Discover Bruno Decharme's exceptional collection, the fruit of 45 years of discoveries and encounters with art brut. More than 400 works reveal the creative power of art brut.

Produced on the margins of society, sometimes in secrecy, most works of art brut come to us only through the chance of a discovery or the action of someone close to the artist. For forty-five years, through encounters and providential finds, collector Bruno Decharme has worked to bring together these creations, born outside the recognized art world, but which today constitute an important part of art history.

Featuring over 400 works, Art Brut. In the intimacy of a collection. Donation Bruno Decharme at the Centre Pompidou explores the history of Art Brut. These works come from Bruno Decharme's donation to the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou.

Organized like a jigsaw puzzle, reflecting the kaleidoscope of themes and viewpoints brought together by research into art brut, the exhibition bears witness to the unsuspected creative wealth that the human mind can unleash when it is alienated from the norm.

A virtual reality experience inspired by the work of American art brut artist Henry Darger, with music by Philippe Cohen Solal, is available as part of the exhibition. Make sure you book in advance to take advantage of it (time-stamped ticket + "Insider/Outsider" immersive and musical experience).

Curator:
Bruno Decharme - Collector and director
Barbara Safarova - Teacher at the Ecole du Louvre and researcher

Associate curators:
Cristina Agostinelli - Curatorial assistant and program manager, Contemporary Collections Department, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou
Céline Gazzoletti - Art historian
Valérie Loth - Curatorial assistant, Graphic Art Department, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou
Diane Toubert - Archivist, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou

Scenography:
Corinne MarchandLighting for part of the exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of lighting manufacturer Sammode.

A relatively little-known fact: Chinese art can be found at the Louvre. The Department of Decorative Arts holds more than 600 Chinese works, most of which come from the collections of Adolphe Thiers and Adèle de Rothschild and from the royal collections. Among them, some veritable treasures are to be found. A number of these were highlighted by recent research among the collection of Adolphe Thiers, who was a journalist, historian, and a major political figure in the 19th century (as deputy, minister, president of the council and, ultimately, president of the French Republic).

The exhibition aims to reveal these exceptional works to the general public, putting them in the historical, diplomatic and cultural context of their creation and their acquisition by Thiers for his collection. It explores Thiers's little-known passion for China. The exhibition will present over 170 works dating mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries: scrolls, album pages, engravings, prints, porcelains, jades, lacquers, and precious objets d'art in ivory, bronze, or wood inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl.

Monet's Water Lilies have long been viewed by artists and studied by historians as the paragon of abstract painting, a sensitive forerunner of the great immersive installations to come. However, the blurry, out-of-focus effect that characterises the wide stretches of water in Monet's imposing canvases has been left largely unexamined. It did not escape his contemporaries, but they put it down to deterioration in his vision caused by an eye disease. These days, it seems more pertinent and fruitful to explore this aspect of Monet's later work as an actual aesthetic choice, one that has been left to posterity to uncover.

This exhibition deliberately makes such blurriness a key that opens another interpretation of a whole area of modern and contemporary visual creation. Initially
defined as "loss of distinctness", blurriness has shown itself to be the favourite means of expression in a world where instability reigns and visibility is clouded.
It was on the ruins left by the Second Word War that this out-of-focus aesthetic took root and began to deploy its inevitably political dimension. The Cartesian principle of discernment, which had prevailed in art for so long, now appeared altogether inoperative. With the erosion of visible certainties and in the face of the range of possibilities available to them as a result, artists came up with new approaches, shaping their works out of the transitory, disorder, movement, incompleteness and doubt.

Curatorship:

• Claire Bernardi, Director, Musée de l'Orangerie

• Emilia Philippot, Head Curator, Deputy Director of Studies, National Heritage Institute (INP)
  In collaboration with Juliette Degennes, Curator, Musée de l'Orangerie

While Khmer art is known around the world for its stone monuments, recent excavations have provided dramatic breakthroughs regarding our knowledge about its significant bronze statues. 

The Musée Guimet's exhibition Royal Bronzes of Angkor, an art of the divine focuses on bronze. The highlight of the exhibition is the reclining Vishnu statue from the Western Mebon - an 11th-century sanctuary to the west of Angkor - discovered in 1936 and originally measuring over five metres in length. This Cambodian national treasure will be exhibited for the first time with its long-separated fragments, after having benefited in 2024 from a campaign of scientific analysis and restoration in France, with the patronage of ALIPH (Alliance internationale pour la protection du patrimoine). It will be accompanied by over 200 works, including 126 exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, whose presence will enable visitors to follow a chronological trail of bronze art in Cambodia, from the 9th century to the present day, through a journey that takes them to the major sites of Khmer heritage.

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire which dominated part of mainland Southeast Asia for over five centuries, has preserved monumental remains of incomparable scale and beauty from its past glory. But if the architecture of the temples of the Khmer Empire (9th-14th/15th centuries) and the stone statues housed within them have been celebrated many times over, who remembers that these Buddhist and Brahmanic sanctuaries once housed a whole population of divinities and cult objects cast in precious metal: gold, silver, gilded bronze?

Exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, granted by the Royal Government within the specific framework of cooperation between the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the C2RMF (Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France), the EFEO (École française d'Extrême-Orient) and the Musée Guimet, are bringing together for the first time in this exceptional exhibition masterpieces (statuary, objets d'art or elements of architectural decoration) as well as photographs, casts and graphic documents to place these works of art in their cultural context, as well as in an archaeological and historical perspective.

Curated by:

• Pierre Baptiste, Director of Conservation and Collections, Musée Guimet, General Curator, Southeast Asia Section

• Brice Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

• David Bourgarit, research engineer, Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF)

• Thierry Zéphir, research engineer in charge of the Himalayan World collections at the Musée Guimet