Sécessions

By exhibiting around forty exceptional pieces by Josef Hoffmann and Ettore Sottsass, Romain Morandi has chosen to confront two major figures in the history of architecture and design. While Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) is considered one of the fathers of the modern movement, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) was one of the first to question its foundations. There is, however, a deep link and a true filiation between these two creators of genius: it was driven by the same refusal of academicism that Sottsass undertook, at the turn of the 1950s, a long work of deconstruction of the principles erected by Hoffmann at the end of the 19th century. Where Hoffmann spoke out against official salon art, Sottsass rejects the impoverished language of a modernism locked in its own codes. Half a century apart, both, in their own way, decided to “secession”, turning the history of design and decorative arts upside down.

In 1896, upon leaving the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he was a student of the great architect Otto Wagner (like Ettore Sottssas’ father), Josef Hoffmann spent a year in Italy. On his return he founded La Sécession with Josef Maria Olbrich, an association of artists and architects whose objective is to bring together and renew the applied arts by creating a total art (Gesamkunstwerk). They thus intend to develop a new form of artistic expression that is “spiritual, modern and authentic” applied to all fields of creation.

“Our art is not a fight of modern artists against the ancients, but the promotion of the arts against peddlers who pose as artists and who have a commercial interest in not letting art flourish. Commerce or art, this is the issue of our Secession. It is not a question of an aesthetic debate, but of a confrontation between two states of mind“, we can read in the first issue of the magazine Ver Sacrum, official organ for disseminating the Secession as a Manifesto.

More than half a century later, the actors and the issues have changed but the deep conviction of Ettore Sottsass remains the same: it is not a question of refusing the part of heritage inherent in any creative act but of defending the idea that art and creation have a role and a power to transform society.

Although his first creations were anchored in a grammar inherited from the modern movement, Sottsass gradually made a stylistic shift. It was during the 1960s and 1970s that he laid the foundations of his formal vocabulary, which led him, at the beginning of the 1970s, to join the Anti-Design movement, the slayer of consumerism and mass production. It is in this perspective that the famous exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” was held in 1972 at the MoMA in New York which brought together, in addition to his production, works by Mario Bellini, Joe Colombo, Ugo La Pietra, Gaetano Pesce or Superstudio.

For Josef Hoffmann, an object must be “aesthetically beautiful” but also “morally good”. its quality does not reside only in the work of the artist’s hand, it is also expressed in the clarity of the formal expression and the integrity of the workmanship. According to him, “under certain conditions a reasonable mass-produced item can be created using machines, but it must nevertheless unconditionally bear the imprint of workmanship.” He worked closely with Gustav Siegel, one of his former students, who headed the workshops of the Jacob and Josef Khon company, which gradually established itself as one of the leading furniture manufacturers in Austria -Hungary. Hoffmann also uses certain models imagined by Siegel in his projects, blurring the boundaries of their collaboration. Together they will participate in forging the creator-editor couple, thus contributing to the advent of design in its current sense. The “Sitzmachine” armchair (Literally “Machine for sitting”) presented for the first time at the Milan Fair in April 1906 constitutes one of the most striking examples of the collaboration between Josef Hoffmann and J&J Kohn.

From the start of his career, Ettore Sottsass has also always worked jointly with artisans, allowing him to continue his work of experimentation on shapes and materials. From his friendship with Aldo Londi, the artistic director of Bitossi e Figli, an extremely sophisticated production was born; Sottsass revisits traditional Tuscan ceramics with more modern decorative motifs, covered with metallic oxides, platinum or lava. With the jeweler Gem from Milan, he offers pieces combining lapis lazuli, coral or turquoise with gold. Finally, with the cabinetmakers from Poltronova, he combines ceramic, aluminum or lacquer with traditional walnut. The Italian architect’s impressive production is always the result of a close relationship and deep respect between the creator and his publisher.

