PARIS.- The Musée dArt Moderne de La Ville de Paris is presenting a new visitor itinerary for its permanent collection, highlighting such flagship items as Pierre Bonnard's Nude in the Bath and Henri Laurens' Spanish Dancer; works by Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Foujita, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Frantiek Kupka, Raoul Dufy and others; and rarely exhibited pieces by Laure Garcin, Natalia Goncharova and Chana Orloff, together with figurative works by Auguste Herbin and Jean Messagier. Interacting with the collection's founding works are the latest acquisitions, by Otto Freundlich, Etienne Cournault, Léon Tutundjian, Karel Appel, Jean Atlan, Lucio Fontana, Man Ray And Willi Baumeister.
The itinerary opens with works marked by the quick, powerfully gestural approach of the postwar movement often labelled "lyrical abstraction", whose diversity is revealed by the artists on show in this room: Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Simon Hantaï, Zao Wou-Ki and Christopher Wool.
The visit is punctuated by single-artist rooms bringing encounters with the unexpected, in the form of Francis Picabia and Giorgio de Chirico. One of the undeniable high points of this new presentation is the Vollard Suite of 100 engravings by Pablo Picasso, dating from 19301937 and on display in its entirety.
There are, too, thematic rooms offering a fresh take on traditional art history categories: the "Cubism from Cézanne to Wallpaper" section homes in on the movement's decorative side, while the room devoted to "Fauves, Post-Impressionists and Other Colourists" covers the different approaches of the early 20th century, setting Maurice de Vlaminck's Fauvist canvases against pictures by Raoul Dufy. "Abstract Cosmogonies" offers an overview of the abstraction of the 1920s and 1930s, with its mix of practices tinged with cosmic and biomorphic mysticism, as in the works of Jean Crotti, Frantiek Kupka and Enrico Prampolini. The exhibition continues with a room dedicated to the School of Paris and a section titled "The Great Independents" a reference to the 1937 "Masters of Independent Art" exhibition at the Petit-Palais and its tribute to the avantgarde painters who had gone on to become modern art icons: Henri Matisse, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Raoul Dufy and Albert Marquet. A room given over to Realism foregrounds painters from the 1920s whose uncompromising opposition to Classicism defies all labelling. Last but not least, the sections titled "Spontaneists and Automatists" and "Dalla natura allarte" the latter an allusion to the "From Nature to Art" exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1960 offer the different Matterist practices of the 1950s and 1960s via works by Dubuffet, Etienne-Martin and Fontana.
The contemporary itinerary is structured around two themes: the avant-gardes of the 1960s and the painting of the 1980s.
The opening section focuses on the New Realism movement, whose artists among them Arman, Gérard Deschamps, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Jacques Villeglé blurred the boundaries of art. Carrying on the Duchamp tradition, visual language took the form of a handling of the real world in what critic Pierre Restany termed a "recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality".
In the Geometrical Abstraction room we find artists like Martin Barré, François Morellet and Aurélie Nemours rejecting individual emotion and the spontaneity of the artistic act in favour of an exploration of art's fundamental givens: format, the series, the support and the artwork's materiality.
Also on show are practitioners of Conceptual Art including Art & Language, Victor Burgin, Hamish Fulton, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Lawrence Weiner, whose works are defined not by their aesthetic properties but by their underlying concept. Distancing themselves radically from the object, they developed a practice in which the use of language came to be the necessary and often sufficient prerequisite for the work's existence.
The appearance of conceptual forms in the 1960s called the whole classical scheme of things into question and brought a decline in the traditional activity of painting. Since the 1980s, however, painting has staged a very real comeback, with painters now taking a personal stand in relation to the history of their medium. In their overt espousing of the pleasure of the painterly act, the artists brought together here Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, Christopher Wool, A. R. Penck and others demonstrate a return to painting's expressive capacity and the achievements of the past.
A selection of recent acquisitions of works by, among others, Mathieu Mercier, Farah Atassi, Alex Israel and Harold Ancart, offers visitors an insight into the most recent trends on the young French and international scenes.
Until February 2018 a group of works by Jan Dibbets will be on show. While seizing variations of light and exploring perspective emerge as two basic principles within the Dibbets oeuvre, the range of surfaces he works on remind us of the freedom offered him by photography as a medium. Dibbets' Duo X (19762014) is currently being acquired, thanks to the Friends of the Musée dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This acquisition is accompanied by a donation of ten pieces representative of the artist's career.