For its new display of collections, the museum reopens a somewhat forgotten chapter in its history with the arrival of a curator whose energy and ambition will breathe new life into the institution: Jacques Latour.
Son of the artist Alfred Latour, an archaeologist by training but open to the art of his time, Jacques Latour was the first curator to introduce the concept of temporary exhibition to the museum upon taking office in 1947. Through his projects, very innovative for the time, he aimed to make Réattu a museum of 20th century art, a type of institution then almost non-existent in France. He brought into the city's collections the first works of Ossip Zadkine, Valentine Prax, André Marchand, Jacques Hauer, Théo Kerg and many others, which shook up the Arlesian cultural landscape, still very anchored in Antiquity and the Provençal traditions.
He was also the first to organize a Van Gogh exhibition in Arles in 1951, which he put in touch with contemporary artists who had made Provence a chosen land. This momentum, interrupted by the sudden death of Latour in 1956, was immediately taken up by another young archaeologist, Jean-Maurice Rouquette. Organizer of the first Picasso exhibition in 1957, co-creator, in 1965, of the first “Photographic Art Section” in an art museum in France, Rouquette in turn cultivated a taste for living artists, including the museum is still the heir. The exhibition offers a rereading of this “conquest of modern art” by highlighting works exhibited and acquired by Latour and Rouquette (paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, photographs), as well as period documents drawn from the museum archives. A way of crossing, on an Arlesian scale, different currents in the history of art from the 1920s to 1960s, from neo-impressionism to cubism via surrealism and abstraction.
