There was a time not long ago when the human body—any human body—was out of fashion, at least in the art world. In 2014, New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz wrote a withering indictment of the abstract, decorator-friendly, and ultimately banal style he described as “Zombie Formalism,” which seemed to be suddenly everywhere. At that time, in the mid-aughts, perhaps the most controversial thing an artist could do was to simply depict real figures of any kind, particularly people. The human being, the original subject of art that had concerned painters since time immemorial, was suddenly, somehow, uncool.
Thank God that’s over. Figuration is back in vogue and this season at the Bourse, the Pinault family’s private museum in Paris’s 2nd Arrondissement, there is not one abstract canvas in sight.
The exhibition there, “Corps et Âmes,” is dedicated to over 100 works by more than 41 artists who span mediums, geographies, and chronologies, filling the entire Tadao Ando-renovated rotunda with bodies. Think: an Auguste Rodin ballerina in eyeshot of Deana Lawson portraits; Marlene Dumas canvases in conversation with nearby Peter Doigs; a Richard Avedon photograph meeting one by Anne Imhof. Show-stopping moments come by way of three films by Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta (she only ever made about 100 of them) and an entire suite of monumental Georg Baselitz canvases that debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
