Long appreciated according to criteria having nothing to do with aesthetics, gathered under the same label while their pictorial universes differ greatly, modern Primitives have been the subject of blissful revisions for some years. Free from the primitivism that marked the first half of the twentieth century and that greatly influenced their recognition, the time has come to take another look at their work and, while trying to better understand the relationships they have had with modernity, to consider a more pictorial reading of their work. It is with this in mind that the present exhibition aims to highlight the importance of colour in the painting of some of the modern Primitives. The use of a bright colour palette, the fairly frequent use of primary colours, characterize the works of André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis, Louis Vivin, and of the one who was considered their father, Henri Rousseau.
Enlivening their canvases with a bright gaiety, this academic and simplified use of colors also invites us to wonder. Would this not be one of the reasons why the painting of the modern Primitives interested the avant-garde that much? One of the essential features of modern painting is the use of a refined palette, sometimes reduced to the primary colours applied to the canvas in large plain areas. From Paul Gauguin to Wassily Kandinsky, to the simultaneity of Sonia and Robert Delaunay – four painters whose appeal to the modern Primitives is well known – modern artists have exalted colour for colour, some even to the point of establishing the concept of “pure colour”. The exhibition Bleu-Rouge-Jaune, the palette of modern Primitives is an opportunity to analyze this pictorial originality through twenty works, some of which have never yet been shown to the public.
Marion Alluchon, exhibition curator
Marion Alluchon holds a PhD in art history and is responsible for the programming of contemporary art, design, crafts, architecture and fashion at the Swedish Institute in Paris. She is the author of a thesis on the reception of naive art, «Du Douanier Rousseau à Gaston Chaissac: la reconnaissance de l’art naïf en France et au Etats-Unis (1886-1948)» defended in 2016 at the University of Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work focuses on primitivism, modernity and naive art, its definition, reception and its artists.