SERGE GAINSBOURG
EXHIBITION
October 21th 2008 - March 1st 2009
The Music Museum is to devote an exhibition to Serge Gainsbourg, whose artistic genius is increasingly acknowledged worldwide. While the contemporary pop scenes in London and New York rediscover the French artist's talents as poet and songwriter, Tokyo is experiencing a wave of "Gainsbourgmania", mixing and sampling his compositions.
This exhibition is organised thanks to exceptional loans from the family, Charlotte Gainsbourg in particular, and other people who were close to Serge Gainsbourg.
The Music Museum has entrusted the Commission for this project to artist and audio illustrator Frédéric Sanchez. In a break from tradition, halfway between an exhibition and an installation, the project is a tribute by a contemporary artist to one of France's great musical figures of the 20th century.
Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), was one of the first French artists to embody a contemporary idea of what an artist is. Serge Gainsbourg, who was in turn a painter, writer, poet, author, performer, composer, actor and director, was an artist who, throughout his life, used image in all its forms and his image in particular, exhibiting an aesthetic universe that broke down the boundaries between "major" and "minor" art forms.
The exhibition highlights the different aspects of this multi-facetted work, whose specific feature was that, for 40 years, like David Bowie in the UK or Bob Dylan in the United States, it was a catalyst for the periods travelled through. Gainsbourg was always ahead of his time. His writing, his compositions, his collaborative work, his aesthetic directions and even the way he conducted his private life often preceded and influenced changes in lifestyles and artistic and cultural movements.
He played with words and references, borrowing from both classical and popular culture, he shifted, transformed, arranged and invented a new form of composition consisting of montages, collages, etc.
Exhibition Commissioner: Frédéric Sanchez
An exhibition in three dimensions: Images – Words – Music
For 40 years, Gainsbourg constantly created associations and correspondences between words, images and music.
The exhibition is designed to stage these three dimensions, inviting visitors to take a dreamlike journey through the artist's universe through hundreds of animated images, excerpts from films and audiovisual documents, photos, etc.
Gainsbourg's music will be present in the exhibition through original audio compositions mixing his creations, his inspirations and audio elements that evoke his artistic universe.
The audio work will be spatialised throughout the exhibition.
A large number of original manuscripts along with objects and writings that evoke Serge Gainsbourg's writing will be presented.
25 artists for 150 texts: Artists have been asked to read and record Gainsbourg's words, men and women who have sung Gainsbourg's work, who crossed paths with, loved or inspired the artist.
A Journey through Four Major Periods:
The Blue Period (1958 – 1965)
With humour, Serge Gainsbourg subsequently dubbed his early years, imbibed with jazz, realism in songs and Saint-Germain existentialism as his "blue period". Gainsbourg was a piano player in a bar when a meeting with Boris Vian electrified him and he decided to take the stage.
The Idols (1965 – 1969)
The success of Poupée de cire, poupée de son that Serge Gainsbourg wrote for France Gall marked a turning point in his artistic life. He abandoned the stage, leaving it to the yé-yé idols to become a prolific composer creating material for others to sing. In 1967, he composed over a hundred titles and thus moved up from cabaret poet status to artistic director. Qui est in, qui est out: A period where youth and the English wave were at the forefront, the end of realistic songs.
La Décadanse (1969 – 1979)
The scandal of Je t’aime moi non plus was the start of a decade of intense creation. It was in the black astrakhan atmosphere of his hotel on rue de Verneuil that Serge Gainsbourg composed a series of concept albums that cover, in the style of a fin-de-siècle dandy, the themes of love as poison, crimes of passion, perversion and scatology. Like Lou Reed with Berlin, Gainsbourg created real consistent narrative series, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), Vu de l’extérieur (1973), Rock around the bunker (1975), and L’Homme à tête de chou (1976), which contributed to a universe that was "la couleur du smoking" [black]. The cynicism of the lyrics and the sophistication of the melodies transcended French popular songs.
Ecce Homo (1979 – 1991)
The 1980s opened with a new scandal, the reggae version of La Marseillaise. In 1984, in New York, Gainsbourg worked with David Bowie's arranger, and published Love on the beat. This period, historically signalling the mixing of cultures, genres and fashions, is Gainsbourg's hallmark period. He wrote titles for France's greatest film stars, and imposed his stamp on advertising, photography and underground cinema, relayed by a fine mastery of the art of slogan creation. Gainsbourg, like Warhol at the end of his life, played on his image with the media, while continuing to cultivate, in the privacy of rue de Verneuil, a still highly pronounced taste for classical culture.