Musée Réattu, chambres d’écho is dedicated to the museum's photography entire collection, in a startling installation that positively effervesces with ideas. Ranging across the collection, across disciplines and throughout the building - itself part of the fabric of the exhibition - it presents a succession of "chambers", each a world in itself. Inside, guest works (sculptures, installations, objects, often between nature and culture), resonant or dissonant, superimpose themselves on our reading of the images from the museum's collection.
In all, there are some 25 chambers. Some are monographic (Dieter Appelt, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Edward Weston, Jacqueline Salmon, Georges Rousse…), others embrace themes, such as the inner journey, the laboratory, the Vanitas, appearance and the enigma... Together, they feature close to one hundred artists and more than 400 works.
The museum's newly-formed Department of Sound Art has contributed to this programme, with the appearance of an exceptional artist, Knud Viktor, whose "sound landscapes" pervade the building's passageways, staircases and its 'secret' nooks and crannies.
An exhibition within an exhibition, the visit's midpoint features a tête-à-tête between two beacons of 20th century art : the conversations that took place between Brassaï and Picasso.
Both artists are splendidly represented in the collections and in the museum's history; Picasso through his 1971 donation, and Brassaï through the memorable exhibition he put on the Réattu Museum in 1974, while appearing as guest of honour at the Arles Rencontres. A total of 110 photographs, drawings, artifacts and sculptures emerging from the bubbling laboratory of a friendship that began in 1932.
From the brimming chaos of the Rue de la Boétie and the Rue des Grands Augustins, to the phosphorescent studio at Boisgeloup, a selection of Brassaï's images – whose truth and intensity Picasso saw as capturing his 'lifeblood' - follows the script of the Conversations in a series of sequential themes: the Circus, the Studio, the Transmutations, Graffiti, and so on. A weft into which we have woven our drawings, two sculptures by Picasso, and a mascot, the famous coco de mer from the Seychelles, both the source of numerous echoes.
