PRESS KIT 28.04. → 20.08.18 centrepompidou-metz.fr #couplesmodernes , Zurich, 1920. Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Sophie Tauber-Arp avec Tête Dada ; Nic Aluf, © Adagp, Paris, 2018 Exhibition organized by c. 1926, Centre Pompidou-Metz in collaboration with Barbican Centre, London Jean Arp avec Monocle-nombril, Jean Arp, BAT_DP_COVER_v1.indd 3-4 09/05/12 11:56 SUMMARY INTRODUCTION 2 EXHIBITION LAYOUT 4 1. RHYTHM AND FREEDOM 4 2. A SHARED SPACE 12 3. LOVE REINVENTED 18 4. NATURE ILLUMINATED 26 EXHIBITION LAYOUT 31 CATALOGUE 31 RELATED PROGRAMMING 32 PARTNERS OF THE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ 34 VISUALS FOR THE PRESS 36 1 INTRODUCTION “ENCOUNTERS – What was the most significant couple formed by Duchamp and Martins, the Modern encounter of your life? To what extent did you have - Couples exhibition explores the creative process do you have - the impression that this was a chance generated by passionate, complex, sometimes encounter? Or one of necessity?”1 subversive, loving relationships, which united artists in the first half of the 20th century. Whether The Modern Couples (couples modernes) exhibition they were officially couples, exclusive or open, explores more than forty essential or incidental these couples brought together not only painters, encounters between artist couples, from 1900 to sculptors, photographers, poets, writers, musicians 1950. and dancers, but also architects and designers. The latter elevated architecture, a new organic unit, in In his essay/manifesto “Beaubourg, un musée où hitherto unexplored ways. A machine for living, a explosera la vie” (Beaubourg [the Pompidou Centre], receptacle for regenerated intimacies, the house no a gallery where life ignites), from 1974 onwards, longer represented a simple shelter, but, from that Pontus Hulten saw art as “a catalyst and a transfer time onwards, revealed the state of the couple’s soul, of the energy of love” and galleries as “places of transcending geometry, becoming a dwelling-place great sensual concentration”. He paved the way for for boundless shared experiences. These couples exhibitions proposing to reinterpret the history of constituted in themselves fertile areas of exchange, art from the perspective of eroticism or gender, of confrontation and of influence, producing works such as féminin-masculin. Le sexe de l’art (Feminine- of art, concepts and movements, like Orphism Masculine, Gender in Art) in 1995, showing that, associated with Robert and Sonia Delaunay or beyond a simple subject or artistic motif, gender is Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova’s Rayism. one of the key issues in the processes of art itself, Beyond the emotional aspect, the exhibition reveals the realisations of which have constantly blurred collaborations and little known figures, or those left biological and cultural determinisms. In 2009, the in the shadows of art history, such as Benedetta exhibition elles@centrepompidou extended this Cappa, founder of Tactilism, with her famous idea, giving a voice to female artists in the Centre husband Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was the Pompidou collections, in order to write the history first to recognise the creative power of her genius of art with “them” alone – “them” who were not and her oeuvre, even to the extent of the following strangers to any of the plastic arts revolutions of injunction: “You must work for yourself, for me, for their time, but who have often been kept in the us.” The exhibition aims to shine an essential light on shadows or in obscurity. With Modern Couples, the the development of aesthetic forms, of the thoughts Centre Pompidou-Metz is continuing this quest and and mores of the protagonists of modern art. It is suggesting a reinterpretation of modernity through the very notion of modernity that is questioned the prism of couples in love. through the prism of this organic cell, multifaceted and creative, formed by the artist couple, which, for “Do not burden yourself too much, give yourself some of them, in these times of political upheaval too much to do, worry about what to call a woman, and identities marked by two wars, provided an children, a country house, a car…”: this libertarian expanse of freedom, the protective matrix of a “co- credo from Marcel Duchamp, solitary herald of intelligence of opposites” which Marcel Duchamp the modern avant-garde, refutes the conventional sought to cultivate. idea of the couple, to make art, combined with life, a desiring machine. The two-person relationship becomes, like a game of chess for Duchamp, “this movement of pieces devouring each other”, a carnal and intellectual passion, a secret dyad like the one he formed with the Brazilian artist Maria Martins, a process of revelation, a sharing of freedom, providing art an intensity which enables it to surpass the imposed limits. Just like the clandestine 1 Surrealist study in Minotaure (Minotaur) 1933, André Breton, in collaboration with Paul Éluard, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism) 1938. 