SAINT-ÉTIENNE.- On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint Étienne Métropole is shedding light on the diversity of its extensive and unique collection. This exhibition proposes a reading beyond chronologies and medium-based sections. The diversity and extent of the MAMC+ collections allow this plurality of dialogues between works of different time periods and techniques. The recreation of lineage and elective affinities organized in stem is likely to surprise, touch, intrigue, disturb and open the way to fruitful debate.

As Raoul Glaber phrased it, the year 1000 saw the rise of a “white mantle of churches”. All throughout the world, the beginning of the 21st century saw the multiplication of new museums to answer to the audience’s new interest and wish for enchantment in front of masterpieces that were inaccessible before.

Housed in what was one of President François Mitterrand’s big cultural projects, for 30 years the MAMC+ and its multidisciplinary collection have been a window to look at past, present and future states of the world. Displaying this collection that spans from the 16th to the 21st century, yet going beyond chronologies; revealing its guiding principle and its coherence is like looking at the world through its utopias, tragedies, epics, renouncements and marvels.

To spark love for a masterpiece is to revive it, to bring it back to the present.

Beyond the experienced emotions and feelings, each work carries a meaning. By fostering encounters and confrontations, we enrich our points of views in order to explore different facets of the world. Some works were inspired by a confident trust in progress – expressed by Fernand Léger’s sharp sentence “Sentir vrai et oser le faire”. But the traumas caused by the 20th century many military conflicts successively altered the utopic hope of a permanent transformation of nature and men. Although we cannot forget the dazzling impact of great achievements like the conquest of the moon, or the importance of the opening of main circulations routes between civilizations historically remote from one another, or the technological transformations in science. All these factors impacted our stories.

The 30th anniversary exhibition focuses on the constantly renewed representations of the world by artists of various nationalities, whether through painting, sculpture, drawing, photography or design. When confronted to the most primal, cold or minimal narrative writing, to a focus on the sole power of the language of forms, materials and colors, to the fascination for technology or the return to primitivism, to the search for sublime or the absolute…we will all be left to wonder- as Hannah Arendt so well put up- whether we love “…the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable”. Confident in its heritage, the Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole cares to undertake its share of responsibility toward the future, whatever it may hold.

The Mechanics of Art
While the industrial and technical evolutions of the early 20th century considerably changed and redefined the modalities of labor, they also deeply impacted plastic creation. During the in-between war, artists started using new techniques and tackled new subject matters. Many artists of this period shared the same faith in progress and enthusiasm for machines. opening on Le Fiancé by Francis Picabia, this first room is dedicated to the fascination of artists for technical innovations, which led them to develop new plastic principles of compositions and consider machines for their symbolic dimension. As a mechanical tool of representation brought by technological progress, photography was also invented during the in-between war and became the privileged medium to capture the modern industrial world.

In the aftermath of WWII, Europe had to catch up its economic backwardness in regard to the united States. A renewal period slowly started, marked by the rebuilding of cities, the reconversion of labor up until then centered on military industry and the development of mass consumption. The arrival of the “American Way of Life” in Europe brought about a new mode of thinking based on the systemic creation of consumers’ needs boosted by the evolution of advertisement and marketing strategies. In France, during the Glorious Thirties, from 1946 to 1975, the development of big supermarkets was fostered by a society built around consumption.

These changes went hand in hand with the rise of information technology and communication: photography was going mainstream. Media –with radio and television at the forefront- spread over. Telephones and typewriters made communication easier. And automobile did so with travelling. Men’s relationship to space, distance and time got profoundly altered. These new reproduction and broadcast methods shifted our relationship to image.

Pop American artists borrowed consumption society its new modes of reproduction. With screenprinting, Andy Warhol especially questioned the status of endlessly reproducible images. Hyperrealist painters Peter Stämpfli and Don Eddy turned to a meticulous observation of daily life and advertisement images. Thanks to the mimetic reproduction enabled by photorealism, they created new images of the daily world. In Europe, artists of the New Figuration movement also questioned consumption society. Bernard Rancillac used advertisements and pop culture while Jacques Monory developed a cinematographic type of painting with patterns traced from enlarged image projections.

Narrative Art
For the showcase of our collection, the “Narrative Art” section was entrusted to art historian Alexandre Quoi. The latter is shedding light on a little-known movement of the 1970s, which gathered conceptual practices geared toward the subjectivity and transmission of stories combining photography and text.

The extent of the museum collection provides insight on this fruitful period of questioning around the photographic medium by a generation of international artists like John Baldessari, Victor Burgin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jochen Gerz and Dennis Oppenheim.

A display organized in four sections thus describes the evolution started at the end of the 1960s, from the documenting of Body Art and Land Art works to the emergence of American narrative photo-texts (Bill Beckley, Peter Hutchinson, Roger Welch), through “individual mythologies” related to identity and memory (Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Tania Mouraud), and up to the rise of “creative photography” in the 1980s (Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman).

Between a quest for minimalism and the experiment of material
At the end of the 1930s, some artists chose to organize their practice around material. Looking for anti-illusionism and the liberation of materials reduced to their components, paint, along with its various supports, became the unique subject matter of the work. Morris Louis used resin to let colorful shapes born out of the random mix of paint drips run wild based on the inclination of the canvas. The “Colorfield painting” movement advocated freeing color from figuration and turning it into the main subject matter of the work.

Robert Morris too showed interest in this hazardous game. He traded paint for felt which malleability opened a field of possibilities to structure space. As for Pierre Soulages, he used light as the core element of his work. He adopted black as his only color for the ability of its reflections to catch the light with various intensities. He would cover supports with big strokes of opaque paint and turn them into surfaces able to capture and generate light.

