The Centre Pompidou-Metz presents, in collaboration with the Barbican Centre in London, a major interdisciplinary exhibition dedicated to creative couples, such as Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Charles and Ray Eames... The exhibition explores the creative process generated by the passionate, complex and sometimes subversive love relationships that unite avant-garde artists of the first half of the 20th century.
Whether official, clandestine, exclusive or free, these mythical couples, formed by artists such as Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Man Ray and Lee Miller, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, constitute in themselves fertile zones of exchange, confrontation and influence where works, concepts and movements flourish. The intimate and loving life of artists, consubstantial with creation, is reflected in the works intended to be seen and exhibited. Beyond this sentimental value, the exhibition provides an essential insight into the evolution of the mores and thoughts of the protagonists of modernity and reveals little-known collaborations. Personalities who have remained in the shadow of their partner are also presented, including the draftswoman Suzanne Malherber, known as Marcel Moore, companion of the photographer and author Lucy Schwob, known as Claude Cahun, or the pianist Nelly von Moorsel, wife of the painter, architect and theoretician Theo van Doesburg
The exhibition brings together masterpieces, more than 150 of which come from the Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Modern Art, but also from prestigious international collections. She explores the artistic trajectory of these intimate pairs to offer a transversal re-reading of art history. It is the very notion of modernity that is questioned through the prism of this organic, protean, creative and sometimes ephemeral cell that the couple of artists has been.
