Christian Bérard / Excentrique Bébé, installation view / Photo NMMM/Andrea Rossetti, 2022
Christian Bérard / Excentrique Bébé
Jul 9 – Oct 16, 2022
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco
Villa Paloma, Monaco

Christian Bérard, Excentrique Bébé continues the NMNM program of exhibitions dedicated to the revolutionary aesthetics developed by Serge Diaghilev in Monte-Carlo. Heralding certain aspects of contemporary art, the cross-disciplinary approach taken by the founder of the Ballets Russes brought radical transformation to the decorative arts during the 1910s and ’20s and had a lasting influence on visual and performance art to this day.

Following the exhibitions Portraits d’Intérieurs and Designing Dreams, a Celebration of Leon Bakst, Célia Bernasconi, chief Curator at the NMNM, is extending, for this new project, the dialogue begun in 2014 with the artist Nick Mauss, with the purpose of presenting the extraordinary modernity of Christian Bérard, affectionately referred to as Bébé by his friends.

Adopting an off-centered perspective, the exhibition is founded on the notion of “eccentric modernisms” defined by the American academic Tirza True Latimer, who proposes an inclusive reconsideration of official art history in order to reassess artists relegated to its margins.

Featuring interior views and Mediterranean landscapes, the exhibition makes reference to the places associated with Bérard’s many stays in the south: these include Monte Carlo, where he produced his first designs for the Ballets Russes in 1932, Tamaris, where he had his studio during the summer period, the Lily Pastré estate in Marseille, and the villa belonging to Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles in Hyères. Over 300 paintings, drawings, photographs and interior decorations trace Christian Bérard’s encounters and collaborations with the great creators of the time, among whom Jean Cocteau, Louis Jouvet, Christian Dior and Gabrielle Chanel.

Throughout the exhibition, works by Nick Mauss invoke Bérard as a lost practitioner of modernism’s irreverence, taking up his techniques to re-entwine the practices of drawing, writing, and decoration, and suggesting a continuity between staged and domestic spaces.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • Impossible Music
    Sep 30 – Dec 10, 2023
    Miller Institute for Contemporary Art
    Pittsburgh, USA

    Opening September 30 at the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Impossible Music brings together sounds, scores, sculptures, video, and live performances to extend discourses on conceptual and experimental music and explore its intersections across different art forms. Marking the first joint curatorial collaboration of curator Candice Hopkins, artist, composer Raven Chacon, with curator, researcher, Stavia Grimani, the interdisciplinary group exhibition features work by boundary-defying composers, artists, (more…)