A double room of the exhibition also questions the various forms of minimalism. Pieces by Josef Albers considered to be the initiator of op art (optic art), which developed in the 1960s, stand alongside Frank Stella’s. Stella worked on the chromatic relationships generated by the combination and multiplication of simple geometric patterns. His constructivist painting constantly sought to explore further and exhaust the possibilities of color that condition composition and sometimes even the shape of the support. Here Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental paintings, Peter Halley’s or Sol LeWitt modernist works make up for an exceptional selection of artworks shedding light on sober and minimal writing. Visitors also have the chance to discover the neon works of Bertrand Lavier and Dan Flavin.

Memory and return to primitivism
Art is defined by its ability to leave a mark in space and time. In that regard, death and memory have always been privileged topics. It is precisely the theme of an oil on wood painting from the early 18th century by Dutch painter Van der Heck. The gravedigger character here serves as a pretext to beware of the vanities of this world. Although gravediggers at work are common in churches’ interior paintings, the choice of this topic is unusual in Dutch art of that time. on the contrary, the skull represented by Gerhard Richter is not as symbolic as it was in classical painting. It rather alludes to the hyperrealist movement and the trompe l’oeil tradition: here the cranial bone is only a mere reflection of itself, aspiring to be not a representation of reality but reality itself.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental installation questions another form of memory and oblivion. By exposing an oversized library, left out in nature with decomposing books and leaflets like that of a colonial governor, these artists evoke the loss of culture and tradition looming over our contemporary societies.

Return to nature
This room opens on a famous 19th century oil painting by Lyon-born landscape painter François-Auguste Ravier. At that time, influenced by 17th century Dutch painting and 19th century English landscapes artists, French artists developed a new perception of nature. In response to the birth of industrialization, they went on exploring French regions, set their easel outdoor and translated the unique atmosphere of their natural surrounding. A few decades later, Arte Povera artists shared the same desire to rediscover nature. This movement emerged in Italy in the middle of the 1960s at the same time than American minimal art. They praised a return to an art based on senses, perception and experience. Although they rejected cultural industry and consumption society, artists of this movement associated elements from nature and industrial civilization, opening a sort of dialogue between natural and manufactured objects. The use of perishable goods like vegetable and fruits was combined with that of diverse materials like terracotta, fabric, glass, neon and steel, the majority of which considered “cheap” materials.

The question of time, contained in the counting of the years made visible by the sapwood, is also present in the progression of numbers of the neon Fibonnaci sequence that Mario Merz displayed on a grid covered with bee wax.

While not all of the works in the room stem from the Arte povera movement, they share certain concerns. In the work of Bernard Pagès, a member of the Supports/ Surfaces group, the technical processes are listed and analysed so as to facilitate our liberation from such constraints. At the end of the 20th century economic contexts changed but the need to be reconnected to natural materials and simple processes is still present (Andrea Branzi).

Between sky and earth, the magic of space and absolute
Some artists embark on a quest for the absolute, which translates in the search for power in the language of forms, materials and colors. Yves Klein’s I.K.B monochrome represents the entry point of this room. This historic piece was made the same year than he created his specific hue of blue (Brevet international Klein’s Blue), which intensity and depth aimed at abolishing all distance with the artwork. In response to the consumption society, Klein imbued his art with a sort of spiritual energy. Choosing monochrome was an answer brought to his need for absolute: the pure color was painted with a roller to avoid imperfections and invade the spectator’s space.

In Gerhard Richter, the temptation of the absolute translates into works deprived of any meaning or content. His paintings have no more subject matter: they are the subject matter. Here, the grey seems to come from a progressive shading off process: “The difference between these various hues of grey fascinated me… it is why I started painting grey monochromes (…) with a paintbrush. They have an illusionist look. one can even see clouds in them… They sometimes look like fantasy landscapes that will never exist, because they were never real.”

Figuration/disfiguration
In contrast to the plain images of advertising, some works choose to distort their topic. The havoc created by tragic historical events regularly leads to a crisis of humanist values. Engaged and socially aware, some artists changed their perception of the body and bravely called the human figure into question. over the 20th century, art progressively took distance with the classical and idealized representation of the human figure toward “dis-figuration”, questioning the relationship between beautiful and moral, ugly and immoral. Starting in 1905, champions of fauvism like Auguste Chabaud with his arbitrary color palette, freed color from its purely representational function. Laid out in large flat tint fields, their raw and vivid hues evoked some sort of primitivism. As for the cubists, they focused on simplifying planes and schematizing forms. The Femme Assise by Pablo Picasso, which lines web saturates the canvas space, shows some characteristics of this period however overcome by the artist after the end of WWI.

At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, photography, with Thomas Ruff in particular, focused on glorified figures and portraits, in reference to the great portraits of classical art. But the photographic medium was also largely manipulated (orlan, Nicole Tran Ba Van and Jean-Pierre Khazem) in order to create strange forms.

In her work, Orlan “travels through an infinity of possible identities”. Somehow heroically, she resorts to subversive humor to question our society’s systems of values. In the Self Hybridations amérindiennes series (2005-2007), she “hybridized” her face with portraits of the Red Indians from various native American tribes painted by George Catlin between 1830 and 1835: “My [pre-Columbian or African] self-hybridizations confront us with a virtual time that intertwine the past of these cultures, the near past of my photographs and the future of the image -its future as an artwork seen by spectators as well as the fantasized future it suggests.”