2 Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture Capricorn, 1947 Photograph by John Kasnetsis © John Kasnetsis © Adagp, Paris, 2018 CURATORS: Emma Lavigne, Director, Centre Pompidou-Metz Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican Centre, London Elia Biezunski, Personal assistant and Project Coordinator, Centre Pompidou-Metz Cloé Pitiot, Curator, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne Assistant curator: Pauline Créteur, Centre Pompidou-Metz In London, Modern Couples, from 10 October 2018 to 27 January 2019, will coincide with the 100th anniversary of suffrage for women and is a major component of the Barbican Centre’s season, The Art of Change. Along with an exploration of the creative dialogues enriched by over forty couples, which can be seen through some eight hundred works and one hundred documents, this exhibition presents English artistic couples little-known in France, such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Eileen Agar and Paul Nash and the nebulous Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists whose moral and creative freedom was particularly influential, and who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, amongst others. Press contact : Barbican Centre, London Exhibition from 10 October 2018 to 27 January 2019 Ann Berni Phone number : +44(0) 20 7382 7169 [email protected] 3 EXHIBITION LAYOUT 1. RHYTHM AND FREEDOM “Total art: pictures, music, dance, poems – now we have that”, notes Hugo Ball in his Diary, evoking a Dadaist soiree at the Cabaret Voltaire. This short-lived venue, which opened on 5 February 1916 in Zurich, synthesised and realised the aspirations of Hugo Ball and of his companion Emmy Hennings, while Europe was stricken by war. “Our cabaret is a gesture”, he explained, a thought activated, a process for taking a stand, for transforming the world. The quest for total art, expressed by their fusion as a couple and the fusion of their talent is, like the world, a necessarily heterogeneous collage of distorted images, of freed words, a sonorous stridency, primordial cries, rhythms and movements bursting out, formed with Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Like Dada, a whole section of the European avant-garde attempted to place its creative vision at the crest of the shock wave of modernity, of this ambivalent concept of “modern” imagined by Baudelaire as being fundamentally “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable”. These artists wove a contaminating and accelerating network of flows, representing bodily convulsions, the collapse of the patriarchal structures of society, the upheavals of history, and attempted to embody, in the urgency of the present, the utopian dreams and shared hopes. The revolutionary aspiration for the emergence of a new community and a liberation of the individual smashed the boundaries and norms of society and of the couple. Art, to go back to the words of Raoul Hausmann about Dada, became “a new way of living, a form of internal mobility”. 4 FOCUS Walter Holdt and Lavinia Schulz In 1920, whilst working with Lothar Schreyer, founder of the Sturm-Bühne expressionist theatre, the dancer and costume designer Lavinia Schulz met and married Walter Holdt, himself a talented dancer. Feeling that expressionism was not the way forward, since it "works with industry and machines" which they despised, the couple moved away from these artistic circles and from every financial mindset to create their own theatrical world, both abstract and organic, inspired by Nordic fables and mysticism. Schulz and Holdt filled the stage with masked characters, Maskentänzer, who were both grotesque and playful, with their intense gestures. Their use of colours suggests their costumes were inspired by the theories on colour and symbols of Johannes Itten, an instructor at the Bauhaus who was ostracised by students and instructors for practising Zoroastrianism, established by Zarathustra on the principle of dualism in the world. The couple developed his own choreography and Schulz created a dance notation system for, amongst others, the dancers who sometimes worked with them. After four years of living together, devoted to art and the stage, their conflictual relationship, caused notably by the incompatibility of Holdt's depressed state and the heightened emotionalism of Schulz, as well as the Minya Diez-Dührkoop Tanzmaske “Toboggan couple's extreme poverty in the inflationary backdrop of Weimar