There was a time not long ago when the human body—any human body—was out of fashion, at least in the art world. In 2014, New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz wrote a withering indictment of the abstract, decorator-friendly, and ultimately banal style he described as “Zombie Formalism,” which seemed to be suddenly everywhere. At that time, in the mid-aughts, perhaps the most controversial thing an artist could do was to simply depict real figures of any kind, particularly people. The human being, the original subject of art that had concerned painters since time immemorial, was suddenly, somehow, uncool.
Thank God that’s over. Figuration is back in vogue and this season at the Bourse, the Pinault family’s private museum in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, there is not one abstract canvas in sight.
The exhibition there, “Corps et Âmes,” is dedicated to over 100 works by more than 41 artists who span mediums, geographies, and chronologies, filling the entire Tadao Ando–renovated rotunda with bodies. Think: an Auguste Rodin ballerina in eyeshot of Deana Lawson portraits; Marlene Dumas canvases in conversation with nearby Peter Doig; a Richard Avedon photograph meeting one by Anne Imhof. Show-stopping moments come by way of three films by Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta (she only ever made about 100 of them) and an entire suite of monumental Georg Baselitz canvases that debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
At the base of the rotunda, serving as an alpha and omega, is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. The seven-minute masterpiece is an exploration of the Black American experience set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” which can be faintly heard throughout the Bourse, serving as a kind of soundtrack for the entire show.
The selections, curated by director general Emma Lavigne, all stem from the Pinaults’ private collection, which means that they have something else in common other than their subject matter: a collector’s particular taste. It makes “Corps et Âmes” seem both vast and focused at the same time. Artists who couldn’t be more disparate in life experience, or separated by continents and centuries, meet in a silent symposium, all probing what it means to live inside our flesh. One wonders what an institution like The Met or the Louvre might do with the same existential subject matter, extending the purview beyond recent art history to ancient cultures too.
Many of the works are compelling individually—they are among the very best examples of contemporary art in private hands—but if “Corps et Âmes” can convince us of just one thing, it is simply that it should never be out of fashion for artists to ask what it means to be human.
