It is always strong feelings, understood and visceral that give shape to art and among these, love is the one that carries with it the greatest example of hope and strength.
In London, the Barbican Art Gallery wanted to celebrate the great couples of twentieth-century art: from Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, to Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, to Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, to name a few.
The exhibition is titled Modern Couples: Compaction, Intimacy and the Avant-keep and will be open to visitors at the Gallery di Silk Street in the British capital until 27 January 2019, offering visitors an intimate insight into the painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, literature , performing Article of the most famous artists of the twentieth century. The review is organized by Centre Pompidou Metz in collaboration with the Barbican Centre and is cured by Emma Lavigne, Jane Alison, Coralie malissard, Elia Biezunski e Cloé pity.
It seems to me very interesting that in this historical moment, when the idea of gender and the status of women was beginning to be questioned, the couple suddenly became a kind of creative unit that allowed some women to reinvent their identity ", has explained Emma Lavigne.
The exhibition wants to go beyond the concept whereby the woman is the artist's silent muse, instead here they are both active subjects of the couple and in which both are capable of inspiring passion, obsession and power.
Among the works in the exhibitions are photographs portraying Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Lee Miller and Man Ray, Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko, Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather; the sculptures of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin; the works of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; the photo of Pablo Picasso taken by Dora Maar; the shot by Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués, and by Emilie Flöge, Gustav Klimt's muse.
Literature plays an important role in the exhibition by turning the spotlight on the writer Virginia Woolf and on his writing Orlando, 1928, dedicated to the poetess Life Sackville-West – with whom she had a tormented relationship – and which she described as “a little book”, while Nigel Nicholson, son of Vita Sackville – West defined as “the longest love letter in history”.
The exhibition itinerary is organized according to a sequence of spaces each dedicated to a couple and in which not only the artists' works of art are collected, but also documents, letters, writings, books and photographs, all bearing witness to the love that bound the two, explaining their lives, meeting and affinities, but also stormy love, betrayals, crises and obsessions. The exhibition also includes two special sections, one dedicated to the "Luck Encounter" of the Surrealism and the other to the radical artists of the Rive Left-footed Parisian in the 20s and 30s.
“We have tried to give a new interpretation to the history of conventional art, focusing on the importance of collaboration and the most intimate and personal relationships,” he explains Jane Alison, head of visual arts at the Barbican. – It is an exhibition about modern art and modern love.”
