Face to Face With ‘A Visage Decouvert’

Summer has come to this quiet little town near Versailles. You can tell by the opening of “A Visage Decouvert,” an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Art lovers stroll through the foundation’s idyllic estate all year, many of them in search of “Long Term Parking,” the best known work in Cartier’s sculpture garden. In his witty commentary on the automobile age, French sculptor Arman has imprisoned 56 real cars in a 60-foot tower of concrete. A year-round exhibition program attracts visitors to the galleries as well, but curators make a special effort to stage an appealing thematic exhibition each summer.

This year’s show (through Oct. 4) addresses the human face, one of art’s most enduring subjects. With thousands--probably millions--of examples to choose from, curator Jean de Loisyunderstandably made no attempt to survey the face in world art. In his final work for Cartier before he becomes curator of contemporary art at the Pompidou Center in Paris, De Loisy opted for a personal approach.

“The exhibition is not historical, it’s not formal, it has no ethnological point of view. It is extremely subjective,” De Loisy said, in a rapid-fire discourse while the show was being installed. Which is not to say “A Visage Decouvert,” (literally translated as “bare-facedly” or “openly”) is trivial. The 350 works, borrowed from public and private collections, include knockout images organized from a fresh--if rather free-wheeling--point of view.

De Loisy’s eclectic selection covers a wide swath of history and geography, but concentrates on ethnic sculpture and contemporary art--often pointing out relationships between the two. “For me it was a fantastic pleasure to find connections, but this is not about influence (of one artist on another), it’s about confluence,” he said.

The exhibition is arranged in three sections--”Grammar of the Face,” “Disruption” and “Silence”--each housed in a separate building.

The first section presents the construction blocks, or grammar, of human images that do not necessarily portray specific people. Larry Rivers’ 1961 painting, “Parts of the Face: A French Vocabulary Lesson”--in which components of a generic face are identified by stenciled words--might have been made to order for the show, but the rest of the grammar is less literal. An international melange of artworks includes such objects as a Congo initiation mask, a Gandharan sculpture from Pakistan and “Transform (lipstick),” a pair of photographic images by conceptualist John Baldessari.

There is some order to the concept, however. One gallery explores “Expression,” for example, in four of the 69 heads created in 1867-73 by Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt to document facial expressions. Nearby, contemporary artist Arnulf Rainer has drawn and painted on photographs of Messerschmidt’s work, piling expression on expression.

Another gallery, devoted to “Man/Animal,” offers Charles Lebrun’s celebrated depictions of the similarities of human and animal faces, along with a Kwakiutl mask and a Francis Picabia painting with an animal face superimposed on a human visage.

The second section of the show, on the destruction of facial grammar, is purposely chaotic, De Loisy said. Here, the face is distorted by modern artists who create a personal language in works such as Francis Bacon’s “Study for Portrait After the Life Mask of William Blake.” Meanwhile, ethnic pieces portray malformations wrought by nature and man. A Bamileke mask from Camaroon, for example, depicts a pear-shaped face with an elongated forehead and puffed cheeks. A New Guinea man’s pregnancy mask, meant to be worn on the chest and belly, doubles as a smiling face and a pregnant woman’s body.

In the final building, the face is reassembled in a meditative or death-like state, but here again the variation of imagery is staggering. One gallery offers calm faces essentially made of three spots, in everything from Cycladic sculpture to a red and black painting by Gerhard Richter. Elsewhere, the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Ken Moody, a beatific black man with his eyes closed, echoes the expression of an ancient stone head from Yemen.

Christian Boltanski has created an entire room of faces, enlarged from obituary photographs in Swiss newspapers. To enter this room is to be reminded that death happens every day, to ordinary-looking people of all ages. Mapplethorpe’s last self-portrait, depicting his ghostly face and one hand gripping a skull-topped walking stick--taken shortly before he died of AIDS--brings the show chillingly up to date.

In short, that’s the summer show, but it’s not all the news from Cartier. To gain a higher profile on the contemporary art scene and to use its resources more effectively, the foundation plans to open an exhibition space in Paris in about two years, according to foundation director Marie-Claude Beaud. French architect Jean Nouvel will design the new building, to be located on Raspail Boulevard at the site of the former American Center. (A new American Center, designed by Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry, is currently under construction in a district of Paris known as Bercy.)

Another change in process at Cartier is that the foundation plans to curtail its collecting and start commissioning contemporary artworks to be donated to museums in Europe and the United States. Cartier will continue to run art programs in Jouy-en-Josas, but the foundation is seeking a partner to share some of the facilities, Beaud said.