Whatever the field of intervention (architecture, furniture, lighting, fire arts, textiles, brassware), the aesthetic defined by Josef Hoffmann is based on a geometric ideal. Described as “proto-cubist”, his creations open, through their purity, the path to functionalism. From the end of the 19th century, Hoffmann developed a system based on the line, the square, the circle and their volumetric variation, the cube, the block or the sphere. The line finds materiality in the bars of the chairs, tables or benches. We find the circle in the work of curved wood, which gives sensuality to the most voluminous seats and facilitates their integration into the space. The only concession made to the ornament, if it did not participate in the structure of the object, the sphere intervenes as a punctuation. The square emphasizes the synthetic character of both the furniture and the architecture. Worked in pattern, its repetition in solids or voids allows to structure the composition of the objects.

Far from refusing the Viennese aesthetic heritage, Sottsass appropriates it and revisits its key elements. It was during his collaboration with Poltronova (1958-1974) that he developed his own formal language. He abandons the organic forms dear to “Good design” in favor of simple geometric figures, which now constitute the fundamental principle of his plastic expression.

The different parts of a piece of furniture are thus broken down into autonomous volumes, highlighted by a color, a material or a pattern, to which equal importance is given. These are then redistributed by playing scale ratios or repeated rhythmically. The color (red in the first place) promotes “greater sensory reading”, before the use of patterns (mainly the grid or the stripe) becomes recurrent; the vertical lines that he places on his furniture, symbols according to him of calm and serenity, act as signage. For the lacquer process, Sottsass substitutes a new printed laminate from Abet Laminatti which he applies to his famous Superbox cabinets and then to storage furniture. At the end of the 1970s, Ettore Sottsass definitively broke with functionalism. He joined Alchymia, then founded the Memphis group in 1981. Through its liberating and experimental vision of design, this movement, which favors the symbolic and emotional dimension of objects, confirms the bankruptcy of modern ideologies. Memphis has the effect of a bomb.

September 7 – October 15, 2023

Galerie Romain Morandi

18 rue Guénégaud

A major exhibition on the story of an extraordinary friendship between two icons of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The exhibition spans a century of art, poetry, music and theater through great figures of art.

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.” Gerstrude Stein

A phrase that could characterize the fertile dialogue between the poet Gerstrude Stein and the painter Pablo Picasso. A friendship that was formed around their respective work, the founders of Cubism and the literary and pictorial avant-gardes of the 20th century.

Gertrude Stein, an American Jewish immigrant, settled in Paris shortly after the arrival of Pablo Picasso in 1901. Their position as foreigners, with approximately mastery of French, and their marginality founded their belonging to Parisian bohemia and their artistic freedom. Their friendship was sealed by the portrait of Stein that Picasso decided to paint in 1905, shortly after their meeting. This painting will require no less than 90 pose sessions and will forever fix the features of the poet and patron. United by the same fascination with Cézanne, the painter was inspired by the Portrait of the Woman with a Fan hanging in Stein’s apartment, rue de Fleurus. Gertrude also places the birth of her writing under the aegis of this pictorial work.

As her friendship with Picasso deepened, Gertrude Stein played an increasing role in painting purchases. Around 1907-08, she and her brother acquired a set of fourteen studies for the Demoiselles d’Avignon and the Nude à la draperie, testing to a real commitment to the painter’s side as he approached the difficulty and then little understood phase of his pre -cubist painting. It was at this time that works as significant as the Nude with a Towel or the Three Women appeared on the walls of the Rue de Fleurus.

Building her writing on the flatness of a continuous present, an unfolded, deconstructed syntax, which plays on the orality of repetition, Gertrude Stein began her great fresco, The Making of Americans, in 1910. She wrote portraits, notably those of Matisse and Picasso, a diptych published in Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, in 1912, which were perceived as Cubist texts, like the works of Picasso that she collected. Crowned with her status as protector of the arts, since the war she has been surrounded by young Americans who come to train in the artistic capital. It was she who named the young writers who visited her, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson, “Lost Generation”.

