Musée sentimental

The Lyon Art Museums Hub, Musée des Beaux-Arts/Musée d’Art Contemporain and Centre Pompidou present “Musée sentimental" (“Sentimental Museum"), an exhibition which explores a fundamental aspect of 20th-century art history : the practice of collecting among artists and its role in their creative process. Staging the most miscellaneous of objects by assembling, accumulating, proliferating, presenting them in display cases, boxes or bags, and so on, it endows them with a new dimension of memory and emotion. It reveals to visitors the sentimental bond that even the most commonplace or trivial objects can evoke.
This exhibition is presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and brings together modern and contemporary works from the three partner public institutions on an exceptional basis. It offers a journey through different, sometimes highly distinctive approaches to the collecting practice of some 60 artists and collectives from the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The concept of the “Sentimental Museum” draw its roots in both art history and the history of museums. This is mentioned at the beginning of the exhibition, in the two introductory rooms. Firstly, with Alexandre Lenoir, who in 1791 was the curator in charge of the collection of religious statues confiscated during the French Revolution, housed at the Couvent des Petits-Augustins, which he transformed into a Museum of French Monuments. This museum was the first to be founded on sentiment and not on scholarship. Secondly, with artist Daniel Spoerri’s “Musée sentimental” (Sentimental Museum), the first version of which was presented at Centre Pompidou in 1977. It was intended as a place of inspiration and emotion, where objects were chosen and assembled according to new criteria, offering a stimulating experience for the imagination.