| Two years after the big construction works and the process of the entire renovation, the French MOMA in Paris has finally reopened its doors to a great number of recent visitors. The intention of the City authorities who financed this huge project was to bring back some 8,000 old masterpieces which were already in the museum’s collections but to endow them with new light and image. |  |
New Light Floods In – Nina Zivancevic
Two years after the big construction works and the process of the entire renovation, the French MOMA in Paris has finally reopened its doors to a great number of recent visitors. The intention of the City authorities who financed this huge project was to bring back some 8,000 old masterpieces which were already in the museum’s collections but to endow them with new light and image. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, was not the only person to greet the renovation with delight. The population of Paris, ranging from the youngest school students to the occasional tourists and the real experts in art market welcomed this event. True, for the last couple of years, there have been very few venues in Paris that were able to exhibit the works of Modern and contemporary art in a manner that this colossal museum used to. The architecture of the building, which allows light to flood into it, has been awarded by several institutions since 1937, when it had opened and became a laurel winner.
During World War II, its numerous collections were buried in its basements and it served as the headquarters for the German Gestapo. However, since the museum officially reopened in 1961, as an institution it has inspired the best virtues of culture encouraging liberal thinking and the avant-garde in modern as much as in contemporary art.
We should notice though, that even at the time when the museum’s original architects (Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastague) inaugurated the 19,000 m. space, not enough attention had been shown to the building’s security and lighting. The accumulation of various works of art and the build up of new collections became subsequently detrimental to the original concept of space (in 1964 Raul Dufy’s Electric fairy was shoved into the museum’s Hall of the Fame), notwithstanding the daily visits of tourists that significantly endangered basic security regulations. As a result, in 1998 the Prefect of Paris had pronounced the museum unfit to continue its work and ordered the museum’s authorities to perform a number of renovations which would improve the security in the building as well as the safety of its staff and visitors. Soon after, the building was disinfected for lead and the new lighting system introduced.
In 2002, the Municipal council, together with the Ministry of Culture, financed the heftiest part of the renovation, overseeing the major work on the building and its environment. After the heaviest reconstruction phase had been executed, architect and curator Jean-Francois Bodin rearranged the permanent collection, a process that took all of 2004 and 2005. A completely new lighting system was built, together with a special air-conditioning facility. A new black multimedia hall was added to the Boltanski hall at the basement level to welcome film and video events. The museum’s monumental iron gate was completely renovated for the first time since its originators Szabo and Subes had conceived it, as well as Ingrand’s glass work and Forestier’s frontal sculptures.
The artists who were honoured to open the museum’s brand new space on February 2, 2006 were Pierre Bonnard, with a large-scale retrospective and a contemporary artist, Pierre Huyghe. As for Bonnard, he has already claimed his place in the pantheon of French Modernism. His paintings, which are marked by gentle hedonism and an artist’s love for life, are filled with a strange melancholy to be found in Tapies and Barcelo. He can be viewed as a predecessor of a special stream of postmodernism which treats the painterly subject as an object of exploration and which creates time within the time in a viewer’s perception.
This new retrospective of Bonnard’s work aims at restoring Bonnard’s reputation as a classic of modernism as much as it establishes his work in the light of the most recent art theories devoted to the treatment of the real subject in painting which is painterly and metaphysical. Various French, Russian and American museums have lent Bonnard’s paintings to Paris for the occasion and endowed the museum’s renovated halls with warmth and light which are so characteristic of Bonnard’s canvases, dreamy, erotic, distant and sensual at once.
The movements of his nudes, primarily of his wife and a muse, Martha, are intertwined with movements of light reflected in a mirror or a coffee table, then of water filling the bathtubs and various landscapes (1900-1946). The landscapes and balconies which Bonnard painted in the 30s were mainly done in Normandy; they are marked by his sense of vegetal life and a feeling for colour that comes very close to Van Gogh’s. These paintings differ a great deal from the earlier, more intimate ones where the interior has undergone certain geometrism and which has always a configuration of family figures at stake.
However, the surface of a painting has always remained the main subject for Bonnard, the one which also masters color and follows certain painterly rules. As Bonnard never abolishes the paintings subject, he often elevates it at the level of an object thus the dreamy and detached sentiment pervades his entire work. His vision often resembles a dream scene rather than an account of a family situation or an actual event that happened in his personal history. One could say that the presence of a figure is important for Bonnard as much as it is not important, as much as his palette is calm, subdued and in fact, philosophically indifferent. This calm organisation of a canvas the artist inherited from Redon who had been a metaphysically inclined Buddhist and a master of transparency. From Bonnard’s negligence of the importance of a figure stems his slow transfer into the realm of abstraction as witnessed in his latest paintings, the landscapes of French Midi. This retrospective includes also quite a large number of his drawings, photographs and journals which he wrote from 1927 through 1946.
The curator of this show was Susanne Pagé who also organized the show "Celebration Park" of a conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe, situated one flight above Bonnard’s. His show, which reopens the contemporary section of the museum, consists of two temporally different sections: the first show is entitled "Prologue" and introduces the second one to open in March 2006. Huyghe has been a founding member of an artists’ association, Leisure Time, which also includes artists such as Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Prado and Philippe Parreno, thus his installation presents an aquarium filled with books that are likely to turn into an imaginary directory of this group’s truisms and dittos. He has also installed nearby several neon panels with his truisms that shine messages such as "I haven’t had a place in a museum nor I’ve ever made a black painting." Perhaps the most interesting project that Huyghe has offered to a spectator is his script for a film which will be shown in March and which introduces two virtual dancers who move smoothly through the world of 3D cartoons. Huyghe has already shown his courage by exhibiting the brightest neon light in the space that had been constructed to be well lit and which was well cleaned and reconstructed to receive the incredible amounts of natural light in the city of lights.
