Tackling an unlimited subject with a limited collection
About the exhibition "La Répétition" at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 27 January 2025.
The choice of only one tiny painting by Claude Viallat for "La Répétition", the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, is fully endorsed by its curator, Eric de Chassey, director of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art. It is no less perplexing for the art critic Catherine Francblin, who devotes her column to the collections that lend themselves to the game in the May issue of Artpress, the contemporary art magazine. "No doubt Eric de Chassey was unable to put together the ambitious exhibition he could have dreamed of, since he only had access to the Beaubourg collections," she writes. It is a pity, however, that emblematic works (Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, etc.) have been discarded in favour of sometimes minor works by artists who are not often shown.
Visible until 27 January 2025, this exhibition, which brings together more than 120 works of art, almost all from the collections of the Musée national d'art moderne, was born of a strong idea. "The idea that creation does not necessarily stem from invention, but that for many artists it is born of repetitive forms and gestures, such as multiplying, starting over, accumulating, doubling, etc." explains Catherine Francblin. Thus La Répétition, the painting Marie Laurencin painted in 1936, gives its name to the exhibition and welcomes visitors. It "immediately introduces several meanings of the term, because, in addition to showing young girls with identical faces preparing for a recital, it directly alludes to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)," observes the art critic.
At first glance, Marie Laurencin's painting is nothing like a conventional genre scene. A group of young women is assembled; one is holding a booklet for the singing, another a guitar for the music, yet another is sketching a dance step, while the other two look on. Without appearing to be, this painting is nothing less than a reformulation of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of the inaugural works of modernism: the same curtain opened by one of the models, the same number of female figures in a pyramidal composition, the same chromatic rhythms - a dog replacing a still life in the foreground. Except that, far from multiplying heterogeneities, the whole painting is marked by a principle of repetition. Repetition is not only the subject of the painting (a repetition as is necessary for a successful show), it is also its method, embodied by the fact that all the faces are identical - a repetition within the repetition.
"But repeating is also trying, even if it means not succeeding, like the hand filmed by Richard Serra trying to catch lead (1968)," recalls the Artpress journalist as she wanders through the exhibition. "It is, in Beckett's words, "to try again. To fail again. Fail better. There is relentlessness in repetition; there is sometimes a desire to go to the limits of what the body can bear (performances by Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay) and often an attention to the "small differences" (Gilles Deleuze), as shown by Marlène Dumas in her series of portraits entitled Sang mêlé (1996) or Roman Opalka in his suites of numbers.
The history of Western art in the 20th and 21st centuries is marked by the figure of invention, a visible synonym for creative freedom, which allows it to assert its autonomy in relation to utilitarian, decorative or ornamental practices, where, since the beginning of humanity, motifs and figures have been repeated, as shown in religious imagery as well as in wallpaper or fabric prints. Many artists, not the least of whom is Andy Warhol, have adopted repetition as a method and as an object, finding in it, for a few works or more systematically, a way of working or a subject. Hasn't repetition always been a necessity in order to produce more works of art for sale that appeal to the public? After the pure and simple copying of yesteryear came the technical means of reproducibility, but in order to practice, students have always copied the great masters, repeating ancestral gestures and motifs.
The collections of our museums are generally based on the search for masterpieces, those exceptional moments, seemingly in one piece, where all the artists' means converge, a principle that was questioned in the inaugural exhibition of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in the form of a giant art gallery of the history of art, entitled "Masterpieces", in 2010-2011. To show how creation can also proceed by repetition, whether this is a means, a process or the very subject of artists, is to go against this simplistic notion. This new exhibition attempts to do so, through a choice, indeed a subjective one, from the collections of the Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, enriched nonetheless by a selection of major complementary works of art, cutting through the stylistic, iconographic, sociological and chronological classifications that usually organise their presentation.
This investigation takes on its full meaning at a time when we understand, through the discovery of prehistoric Neronian artefacts in the Mandrin cave (in the Drôme), executed 56,000 years ago, that Homo Sapiens distinguished itself from other human species by the application of systematic methods, corresponding to a process of repetition designed to improve the efficiency of their tools, whereas the Neanderthals (who preceded and followed them in the Mandrin cave) showed an apparently greater freedom and diversity of approach. Being an artist also means repeating.
Repetition is above all a fundamental operation in abstract art," says Catherine Francblin in Artpress, citing the multiplied modules of Aurélie Nemours, the interlocking or shifted squares of Josef Albers and Vera Molnar, Bernard Piffaretti's redoubled figures, Agnes Martin's grids, etc. "As a painterly gesture, repetition thus comes to join that of the worker (Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci) and to call into question a certain aestheticism, in favour of a simple vocabulary. "A painter's gesture, repetition thus comes to join that of the worker (Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci) and to call into question a certain aestheticism, to the benefit of a simple vocabulary and an apparent neutrality (Niele Toroni, Claude Viallat...)", observes the journalist as she continues her visit to the Messina exhibition. "The exhibition is interspersed with highlights (an entire room of paintings by Simon Hantaï, a magnificent installation by Marthe Wéry, the great Shining Forth (to George) (1961) by Barnett Newman), and the display gives a good account of the scope of the theme.
Illustration: Marie Laurencin, La Répétition, 1936
Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne
Fondation Foujita / Adagp, Paris - Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI