At Paris' Pompidou Center, the year of the women

VIVE LA FEMME: Suzanne Valadon’s "La Chambre bleue" from 1923 is part of the exhibition.

At Paris' Pompidou Center, the year of the women
A long exhibition, 'elles@centrepompidou,' will feature hundreds of works by female artists only. Think of it as an alternate history.

Reporting from Paris -- Imagine a museum that boasts the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. Now imagine that an intrepid female curator puts all the men's work in storage and fills the permanent collection galleries with a new version of 20th and early 21st century art history, the one that women created.

Would she emerge as a champion, finally proving that women artists are as good as -- or better than -- the guys? Or would she simply expose weaknesses of the museum's collection and the art itself?

"It's a risk," says Camille Morineau, who has organized “elles@centrepompidou,” opening Wednesday at the Pompidou Center. "Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action. But the museum is avant-garde. It's part of the Centre Pompidou culture to do things differently. And we like a lot of drama. This is going to be dramatic in a big way."

A serious statement

By any definition, the installation of about 500 works by more than 200 women is an ambitious project -- a standout among museums' efforts to pay more attention to women. If not the first such exhibition in the world, as advertised, it's certainly the first on such a grand scale. And it will run for an entire year, with periodic additions and rotations of artworks.

As Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, puts it: "When you have an institution of the scale and prestige of the Pompidou devoting its entire hang of its collection thematically to women artists, it's making a very serious statement."

Beginning with early 20th century paintings by French artist Suzanne Valadon and ending with works by up-to-the-minute figures such as Japan's Mariko Mori, Switzerland's Pipilotti Rist and England's Rachel Whiteread, "elles" will offer an international array of paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, prints, videos, furniture and architectural models. Read Article...
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-elles24-2009may24,0,1787985.story

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Pour la première fois dans le monde, un musée présente ses collections au féminin. Cette nouvelle présentation des collections du Centre Pompidou est entièrement consacrée aux artistes-femmes du XXème siècle à nos jours.
Après Big Bang en 2005 et le Mouvement des Images en 2006-2007, elles@centrepompidou est la troisième présentation thématique des collections du Centre Pompidou. C'est l'occasion pour l'institution, qui a su constituer la première collection européenne d'art moderne et contemporain, d'affirmer son engagement auprès des artistes-femmes, toutes nationalités et disciplines confondues, de remettre les créatrices au centre de l'histoire de l'art moderne et contemporain du XXe et du XXIe siècles.
Des figures emblématiques telles Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva voisinent avec les grandes créatrices contemporaines, parmi lesquelles Sophie Calle, Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois ont fait l'objet d'expositions monographiques récentes au Centre Pompidou.

Pluridisciplinaire, la programmation permet d'approfondir les domaines culturels que les femmes ont investis depuis un siècle, aussi bien dans la littérature que dans l'histoire de la pensée, de la danse ou encore du cinéma.
http://www.ina.fr/fresques/elles-centrepompidou/Html/PrincipaleAccueil.php
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/