Le Centre Pompidou dédie une nouvelle galerie à la photographie — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 5, 2014 → February 2, 2015

Located in the Forum on level -1 of the building, the idea behind the new «Galerie de photographies» of 200 m2, with free access, is to make more generous use of the rich and varied photographic resources of the Musée National d’Art Moderne by offering visitors fresh interpretations of a collection containing 40,000 prints and over 60,000 negatives.

Today, this collection is one of the few in the world capable of presenting a comprehensive history of modern and contemporary photography in all its diversity. Its highlights include the Twenties and Thirties, the work of Man Ray, Brassaï and Brancusi, and the New Vision and Surrealism.

Surrealism is, in fact, the movement to which the inaugural exhibition pays tribute, with a first-ever retrospective devoted to the work of Jacques-André Boiffard.

Jacques André Boiffard, Renée Jacobi, vers 1930, 0 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, tirage d’époque Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne, Paris Photo : © Centre Pompidou, MNAM / CCI, Dist. RMN-GP / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM / CCI © Mme Denise Boiffard

Photography will still be much in evidence at the museum in the multidisciplinary circuit of the modern and contemporary collections, where the various disciplines dialogue together. But it will be given further visibility in this new dedicated gallery, which will regularly feature three exhibitions each year. These might be thematic or monographic, and will be based on various approaches: historical, cross-period or contemporary.

The inaugural exhibition: Jacques-André Boiffard, la Parenthèse surréaliste (A short Spell in Surrealism)

For the opening of its new photography gallery, the Centre Pompidou is exhibiting, for the first time, seventy photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard: the last great Surrealist photographer who has never yet featured in a museum retrospective.

Lasting only a short decade, Boiffard’s career as a photographer was dazzling, to say the least. And though limited in terms of time and quantity, his photographic works were some of the most authentically Surrealist of his time. Swelled by a number of vintage prints still in private hands, this unprecedented exhibition features Boiffard’s pictures for André Breton and Georges Bataille, his commissioned works and his more experimental pieces. Although the pictures Boiffard published in Nadja and Documents have received much critical acclaim over the past few years, particularly in the UK and the US, his work is still too little-known. In 2011, the acquisition of Christian Bouqueret’s photograph collection added 50 prints to the Centre Pompidou collection, which already contained 26 original prints by Boiffard. It is now the largest institutional collection of his photographs.

Presenting a completely new portrait of this dazzling proponent of Surrealism, this first-ever retrospective restores Jacques-André Boiffard to the place he deserves in the history of photography.