Jean Paulhan, In the secret of modern painting

du 27 mai 2015 au 21 décembre 2015

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This temporary exhibition-file is presented in one of the rooms of the Museum, on the 5th floor, as part of the new presentation of the modern collections.

It was during the Occupation, in 1942, that exchanges intensified between Jean Paulhan, writer and editor, host of La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the painter Georges Braque. Paulhan then seeks refuge in art from the heartbreaks that literature is experiencing. Shortly after, he met Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. He senses in their paintings the revelation of a “secret”, which he sets out to define in his writings on painting. He also confides the two founding experiences of his “initiation” to modern art. The first is that of the “dark room”, an experience of the emergence of reality in the darkness, which Paulhan puts in parallel with the revelation of the “truth”. objects in Cubist works. The second is that of the “blind spot”, a zone of failure of vision, constitutive of the gaze, which he compares to informal art: the lack is understood there as the very heart of painting. Among the works that Paulhan dedicated to art, let us cite in particular Braque le patron and Fautrier l'enragé, exhibited here.

Anne Lemonnier

Curator: Mnam/Cci / Anne Lemonnier

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