Exhibition, 5 May 2017 - 31 May 2018

L'oeil écoute

Centre Georges Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, France

Entitled “L’Œil écoute” – perhaps best rendered as “the listening ear” – this new byway winding among the founding figures and major movements of modern art takes its title from Paul Claudel’s book of the same name, published in 1946, in which the writer set himself to “listen” to a number of different paintings, among them Rembrandt’s La Ronde de nuit and Watteau’s L’Indifférent. Visitors to the Museum are thus invited to lend their eyes and ears to the Parisian nightlife that – from Montmartre to Montparnasse, from Bal Bullier to Bal Tabarin, from fancy-dress ball to Bal Banal, from Josephine Baker to the Black Birds – so enchanted modern artists and their musical colleagues, with its glittering shows and the creative spur of costumes, movements, dances and musical numbers.


Curator : Mnam/Cci, Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov