The ensemble of eighty three works of forty five artists, mostly paintings, which is on loan from the Swiss private collection, was assembled over three generations, affording us the opportunity to retrace the history of modern art from the 1880s until the present day.
Most of the major movements, currents and trends that have marked the evolution of painting are touched upon here in varying degrees of detail: Impressionism, Symbolism, Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Japonisme, Synthetism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They reflect the increasing changes imposed on perspective, colour and figuration, as well as the historical context in which they were conceived.
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse:
The role played by Picasso and Matisse in the evolution of modern art was so fundamental that both perpetually moved between the various artistic movements of their era, without ever fully joining one. Thanks to the tremendous number of works they left behind, these two shook the foundations of painting, sculpture and drawing. One thing they both have in common is a simplicity of execution that only better reveals their expressive capacity.
Pablo Picasso, Satyr
The figure of the fawn, or satyr, appears more than 700 times in Picasso's oeuvre, and eventually ousted another hybrid creature that was central to his work: the Minotaur.
Henri Matisse, Head of a Young Girl, 1947, (India ink on wove paper)
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman in Profile, 1913Pablo Picasso, The Frugal Repast, 1904, (etching and scraper on zinc printed on wove paper)
A print of the famous Frugal Repast from an era when Picasso painted marginal people and travelling circus performers. He learned the techniques of etching and drypoint.
Pablo Picasso, Bullfight, 1960, (mixed media on paper)Destination Paris:
The term Ecole de Paris was created to designate the totality of European artists who flocked to Paris from the end of the 1890s. It encompassed extremely diverse contributions to modern painting, including Wassily Kandinsky, Amedeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall, all of whom cannot be assimilated to any one particular current. When he resigned himself to abandoning sculpture, his first love, Modigliani revolutionised the art of the portrait and the nude. As for Chagall, he imagined his own pictorial universe characterised by the perpetual recalling of the themes of love and tolerance.
Amedeo Modigaliani, Portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1915, (oil on paper mounted on canvas)
Marc Chagall, Bouquet of Mimosas, 1954-55, (oil on canvas)
Sam Szafran the Unifier:
Szafran holds an unusual place in contemporary art at the end of the 20th century. Despite his status as a self-taught painter he reintroduced into painting the long-neglected technique of pastel and led it to a higher level of excellence. Fascinated by the new perspectives that were afforded by the various focal lengths used in the cinema industry, he presented a new way of seeing the world through angles unexplored until then.
This exploration continued with watercolour that he used to work on a larger scale. Thus, Szafran combined a classical tradition with contemporary innovations, far from any affiliation with a specific group.
Sam Szafran, Plant Watercolour (Faceless Lilette). 2009, (watercolour on paper)
Szafran made his studio a sumptuous oasis. The predominance of flora took on a threefold symbolic value: to the joy of finally owning a studio that he could decorate as he wished was added the happiness of seeing in plants both a nod to Matisse and a kind of miniature forest.
Sam Szafran, The Bellini Print Shop, 1974, (pastel on cardboard)
Szafran took part in the purchase of a print workshop on rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, in Paris, at the end of the 1960s and christened it Bellini in homage to the Venetian painters Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. It would become a recurrent motif in his work for close to forty years and afforded him the opportunity to adapt his use of pastels to meticulous descriptions of the various machines along with architectural details.
Sam Szafran, Staircase, 2002, (pastel on paper)
Towards the end of the 1960s Szafran paid a visit to a friend at 54 rue de Seine. He was captivated by the staircase that he had to climb and over the years he would immortalise it from every angle, by day and by night. He made of this common space, up until then overlooked in painting, an obssessive place of memory, existential questioning and aesthetic experimentation.
