Alongside works from its own collections, the Centre Pompidou is exhibiting a selection from the Jean-Jacques Lebel endowment fund. There are 95 works in all, curated by Cécile Bargues, one of the fund’s administrators, and Anne Montfort-Tanguy, curator of the museum’s graphic art department. What is the exhibition about? A collection – now inalienable since its inception as an endowment fund – of around a thousand works built up over the years by Lebel, an artist, writer, anarchist activist (in 1968, he was one of the pillars of the student-led Movement of March 22nd), anti-colonialist, troublemaker and eternal rebel born in 1936.
It does not feature any of his own works – although he did lend one for the exhibition – but many from his friends and also the artists he loved, especially the surrealists: When he was a child, Jean-Jacques, son of the poet, art collector and dealer Robert Lebel (1901-1986), a refugee in New York during the Nazi occupation, met André Breton and literally jumped into the lap of Marcel Duchamp (his father wrote a major book about the artist in 1959), who presented and dedicated to him his self-portrait, a profile made of torn paper.
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