Folklore

Who knows that Vassily Kandinsky began his career as an ethnographer in Russia?

That Constantin Brâncui's great-grandfather built traditional wooden churches

in Romania? That Natalia Gontcharova developed abstract painting when inspired

by Spanish costumes? That Joseph Beuys announced that he saw folklore as a tool

for understanding the future, or that Marcel Broodthaers included a "folklore

section" in his Musée d’art moderne, département des Aigles?

Associated with tradition, and thus apparently opposed to the idea of

avant-garde, the world of folklore, literally "the lore of folk", the subject

of multiple controversies and infinite quarrels about definitions, infiltrated

whole swathes of modernity and contemporary creation in different ways. Far

from the clichés of an outmoded and artificial attachment to the past, artists

have found in folklore, and in its most immaterial manifestations, a source of

inspiration, a regenerative power, as well as a subject for critical analysis

and protest. Faced with works of art, objects and documents from the collection

of the Mucem, the heir to the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires,

the exhibition unveils a twofold history: that of a discipline that came into

its own at the very moment when artists were exploring isolated regions and

collecting objects, like Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier in Brittany, Vassily

Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in Russia and Bavaria, and Constantin Brâncui in

Romania, guided by the fantasy of a quest for origins.

The exhibition weaves together these different links, affording a

reinterpretation of the history of art in the light of European ethnology and

history. One section focuses particularly on the influence of ethnographical

and museographical practices on the approaches of artists like Joseph Beuys,

the artists of CoBrA, Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. Finally, in the age of

globalisation accompanied by a trend toward uniformisation, and in which

folklores entirely created for the tourist industry are perpetuated, the

exhibition explores the paradoxical "new geographies of folklore". They

continue to move with populations and are constantly reinterpreted, even

reinvented by artists. As a burning issue involving political questions of

identity and authenticity, folklore seems to offer a new vision of creation.

Conversely, the vision of artists also enables us to recontextualise and

reconsider folklore today.