L’Âge atomique — Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris
The Museum of Modern Art in Paris presents L’Âge atomique, an exhibition of extraordinary density, whose relevance serves as a reminder that behind the nuclear catastrophe lies a twist in our history that the present has by no means healed.
L’Âge atomique — Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire @ Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris from October 11, 2024 to February 9, 2025. Learn more Through a journey rich in remarkable depth and scholarship that skillfully combines chronology with thematic exploration (the hallmark of exhibitions with intelligent inquiries), L’Âge atomique unfolds in the museum’s corridors like a striking polyphony. Viewers are taken from the formal invention of a future to be rebuilt to the plastic experiments aimed at expressing the ineffable elements of a past to be reconstituted.Reflecting this unique turning point in history, art becomes infused with the most singular inventions and intentions to breathe life into what seems capable of annulling it. Major movements of the 20th century collide in particles embracing the proliferation characteristic of this era, where perspectives from the ends of the earth are shared; Dali, Pollock, Sigmar Polke, Loie Fuller, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Asger Jorn, Barnett Newman, Wilfredo Lam, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Enrico Baj, Yves Klein, Alberto Burri, Francis Bacon, Yoko Ono, Le Corbusier, Jim Shaw, Miriam Cahn, Luc Tuymans, On Kawara, Boris Mikhailov… The list of legends is overwhelming in its sheer gravity—and its almost exclusively masculine cast, only symbolically balanced by a Feminism section focusing on ecology and anti-militarism. This adds little unity to the symphony of passions, except for the radical will to stand apart.
Throughout, there is the same urgency in each artistic gesture, attempting to integrate, sometimes well in advance, the causes and consequences of a scientific paradigm shift. However they approach it, each artist’s effort to grasp the new vision of the atom arises from art’s shared need to grapple with the dizzying notion of reduction to the infinitesimal.
This is a reinvention of vanitas, a search for an atomic self to transmit to the world, where the exhibition’s path also reveals a trompe-l’œil reading—able to produce art pieces as objective witnesses to a reality that can no longer be expressed in words, or, conversely, driven by a limitless and inevitably questionable fascination with technology, sometimes treating horror itself as the most grandiose spectacle.
Thus emerge countless counter-histories within a history of artists confronting their own, further expanding the realm of possibilities in this decidedly unexpected journey.
Perhaps its final surprise is revealed in a backward reading of the explosion, where one discovers the almost tragic trace of a guiding thread each artist tried to pull, embarking on the inescapable path of transforming humanity’s view of itself into a fascination with a leap into the unknown. A new era that, far from bringing answers, reshuffles the cards and redistributes chances. A trap that reverses their boldness into a roll of the dice, replaying, under the illusion of mastering the subject, the tragedy of our inherent reduction in this conquest.
Thus, the title also suggests, in the face of a humanity no longer troubled by its worth, a retreat to one’s atomic self—a nuclearization of social relations that leads to withdrawal, encapsulating the greatest danger of the atomic age: having reduced each person to their barest portion, their survival.
