25 YEARS AGO? Not possible.......

août 23, 2014

When you get skies like this in the evening .....

and in the morning the light is grey and it looks like rain, is it going to be another reading day or will I go off to the Beaubourg?

When crossing the bridge, I looked down at « Paris Plage » and wondered if the tourists - the few of them - felt they were in the midst of winter or summer. Summer in Paris this year, is a bit of a euphemism.

There was a small exhibition called « Magiciens de la Terre » - a Look back at a legendary exhibition. I could not believe for one moment it had been 25 years ago. Impossible.

25 years ago at La Villette

I had taken a quick look at the short video on the Beaubourg site. Frankly, I was not too sure that this was for me. Far too many pictures on walls or looking like sardines in a can. At 11am, opening time, the tourists were not on Paris Plage but at the Beaubourg.

The exhibition, as I remember it, was very much a first as it presented artists from every continent in the world and not exclusively Europe and North America. Somehow, contemporary art « grew up » and a legend was born around young artists coming from all over the globe.

I actually remembered a few of the aboriginal drawings and even some of the African. This is a « look-back » which made it possible to follow the course of the « Magiciens » and relive this venture in a highly original setting. It worked too and I spent over an hour going from one to another.

Picabia projects

In the opposite gallery there was a small exhibition on Man Ray,(1890-1976) Picabia (1879-1953) and the review « Littérature » (1922-1924). André Breton (1896-1966) was the chief editor for this review. He gave a free hand to Francis Picabia, one of the key figures in the Dada movement and to Man Ray, the American photographer who lived in Paris in 1921. The small exhibition unveiled nine original covers for the review and seventeen alternative projects - most of them I found more interesting and more original.