Prehistory as a discipline emerged in XIXe century. The fragmentary traces on which it is based and the mystery that surrounds them permeate the imagination of modern artists. The exhibition “Prehistory. A Modern Enigma” shows the fate of a discovery inseparable from fantasy.
How is research done, how are hypotheses formulated? How are theories invented? How is knowledge preserved? How are works exhibited? The Life of Ideas wishes, in the form of podcasts, to give a voice to the players in intellectual and cultural life. From the laboratory to the workshop, from the library to the stage, The Life of Ideas starts listening.
Remi Labrusse is co-curator of the exhibition “Prehistory. A Modern Enigma”. A historian of contemporary art, professor at the University of Paris Nanterre and director of the interdisciplinary laboratory History of Arts and Representations, he devotes a significant part of his research to the instrumental value, for the construction of modern Western identity, of the notions of the Orient and primitiveness, of the end of the XIXe century to the present day.
He is notably the author of Facing Chaos – Thoughts on Ornament in the Age of IndustryLes Presses du réel, 2018, and Prehistory. The other side of timeHazan, 2019.
National Archaeology Museum, St Germain-en-Laye
Photo © NMR-Grand Palais / Franck Raux
From Max Ernst to Yves Klein to Picasso, many modern artists have seen in prehistory a golden age of the arts, the place of a perfection forever lost, to which the artist of the XXe century can only dream with nostalgia. Miró thus writes that “painting has been in decline since the age of caves”. Like the role that ancient Greece played for German artists of the XIXe century, this ideal constitutes from the discovery of prehistory a horizon for creation, sometimes in the mode of obsession, as with Giacometti: “Drawings of caves. Drawings of caves, caves, caves, caves. There and there only is the movement successful. See why, find the possibilities.”
If prehistory haunts modern art, it is undoubtedly because prehistory as an idea gradually crystallizes throughout the XIXe century – from the analysis of fossils to the discovery of parietal art – at the very moment when this art emerged. The exhibition “Prehistory. A Modern Enigma”, on display at the Centre Pompidou until September 16, starts from this observation, without however reducing this idea of obsession to the traditional question of influence in art. Rather than closing the question by seeking answers in the works, the exhibition chooses to cultivate the ever-mysterious part of this distant era.
Museum of Man, Paris © MNHN – Jean-Christophe Domenech
By bringing together prehistoric artifacts and works of art in a modern art museum XIXe–XXe centuries, it creates resonances – sometimes to the point of indistinctness of voices – and questions the status of objects: works or traces? It also shows how art can be inscribed in the interstices left by historical research, which is helpless in the face of such remote times. Through an imposing scenography, it gives us to see and feel the fact that the discovery of prehistory, in that it engages our situation within a history of humanity, is necessarily a dizzying experience before being a scientific discipline.
Art historian and co-curator of the exhibition Rémi Labrusse offers us a guided tour of the rooms of the Centre Pompidou.
Centre Pompidou, 2019. Photo: Catherine Guesde
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