brown as seasoned wood, all the same, a species among the species (the watercolours in life-size Joachim Lutz for Leo Frobenius, 1929, records of the walls of Mutoko, Zimbabwe). The artists are again always the world with them, in an eternal return to the beginning of things. With modern art and revolution at the beginning of the Twentieth century, was born as a scientific discipline, they have found a continent to explore, a “terra incognita” full of mysteries and shapes, and a sketch of what may be the gesture is the first of creation.
The Centre Pompidou offers to dive with them in the time, in the caves of Altamira (between 15 500 and 13 500, discovered in Cantabria, spain in 1879), Lascaux (- 17 000, discovered in the Dordogne in 1940 and Chauvet, twice as old as Lascaux (- 36 000, discovered in 1994 in the Ardèche). What sees the man at the beginning of the world we are sent with a freshness staggering. This freshness is there, as by magic, in this long exposure erudite who knows how to play the theatre of knowledge and the shock of the revelation. Women body painted in yves Klein blue, which are printed on the canvas there are all-natural (Anthropometry ANT84 , 1960).
Links between the parietal art and the modern art
The three commissioners, strong temperaments struck by lightning, bring all their keys. Academics in the soul, Rémi Labrusse and Maria Stavrinaki have explored in pioneering the links between the parietal art and the modern art ( The Carboniferous period , 1922, Otto Dix, or The Great Forest , 1927, Max Ernst), between the prehistory and the contemporary world (great fresco painted on the bare hand in the raw clay by Miquel Barceló). Ex of the Centre Pompidou and the director of the Museum of the Orangerie, Cécile Debray has long proved that she knew how to simplify it for a better show, to handle the synthesis in order to be more didactic.
The whole forms a splendid essay, in works amazing, on a theme that is brand new. Of the Cave out of which a man, drawing the symbolist of Odilon Redon, to 1878, to the arte povera Giovanni Anselmo, Trecento Milioni di Anni, 1969, that shine at the heart of the rock with a light bulb. It is enough to see (to be read after the catalog scholar of scholars, we will see after the documentary live from Arte). And the eye is caught up in this back-and-forth fluid between prehistory reinvented itself through its caves, its tools and bits and pieces, and our time worried about the future of our planet.
“Prehistory, an enigma that modern”, until 16 September at the Centre Pompidou. Place G. Pompidou (IVe).
Tel.: 01 44 78 12 33.
Catalog: Prehistoric times, an enigma, modern, under the supervision of Cécile Debray, Rémi Labrusse and Maria Stavrinaki (ed of the Centre Pompidou, 304 pages, 39,90€). 36 000 years of modern art from Chauvet to Picasso , film, Manual, White, 52 min., (Arte France, C. P., Dr Folamour, 2019).
