Galerie
Mark Müller

For this exhibition to be presented at three consecutive sites – the LAAC in Dunkirk, the Saint-Roch Museum in Issoudun and finally the Sainte-Croix Abbey Museum in Les Sables-d’Olonne – Daniel Abadie has chosen nearly 150 rarely or never before exhibited works that offer a new perspective on the past century’s artistic movements and their often-surprising inter-relations, while also echoing and shedding light on the LAAC collection.

This project was inspired by Daniel Abadie’s shock discovery in 1991 at the Albright-Knox Museum of Buffalo (New York), when confronted with the juxtaposition of three fundamentally different paintings dating from 1913, by the artists Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay. He suddenly understood that what links the painters of any given generation is the lesson drawn from their predecessors, with each artist answering in his or her own manner the questions raised by the previous generation. This new approach to 20th-century painting differs from the established practice of observing multiple incompatible movements in a state of cohabitation.
Indeed, the exhibition underlines this fascinating paradox. “Other eyes, from Apollinaire to today” begins following the Second World War, in resonance with the LAAC collection and evoking the artistic explorations of the early 20th century.

The exhibition shows how successive approaches form unexpected ensembles, when one looks beyond their apparent contradictions. It links the questions raised with the proffered solutions, thereby offering a new view of this so-close century. And it reveals the extent to which each generation – within a context of uncertainties, debates and contradictions – reacts, echoes, resists or pursues the research and searchings of its predecessors.