La Figuration dans tous ses états : la figuration moderne au XXe siècle

While abstraction represents the great paradigm shift of the 20th century, other artists rejected the academic and bourgeois tradition through figuration. While Cubism is considered one of the foundations of abstraction, Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger never considered themselves abstract. The path of colour taken by the great representatives of the Fauve movement places the human figure at centre stage, as the works of Kees Van Dongen prove. Expressionist artists in turn distort reality in a poetic way, a manifesto against academic beauty. Artists such as Chaim Soutine and Gen Paul would go on to inspire American abstract expressionism decades later. The surrealists, in turn, brought figuration into the realm of dreams and the imagination.

For centuries, pictorial and sculptural representations have fascinated humanity. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of abstraction and the liberation of painting from all constraints of figuration, figurative painting became a difficult term. Modern art and abstract art became synonymous at that time. Has figuration become a vestige, a survivor from another world? Its persistence within avant-garde movements shows that abstraction is not the only path taken by artists to renew the language of the visual arts. Figuration in all its forms follows on from and is a continuation of the exhibition Abstraction in all its forms held by the gallery in 2018, a way of showing the public the other path of modern visual art.

In the post-war period, the human figure once again became a central preoccupation of artists, in an existential need to question our place in the world. Post-war figuration positioned itself as a countermovement to the geometric or lyrical abstraction that dominated and had become a stylistic imperative. The works of artists such as Eugène Leroy and Fautrier are on the borderline between figuration and abstraction, a manifesto of the place of man himself at that time. The art brut of Gaston Chaissac or Jean Dubuffet provides an alternative to the European cultural tradition. The Nouveaux réalistes such as Yves Klein, Niki de Saint-Phalle or César represent a response to American Pop Art from across the Atlantic. These artists thus lay the foundations for figurative art in the 20th century.

 

La Galerie Jean-François Cazeau, installée à Paris dans le Marais depuis 2009, dresse des ponts entre les Maîtres Modernes et l’art de l’après-guerre des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, tout en s’ouvrant à l’art contemporain. Depuis 2009, elle organise des expositions thématiques autour des grands mouvements historiques du XIXe et XXe, comme l’exposition monopgraphique Riopelle (2010), la première rétrospective Afro en France (2013), Jean Miro: la simplicité poétique (2014), Picasso: Mon ami, Tabaraud (2014), L’Art abstrait géométrique (2017), L’Abstraction dans tous ses états (2018), Giacometti Intime (2018), Pablo Picasso: MasterPrints (2023) et la rétrospective André Masson en 2024, à l’occasion du Centenaire du surréalisme.

 

L’exposition La Figuration dans tous ses états offre une vue panoramique des mouvements figuratifs de la modernité, à partir de l’impressionnisme, post-impressionnisme et l’École de Pont-Aven jusqu’à l’après-guerre.