Fondation Giacometti

The Institut Giacometti is launching a new collection of books on the history of modern art, in co-edition with Editions FAGE. This publication, entitled École des Modernités, is part of the research programme on the history of modern art (1905-1960) and accompanies young art historians in their first significant publications while making the results of their research accessible to a wide audience.

Victoria Giraudo
Alicia Penalba, Paris après guerre
ISBN 978 2 84975 696 6

The work of the Argentinean sculptor Alicia Rosario Pérez Penalba (1913-1982) took off in Paris in the 1950s. Her career in those years, and the friendships she made in artistic and intellectual circles (Wilfredo Lam, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti...) were decisive in the construction of a singular path in post-war abstract sculpture.
Tracing her career in post-war Paris allows us to reintroduce an important body of work that is still too little recognized. The artist's newly made public archives have been used as the basis for this study.

Victoria Giraudo is a curator and independent researcher. She is working on a doctorate at the University of Buenos Aires on Latin American female avant-garde artists. She was chief curator at MALBA / Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires from 2001 to 2020. She has curated many major exhibitions on Latin American art, including: "Alicia Penalba, escultora" (2016); "Arte Latinoamericano. 1900-1970. Colección MALBA" (2018-2020); and "Remedios Varo: Constelaciones" (2020).

Marion Sergent
Louise Janin, l’art de l’entre-deux
ISBN 978 2 84975 697 3

Between 1923 and 1928, the French-born American artist Louise Janin (1893-1997) lived in Paris, where she built up relationships that were fundamental to the development of her work. Faced with the different trends she discovered, Louise Janin wanted to go beyond the divisions, and developed a fantastic phantasmagoria, nourished by borrowings from Asian art and an interest in spirituality. This perhaps explains why she has not found a place in the historical accounts of 20th century art, built on the succession of avant-gardes. From her first works shown at the end of the 1910s at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, to her membership in the Association of Musical Artists in 1932, Louise Janin's work was nevertheless visible in its early development and met with some success in the second half of the 1920s. This study, based on extensive work using the works and archives of the artist and her collaborators, makes it possible to consider her work by moving away from a polarisation between trends (abstraction/figuration, avant-garde/academism, etc.) to a middle ground that corresponds to her conciliatory spirit.

Marion Sergent is a doctor in art history from Sorbonne University where she defended her thesis in 2021. Her work focuses on the musicalist group of which Louise Janin was a member. She thus investigates the key notions that were used to write the history of art in the first half of the 20th century (avant-gardes, modernity, abstract art, etc.), going beyond them to better understand the contribution of groups such as Musicalism.

Marion Alluchon
Primitifs modernes ? Définir l’art naïf en France dans les années 1930
ISBN 978 2 84975 698 0

The place of the Douanier Rousseau (1844-1910) in the art history and the influence of his painting in the advent of modern art no longer need to be proven. But many other artists have remained in the shadows of the history of what is known as "naive" art: Séraphine Louis (1864-1942), André Bauchant (1873-1958), Camille Bombois (1883-1970), Emile Boyer (1877-1948), Jean Ève (1900-1968), René Rimbert (1896-1991) and Louis Vivin (1861-1936) were nonetheless influential artists throughout the inter-war period. This book focuses on these lesser-known figures of so-called "naïve" art, helping to understand how the recognition of this second generation of "naïfs" questions the definition of modernity.

Marion Alluchon is a doctor in art history and responsible for the contemporary art, design, architecture and fashion programme at the Swedish Institute in Paris. She is the author of a thesis on the reception of naive art, "Du Douanier Rousseau à Gaston Chaissac: la reconnaissance de l'art naïf en France et aux États-Unis (1886-1948)" defended in 2016 at the University of Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work focuses on primitivism, modernity and naive art, its definition, its reception and its artists.