July 17 - October 18, 2020
Like an archipelago, the exhibition Archipel, Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel presents a variety of groups of works by artists, movements, media, techniques, provenances, and types, all forming a coherent whole. This reflection of the extraordinary Jean-Jacques Lebel Endowment Fund explores several chapters in the history of 20th century art.
With the exhibition Archipel, the Musée d’arts de Nantes is pursuing the dialogue which was initiated in 2014 with Jean-Jacques Lebel and works in his Endowment Fund by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Francis Picabia and Yoko Ono, and including Victor Hugo, Max Ernst, and André Breton.
The works reveal the huge diversity of the Fund. Setting them in counterpoint makes it possible to identify seminal themes (madness, eroticism, revolutions, etc.) and to pay tribute both to known artists and to neglected, overlooked or anonymous artists from the world of modern and contemporary art dear to Jean-Jacques Lebel (Antonin Artaud, Carolee Schneemann, Isabelle Waldberg, etc.).
Chief Curator:
Sophie Lévy, Director and Curator, Musée d’arts de Nantes.
Scientific curators:
Cécile Bargues, art historian and exhibition curator, Katell Jaffrès, Head of Contemporary Art Collections at the Musée d’arts de Nantes.
With support from:
Captions and credits:
- Francis Picabia, Aello, vers 1930, huile sur toile, 169 x 169 cm, Collection Hopi Lebel © ADAGP, Paris, 2020
- André Breton, Paul Eluard, Valentine Hugo, Nusch, Cadavre exquis, vers 1930, crayons de couleur sur papier noir, 31 x 23,5 cm, Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel © ADAGP, Paris, 2020