The exhibition highlights the posterity of the two artists through great figures of art: Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven, Glenn Ligon , John Cage, Steve Reich, Bob Wilson, Philip Glass… 28 works centered around the Cubist years and the Demoiselles d’Avignon, as well as the archives of the patron and poet.

The American posterity of this dialogue forms the second part of the exhibition (the “American Moment”) with emblematic works from Steinian writing, from the 1950s to the present day: from the Living Theater and the musical, plastic and neo-dada and fluxus theatrical works, through minimal art around language and the circle, to neo-conceptual and critical works.

September 13, 2023 – January 28, 2024

MUSEE du LUXEMBOURG

9 rue de Vaugirard 75006 Paris

01 40 13 62 00

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The Cartier Foundation invites the Australian sculptor Ron Mueck to exhibit a set of works never before shown in France alongside emblematic works from his career. the Foundation is therefore pursuing a long-term dialogue with this artist whom it revealed to the French public in 2005 and whose works are as rare as expected.

This third exhibition bears witness to the recent evolution of Ron Mueck’s practice. The scale and craftsmanship of the monumental installation Mass marks a new milestone in the artist’s career. This work, commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) in 2017, is the largest he has ever produced. Composed of one hundred gigantic human skulls, Mass is reconfigured by the artist according to the space he has available for each presentation. It offers a fascinating physical and psychic experience that leads us to contemplate the fundamental notions of human existence. Its title alone gives an idea of the polysemy of the work. The English word “mass”, meaning both a heap, a heap, a crowd but also a mass, is a source of interpretations specific to each visitor. The iconography of the skull itself is ambiguous. If the history of art associates it with the brevity of human life, it is also omnipresent in popular culture.

For the artist, “the human skull is a complex object, a powerful, graphic icon that one immediately identifies. Familiar and strange at the same time, it repels as much as it intrigues. It is impossible to ignore, subconsciously capturing our attention. The skulls are presented as a group, a sum of individuals that imposes itself on the visitor. In this, Mass differs from the previous works of Ron Mueck who had, until then, always represented the human being in his individuality.

Also exhibited for the first time in France, Dead Weight (2021), a nearly two-ton cast iron skull, contrasts with his usually naturalistic works. The traces of the molding of this sculpture remain, the artist having voluntarily left the marks of its manufacture and the raw nature of the material to speak for themselves.

The exhibition also unveils a spectacular sculpture representing a group of menacing dogs, created especially for the occasion, which Ron Mueck was already feeding into the project when he was preparing his monographic exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in 2013.

Three emblematic works from the 2000s are also presented. For Baby (2000), a tiny sculpture of a newborn baby boy, Ron Mueck modeled an image found in a medical textbook showing a baby held aloft by its feet just minutes after delivery. . At the antipodes of the installation Mass, an evocation of the post-mortem body, this meticulous representation of the first moments of life attracts attention just as intensely. By reversing the original image and hanging the sculpture on the wall like a crucifix, the artist first presents his work as a religious icon. But on closer observation, the visitor is transfixed by the almost insolent gaze of the baby.

Man in a boat (2002) depicts a particularly mysterious scene. A man whose arms hide his nudity is seated at the prow of a long boat and leans forward, with a questioning or scrutinizing gaze. As often with Ron Mueck, this character seems to “withdraw or drift into inner states that are almost inaccessible to us”, in the words of art critic Justin Paton.

With A Girl (2006), the visitor finds himself face to face with a gigantic newborn, who takes his first look at the world. Stained with traces of blood, the umbilical cord still present, her body is still marked by the experience of childbirth. The artist plays on an impressive distortion of scale to evoke both the miracle and the ordeal of birth, a forgotten yet fundamental moment for each of us.

June 8 – November 5, 2023

FONDATION CARTIER

261 boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris

fondation-cartier