Musée Cantini

L’(OEIL) OBJECTIF

From July 05, 2024 to November 03, 2024

Photographs from the collections of modernity from the 1930s to the 2000s. As part of its new exhibition schedule, the museum is presenting an exhibition-dossier of its photographic collections and those of the Musée d’Art Contemporain [mac].

In February 1968, the Musée Cantini presented its first photography exhibition, L’OEIL OBJECTIF, featuring Doisneau, Brihat, Clergue and Sudre. At the same time, Gautrand was awarded the Grand Prix de la Ville de Marseille for photography. Alongside the Bibliothèque nationale and the Musée Réattu, the institution took on a pioneering role, creating a collection that echoed regional events such as the Rencontres d’Arles and the Festival d’Avignon. Through the collections of the Musée Cantini, the [mac] and the Fonds Communal d’Art Contemporain (Fcac), L'(ŒIL) OBJECTIF presents a renewed panorama of the collections; from the optical games of the Nouvelle Vision to the documentary practice of Valérie Jouve, via the stagings of Man Ray, the exhibition offers a broad approach to photography and the diversity of views that emanate from it. This exhibition is part of the Rencontres d’Arles program as part of the Grand Arles Express.

Collection permanente du Musée Cantini

Until December 31, 2024

Since then, this prestigious Marseilles-based cultural institution has developed an intense acquisitions and exhibition policy, in collaboration with leading national and international museums.
The museum presents a broad panorama of modern art, focusing on a number of historical sequences such as post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism and the various post-cubist trends of the 1920s-1930s.
Surrealism also forms a major axis of the collection, due to the historical links forged between this movement and the city of Marseille, which welcomed thousands of refugees in 1940-1941, including many artists, writers and anti-fascist activists fleeing Nazism. Among them were many members of the Surrealist group, gathered around André Breton at the Villa Air-Bel.
The collections cover a period up to the end of the 1970s, covering a wide variety of aesthetic currents, and featuring some remarkable ensembles built around artists such as Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Victor Brauner and Antonin Artaud, or movements sometimes little known to the general public, such as the Japanese Gutaï group, very active and particularly innovative in the field of abstraction and performance art in the 1960s.

A privileged partnership with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, has enabled us to place exceptional works on deposit to complement and enrich our collections. The exhibition is regularly renewed.

musees.marseille.fr/musee-cantini

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