Musicircus

Following the framework of the Beacons journey, Centre Pompidou-Metz will be presenting from Spring 2016 an exhibition exploring the links between visual arts and music. Highlighting around forty flagship artworks from the national museum of modern art, Centre Pompidou collection, the Musicircus exhibition will offer the opportunity to reinterpret the history of modern and contemporary art through the prism of music.

The exhibit will examine the practice of famous artists – amateur musicians (Wassily Kandinsky played the violin) or music-lovers (Sol LeWitt owned hundreds of recordings in his collection) – whose works were influenced by music.

From the beginning of the 20th century up until today, the journey will bring light to the paramount importance of the notions of rhythm in the birth of abstraction, as well as the links between musicality and movement at the dawn of kinetic art.

Among the works presented, the visitors will for instance be able to admire Marc Chagall's La Noce, the reconstitution of Wassily Kandinsky's murals for the Juryfreie Kunstschau exhibition at the Berlin Glaspalast in 1922, veritable symphony spread out in space, or Alexander Calder's majestic mobile, 31 janvier. The exhibition will be interspersed with rich documentary ensembles – sheet music, archive documents, videos, photographies, correspondences, theory or poetry writings, preliminary drawings, etc. – offering to the visitor a true immersion at the heart of the creative process. Accompanied in this discovery by the music that fed the artists imagination, the visitors will be invited to wander freely, building according to their desires a sensitive visit. The Grande Nef will thus turn into a laboratory of creation in all its forms, cadenced by a unique programme of installations, performances and concerts at the very heart of the exhibition, allowing the music to harmoniously converse with the journey.

A catalog will accompany the exhibition.

Curators: Emma Lavigne, Director of Centre Pompidou-Metz Anne Horvath, Research Officer, Centre Pompidou-Metz