Mécène fondateur 29.05 PRESS RELEASE → A R 22.11.21 C I M B O L D O F A C E TOFACE # c e f a nt c e r e a p a r o c m i m p b i d o o l d u o - m e t z . f r M/M (PARIS) Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Les Quatre Saisons, Le Printemps , 1573 ; huile sur toile, 76 × 63,5 cm ; Paris, musée du Louvre, département des Peintures. Photo ©RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Jean-Gilles Berizzi ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE CONTENTS 1. GENERAL PRESENTATION .................................................................5 2. GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO ...................................................................8 3. ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE ..........................................................11 4. EXHIBITION LAYOUT .......................................................................18 5. FORUM .............................................................................................24 6. LISTE OF ARTISTS ............................................................................26 7. LISTE OF LENDERS ..........................................................................28 8. CATALOGUE & PUBLICATIONS ..........................................................30 9. RELATED PROGRAMME ....................................................................33 10. YOUNG PEOPLE AND EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES ............................38 11. PARTNERS......................................................................................40 12. PRESS VISUALS .............................................................................46 3 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE Mario MERZ, The Other Side of the Moon or Table de Chagny, 1984 (fruit and vegetables) Steel, glass, brown stones from Burgundy (Buxy), white stones from Venice (Biancone), fruit and lead 70 x 900 x 350 cm Metz, 49 Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine © Adagp, Paris, 2021 4 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE 1. GENERAL PRESENTATION ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE 29 May to 22 November 2021 Grande Nef You who roam the world, eager to see lofty and astounding wonders, come here and you will find... This inscription aimed at visitors walking around Just like Arcimboldo’s work, Mannerism, which the 16th-century Bomarzo garden could equally was a shared artistic language in Europe in the aptly be addressed to visitors to Arcimboldo Face 16th century, was forgotten – and scorned even – to Face, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou- up until the beginning of the 20th century, when Metz that pays tribute to the Lombard painter. This this rich intellectual and artistic current became subjective portrait of Arcimboldo seen through the popular again. After being linked with degenerate eyes of other artists – chosen for the influence, art during the interwar period by Wilhelm Pinder, acknowledged, unconscious or fantasised he exerted it would come to symbolise the embodiment of a on them – has been put together like the fragment common European culture for people at the end of a story with a personal dimension. By comparing of the Second World War. Also seen as the first Arcimboldo’s works with those of James Ensor, anti-classical avant-garde1, Mannerism heralded, Hannah Höch, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Francis through its subversive potential, the multiple Bacon and Cindy Sherman, the exhibition reveals revolutions of modernism, from abstraction to how the artist’s thought enriched art history, past cubism. At the junction of these two analyses, the and present. complex figure of Arcimboldo, both the linking thread of his bountiful century and the early stages While developing into something unique, of modernity, embodied the multiple ruptures that Arcimboldo’s oeuvre was part of the Mannerism that will form the axes of the exhibition Arcimboldo shook the Renaissance. Without forming a veritable Face to Face. school, his contemporaries shared the same desire to abandon the rules of perspective, used glowing Inaugurating the programme of Chiara Parisi, who colours like Rosso Fiorentino and revelled in their has been director of the institution since December experiments at distorting bodies, which culminated, 2019, the project grew out of the exhibition The among other things, in Parmigianino’s self-portrait Arcimboldo Effect. The Transformations of the in a convex mirror and the diary of the troubled Face from the 16th to the 20th Century, mounted Pontormo. By gradually shifting the focus onto how by Pontus Hultén and Yasha David at the Palazzo the subject should be represented and how to be an Grassi in Venice in 1987, which was the first artist, they assigned importance above all to their monograph dedicated to the artist. This event conception of the execution of a work of art and in followed on from Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s exhibition the process wrote the first modern theory of art. organised at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which paved the way by showing Arcimboldo as a key precursor to the emergence of modernity. 