"You don't need a drawing to visit an exhibition!

About the exhibition "Pas besoin d'un dessin" at the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève until 19 June 2022.

"The pleasure of observing a work of art should not be reserved only for those who have the knowledge. You don't go to a concert to learn music, but to have a good time," says Jean-Hubert Martin, who has been curating exhibitions for fifty years. Just because he is the son of a museum curator, born in 1944 in Strasbourg and an art historian, and because he himself has been a curator or director of the most prestigious museum institutions, in charge of the contemporary art collections for the creation of the Centre Pompidou, does not mean that he has forgotten the majority of visitors to exhibitions who come to relax, to be amazed, or not, in any case to feel something. The man who never ceases to regret "the scientific corset in which the history of Western art was enclosed in the middle of the 19th century" therefore absolutely wants to trust the emotions and sensations of visitors. Quite simply. And tirelessly. We remember "Magicians of the Earth" in 1989 or "Carambolage" in 2016, in Paris, which had already questioned museological thought and practice.

This time, it is the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève that has entrusted him with the task of drawing on its reserves to mount an exhibition accessible to all audiences, with a deliberately provocative title: "No need for a drawing". The idea is clearly stated: even without learned explanations, walking around here with eyes wide open is first and foremost a pure pleasure! Those who want to will complete the picture.

In a vast space with no additional picture rails, some 800 works selected from among 800,000 pieces dating from 15,000 BC to the present day can be seen! For Art Press, the contemporary art magazine, journalist Elisabeth Couturier had the sensation of seeing the sequences of a film unfold as she walked successively through the 22 rooms of the exhibition where "a succession of hangings organised according to the logic of the rhyme 'marabout, piece of string, horse saddle, racehorse...

So, of course, art lovers who are used to the exercise of erudition may find themselves a little disoriented as they lose their chronological or sectoral reference points. But it's good to let go and immerse oneself in a journey that brings together works according to new affinities, mixing periods and techniques, emphasising thematic similarities and analogies of form and colour. Yes, a complete wall aligns, for example, 159 objects, whether clothing or furniture, paintings or sculptures, solely according to a gradation of colours ranging from red to white, passing of course through the warm yellows and oranges... And it is a completely delightful effect! It is a pity that this is one of the two rooms on the first floor, which will close on 24 April...

In the other rooms, a lyre-guitar is associated with a pre-Columbian vase, Rodin's "Thinker" with Ferdinand Hodler's "Philosopher Worker", a painting by Roman Opalka aligning a series of numbers tending towards infinity punctuates a succession of paintings forming a countdown from 1 to 21 according to the number of figures represented, fabrics and tiles line up their geometric patterns, aristocratic salons open their windows on the misery of the people...

Thus the public of the MAH is invited to appropriate a real common treasure, namely the fascinating encyclopaedic diversity of this collection which goes from the small Mesopotamian spoon to religious scenes of unknown painters, while passing by medieval armours or costumes of the Belle Epoque, furniture, carpets, engravings, paintings, works of contemporary art...

Through playfulness, switching or association of ideas, some of the museum's most important works are brought into simple and uncomplicated dialogue with singular objects that might otherwise have escaped the attention of visitors. In the end, this gives visitors a new confidence in their own emotional power.

Assisted by Tijs Visser, Jean-Hubert Martin has taken up the challenge set by Marc-Olivier Wahler, the director of the museum, who gave him carte blanche: by revealing it in a new light, the museum becomes the theatre of all desires.