Exhibition dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg, from 21 October 2008 to 1 March 2009 in Paris.
The Music Museum in Paris is dedicating an exhibition to Serge Gainsbourg, whose popularity is currently taking on international proportions.
A cross between an exhibition and an installation, the project is the tribute of a contemporary artist to one of France's greatest musical personalities of the 20th century.
Alternately painter, writer, poet, author, singer, composer, actor and director, Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) was an artist who, throughout his career, used images - in particular, his own - in all of their forms, creating an aesthetic universe that abolished the boundaries between the "major" and "minor" arts.
The exhibition showcases the various aspects of the artist's protean oeuvre, whose particularity was to have acted, over a period of forty years, as a catalyst in every era in which Gainsbourg was active, just like that of David Bowie in England or Bob Dylan in the United States.
Gainsbourg was always ahead of his time: his writings, his songs, his collaborations, his aesthetic orientations and even the conduct of his private life quite often preceded and influenced French mores, culture and art.
He played with words and references, borrowed as much from classical as from popular culture, shifting, transforming, arranging and thereby inventing a new form of composition made up of montages and collages.
The exhibition presents some one hundred moving pictures, excerpts from films and audiovisual documents, photos, etc.
Visitors will also discover objects and works of art that belonged to the artist, such as L'Homme à tête de chou [The man with the cabbage head] by Claude Lalanne, which inspired his album of the same name, and Paul Klee's painting "Bad News from the Stars" (1913), which lent its name to Gainsbourg's 1981 album Mauvaises nouvelles des étoiles.
The famous Autoportrait (Self-Portrait), painted in 1957 and only occasionally reproduced, will be on display to the public for the first time, as well as many original manuscripts, objects and writings representing Serge Gainsbourg the writer.
Vanessa Paradis, Bambou, Alain Chamfort, Isabelle Adjani, Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Dutronc, Lulu…
The exhibition has been designed in order to give form to these three dimensions, inviting visitors on a dreamlike journey through the artist's universe. A journey that appeals to the imagination, such as that of Alice in Wonderland, a common reference in Gainsbourg's works.
The exhibition takes the form of a sensorial stroll through a maze of thematic totems three-metres high, on which several hundred luminous supports present photographic and audiovisual documents. Images file past and sounds shift around: synchronised screen images, a spatialised composition of sound, etc.
The exhibition is divided into four main periods:
The "blue period" (1958 - 1965)
Idols (1965 - 1969)
Decadence (1969 - 1979)
Ecce homo (1979 - 1991)
Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Thursday: from 12 noon to 6 pm.
Friday and Saturday: from 12 noon to 10 pm.
Sunday: from 10 am to 6 pm.
Open until 8 pm on concert nights during the "Gainsbourg Years" cycles (from 22 to 28 October and on 21 February).
Prices:
Admission to the exhibition: €8
For visitors under 18 years of age and the disabled: €4
For exhibition information:
http://www.cite-musique.fr/francais/espaces_dedies/presse/images/pdf/dp-gainsbourg.pdf
Film showings:
http://www.cite-musique.fr/francais/espaces_dedies/presse/images/pdf/dp-gainsbourg.pdf
CITE DE LA MUSIQUE
221, avenue Jean Jaurès
75019 Paris
Tel: 01 44 84 44 84
http://www.cite-musique.fr/francais/musee/expos_temporaires/prochaines_expositions.html
Metro station: Porte de Pantin (line 5)