1 Patricia FALGUIÈRES, Le Maniérisme, une avant-garde au XVIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 2004 5 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE Curators The Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition continues this exploration of the contemporary relevance Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou- of Arcimboldo’s vocabulary, which has crossed Metz, and Anne Horvath, research assistant centuries, with the question of the representation at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in a fruitful of the body taken apart, mechanised, disfigured, dialogue with the artist Maurizio Cattelan, the transfigured and exploded. art historians Patricia Falguières and Antonio Pinelli, and the curator Yasha David. The exhibition has been enriched by the visionary spirit of Pontus Hultén, who regarded The Exhibition design Arcimboldo Effect as one of his most important exhibitions, and offers a synthesis of the multiple Berger&Berger facets of his vision of the museum as a medium, Laurent P. Berger and Cyrille Berger which he put into practice at the Centre Pompidou from 1977. Embracing awareness of the past and passion for the future, the exhibition Arcimboldo Face to Face sidesteps any concept of hierarchy of periods and generations, the exhibition Arcimboldo Face to Face. It is like a Museum of our Wishes2, featuring Arcimboldo and the artists who, through their visions, enrich our appreciation of his work. Lynda BENGLIS, Hills and Clouds, 2014 Cast polyurethane with phosphorescence and stainless steel, 305,2 cm × 548,9 cm × 549,3 cm Courtesy Pace Gallery, Thomas Dane Gallery, Blum & Poe, Xavier Hufkens et Mendes Wood DM © Adagp, Paris, 2021 © Photo Jonathan Nesturek, courtesy Pace Gallery 2 Pontus HULTÉN (ed.), The Museum of our wishes, exh. cat., Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 26 December 1963–16 February 1964 6 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE Giuseppe ARCIMBOLDO, The Four Seasons – Spring, 1563 Oil on oak panel, 66 x 50 cm Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Madrid 7 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE 2. GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO A popular icon thanks to his composite heads –which formed only a small part of his many activities– Giuseppe Arcimboldo was for a long time seen as a curiosity by art historians. Despite the success he enjoyed during his lifetime and the popularity of his composite portraits, as demonstrated by his numerous followers, his work was forgotten and was only rediscovered and seen in a new light at the dawn of modern art. Arcimboldo probably suffered from not having left behind an autobiography and to have been born too late to be part of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, which established the reputations, in a subjective way, of the period’s leading painters, sculptors and architects for centuries to come. Yet the artist’s life (1526–1593) was a reflection of the Mannerist 16th century, which it spanned from beginning to end. After training with his father, a painter at the Duomo workshop in Milan, Arcimboldo was summoned to the Habsburg court in 1562, where he played a central role in the artistic, scientific and political endeavours of the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II. Carton de Giuseppe ARCIMBOLDO, made by the master glassmaker Corrado de Mochis Green mask with festoon of flowers, 1550 (?) Symbol of an open, cosmopolitan, culturally rich Glass, lead and grisaille, 48,5 x 60,5 cm Europe, Arcimboldo had an international career Milan, Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano that took him from his native Lombard to Vienna and then Prague, before returning to Milan, where he was honoured with the prestigious title of Palatine count before he died. Official court painter, he painted his famous composite heads for the princes and played a key role in orchestrating major festivities and parades, as well as serving as an advisor on the imperial collections. One of his most important missions was to document the naturalia in the imperial cabinet of curiosities, drawing from life the most exotic species collected during distant expeditions. In addition, he considerably enriched the collections of mirabilia – the emperors were enthusiastic collectors, motivated by the desire to possess the rarest and most extraordinary items. 8 ARCIMBOLDO FACE TO FACE The cabinet of Rudolf II, a proto-museum to his glory where master canvases rubbed shoulders with natural oddities, offered Arcimboldo a formal and conceptual repertory that would enrich his own corpus of works. The cycles of the Seasons and the Elements captured the extraordinary richness of fauna and flora contained within the rooms of wonders. The paintings were allegories of abundance and plenitude, and of the eternal power of the Habsburgs, who ruled over the world