The exhibition “ Art at war » at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris brings together more than 400 works produced in France between 1938 and 1947. One of its two exhibition curators, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, deciphers the historical and artistic issues of an art marked by exile, occupation, and camps.
“ Art at war » is a retrospective exhibition of a well-known period in French history, that of the Second World War. But works produced during this period of conflict and occupation have received little visibility until now. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Professor of art history at Sciences Po where she also directs the research group “ art and society “, is one of the rare historians to have taken an interest a few years ago in this singular artistic production, this “ art of defeat » long passed over in silence. Around a few works chosen from the exhibition, she describes here the heterogeneous, almost unclassifiable nature of an artistic production which reflects the personal experiences of exiled, excluded, or interned artists.
From the anguish that appears in the works of the surrealists from 1938 to the physical and moral suffering that emerges from the drawings produced in the camps a few years later, the exhibition aims to place these works in their original historical context, without which their content and technique would remain elusive. By returning to the creation of an official art with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1942, it also illustrates the complexity of the relationships that existed between art and politics until 1945. But the pieces The most striking of the exhibition undoubtedly remain the committed works, created by artists fighting against the enemy and the occupier, works that remained invisible throughout the duration of the war because they were hidden by their creators or rejected by the Nazis and the Vichy regime. How to understand this artistic production ? Can we speak of acts of resistance when the denunciation remains secret here and cannot influence the course of things? ? Laurence Bertrand Dorléac sheds light on these questions which touch on the artistic and historical significance of works produced under the constraint of war and occupation.
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac also published in La Vie des Idées: “ When history drives you crazy », October 26, 2011.
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Photographs: Ariel Suhamy. Comments collected