METZ.- “ENCOUNTERS – What was the most significant encounter of your life? To what extent did you have - do you have - the impression that this was a chance encounter? Or one of necessity?”1

The Modern Couples (couples modernes) exhibition explores more than forty essential or incidental encounters between artist couples, from 1900 to 1950.

In his essay/manifesto “Beaubourg, un musée où explosera la vie” (Beaubourg [the Pompidou Centre], a gallery where life ignites), from 1974 onwards, Pontus Hulten saw art as “a catalyst and a transfer of the energy of love” and galleries as “places of great sensual concentration”. He paved the way for exhibitions proposing to reinterpret the history of art from the perspective of eroticism or gender, such as féminin-masculin. Le sexe de l’art (FeminineMasculine, Gender in Art) in 1995, showing that, beyond a simple subject or artistic motif, gender is one of the key issues in the processes of art itself, the realisations of which have constantly blurred biological and cultural determinisms. In 2009, the exhibition elles@centrepompidou extended this idea, giving a voice to female artists in the Centre Pompidou collections, in order to write the history of art with “them” alone – “them” who were not strangers to any of the plastic arts revolutions of their time, but who have often been kept in the shadows or in obscurity. With Modern Couples, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is continuing this quest and suggesting a reinterpretation of modernity through the prism of couples in love.

“Do not burden yourself too much, give yourself too much to do, worry about what to call a woman, children, a country house, a car…”: this libertarian credo from Marcel Duchamp, solitary herald of the modern avant-garde, refutes the conventional 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 couple formed by Duchamp and Martins, the Modern Couples exhibition explores the creative process generated by passionate, complex, sometimes subversive, loving relationships, which united artists in the first half of the 20th century. Whether they were officially couples, exclusive or open, these couples brought together not only painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, writers, musicians and dancers, but also architects and designers. The latter elevated architecture, a new organic unit, in hitherto unexplored ways. A machine for living, a receptacle for regenerated intimacies, the house no longer represented a simple shelter, but, from that time onwards, revealed the state of the couple’s soul, transcending geometry, becoming a dwelling-place for boundless shared experiences. These couples constituted in themselves fertile areas of exchange, of confrontation and of influence, producing works of art, concepts and movements, like Orphism associated with Robert and Sonia Delaunay or Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova’s Rayism. Beyond the emotional aspect, the exhibition reveals collaborations and little known figures, or those left in the shadows of art history, such as Benedetta Cappa, founder of Tactilism, with her famous husband Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was the first to recognise the creative power of her genius and her oeuvre, even to the extent of the following injunction: “You must work for yourself, for me, for us.” The exhibition aims to shine an essential light on the development of aesthetic forms, of the thoughts and mores of the protagonists of modern art. It is the very notion of modernity that is questioned through the prism of this organic cell, multifaceted and creative, formed by the artist couple, which, for some of them, in these times of political upheaval and identities marked by two wars, provided an expanse of freedom, the protective matrix of a “cointelligence of opposites” which Marcel Duchamp sought to cultivate.

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”.

A SHARED SPACE
In the first half of the twentieth century, art permeated all aspects of life, including daily life, even revolutionising the role of women who played a part in reinventing their position, women who, according to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, “have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force". Artists advocated a new way of life where houses, workshops and boutiques housed experimental lifestyles that, since the Vienna Secession, broke with social conventions and caused artistic revolutions.

The model of the couple now found its embodiment in regenerated repositories of intimacy, the complexity of the relationships offering a subtle breeding ground for experimentation, a medium to be shaped to create new lifestyles. Often as part of a break - from customs, codes, traditions - artist couples were responsible for creating bold spaces during the interwar years. From objects and furniture to architecture, a new coherence emerged, based on different scales and tempos, using innovative techniques and materials to create harmony between the living quarters and the occupants.

The search for an infinite space, with open lines and new colours, a place where everything was possible, went beyond the confines of architecture and interior design to give rise to paintings, photographs and textile creations seeking to capture the constantly evolving space without defining or restricting it. The shared space, as a physical one but also a mental one, was on the rise; in a liberating drive, both in its representations and in its implementations, it became flexible, boundless, and tending towards abstraction.

LOVE REINVENTED
On the threshold of the 20th century, echoing the prophecies of Rimbaud proclaiming that "love has to be reinvented, we know that" and "I is someone else", love, just like the person, was transforming itself and showing itself to be elusive, multifarious, in constant metamorphosis. If it did not lead to one person consuming the other or to abandoning him or herself, the couple, real or imaginary, had the potential to create an intermediate space for experimentation, ideal for producing new forms of art. It would be supportive of "the interlacing of opposites and all contradictions", as called for by Tristan Tzara in the Dada Manifesto of 1918. Artists who advanced in unison in this interspace, tuned into a permanent dialogue, could increase the flow of creative energy. Prized by the surrealists, these extraordinary encounters sometimes led to wonders and produced hybrid art works or residences, unexpected supra-individual pairings. New mythologies emerged, open to the subconscious, to chance and to the legends of different cultures. They helped to "muddy the waters", to the point of making the intentions and achievements of their creators unfathomable, just like the nature of their relationships.

NATURE ILLUMINATED
With the approach of the First World War, the hope of a spiritual resurrection, the antidote to Positivism, Materialism and superficiality, was the driving force of the New Artists’ Association of Munich which included Marianne von Werefkin, Vassily Kandinsky and Alexej Jawlensky. These artists offered an internal journey through a subjective, non-conventional nature, avoiding the material limits of the real, to create works which when contemplated caused a vibration of the soul. Their introspective experiments were developed into theories by Vassily Kandinsky in his theoretical work, Du spiritual dans l’art, (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), published in 1911. This writing inspired numerous artists, from the United States and Mexico to England, who also wished not to reproduce the state of the world, but to express their own interior vision. This idealist impulse was initiated at a time when the industrialisation and modernisation of towns was accelerating. The artist couples tried, at the same time, to understand these phenomena, to capture them in their work, but also to escape from them to make it easier to hear their internal voice and reveal their relationship, often pantheistic, with nature.


1 Surrealist study in Minotaure (Minotaur) 1933, André Breton, in collaboration with Paul Éluard, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism) 1938.