Mickey Mouse’s genitals, plastic cats with Hitler moustaches, and a paint-flecked portrait of the French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, were among the works on show on Tuesday as Paris’s modern art triennial opened amid controversy and picketing.
La Force de l’art, a showcase for 200 contemporary artists born or resident in France, is the pet project of De Villepin, a published poet, who prides himself on his cultural sensibility and reportedly carries a folder of his verse in his briefcase at all times.
But the show, dubbed ”Expo Villepin”, has created yet another headache for the prime minister, who is battling to keep his job in the face of an alleged political smear campaign.
De Villepin launched the â,¬4-million state-funded exhibition as a means of putting French contemporary art back on the radar and boosting its sales on the international market. He wanted to compete with London’s triennial at Tate Britain and other biennials in New York, and make his mark in the run-up to the French presidential elections next year. But instead the show has generated a series of rows.
First, De Villepin only announced his plans in December, sparking a mad rush to curate the works and leaving too little time to produce a catalogue. Some in the arts world fumed that among the 15 curators only one was an artist, and works were gathered from public and private collections, rather than created specifically.
Then the painter Gérard Fromanger withdrew his work, saying he was not going to ”dance for De Villepin” in a exhibition he felt was a political public relations exercise for the prime minister.
In the sumptuously refurbished Grand Palais, which hosted the 1900 world exhibition, organisers on Tuesday described the eclectic pieces as a ”rendezvous with French creativity”. Work ranged from oil paintings to video installations, and featured young artists beside more established names such as the French installation artist Annette Messager, who presented a series of reworkings of the French map beside a wall of dismembered soft toys’ limbs.
Outside a painter, Pierre Gilou, handed out leaflets bearing a quote from the 19th-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet: ”The state understands nothing about art.”
Gilou said: ”This exhibition does not represent French art in any way … for a long time in France, art has been suffocated by the government.” – Guardian Unlimited Â