Fireflies. The Art of Childhood

Fireflies. The Art of Childhood Musée Gassendi
by Musée Gassendi in Non classé

Fireflies. The Art of Childhood.
Reading and playing with Les Trois Ourses, from the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) collection

Exhibition at Musée Gassendi

July 5, 2024 to February 25, 2025

Artists:  Ianna Andréadis, Marion Bataille, Mauro Bellei, Remy Charlip, Paul Cox, Louise-Marie Cumont, Sophie Curtil, Milos Cvach, Sonia Delaunay, Dobroslav Foll, Keith Godard, Tana Hoban, Coline Irwin, Elisabeth Ivanovsky, Ronald King, Katsumi Komagata, Vladimir Lebedev, El Lissitzky, Julien Magnani, Enzo Mari, Fanette Mellier, Bruno Munari, Kazumasa Nagai, Nathalie Parain, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Kurt Schwitters, Kate Steinitz, Théo Van Doesburg, Luigi Veronesi, etc.

Curation: Sandra Cattini, Musée Gassendi director and head curator; and Fabienne

Grasser-Fulchéri, Espace de l’Art Concret director

Exhibition design: David des Moutis

The artists and designers featured in Fireflies highlight the intertwined connections between play and learning – and, even more profoundly, how imagination, the mother of invention, is key to understanding complex phenomena.

Beginning with a selection from Les Trois Ourses collection that dialogues naturally with other works from the Cnap’s design holdings, the exhibition presents a selection of works and books intended for children, but whose insights and intelligence speak to us all.

Often neglected, the art of childhood takes on central importance in this exhibition of leading artists and designers. Some centered this art in their practice, including members of the 1920s Russian avant-garde (Lebedev, Lissitzky and Rodtchenko), participants in the post-World War II Italian concrete art movement and its descendants (Bruno Munari, Luigi Veronesi and Enzo Mar), and other historic figures (Charlip, Delaunay, Foll, Hoban, Schwitters, Steinitz, Van Doesburg) and contemporary authors (Andréadis, Bellei, Cumont, Cvach, King, Irwin, etc.). Based on the foundational work of artist and designer Bruno Munari, who was particularly interested in children and art education, The Three Bears association (1988-2018) chose to focus on teaching children how to look at art and the world. Books played a key role in the association’s reflections. The exhibition is organized around some of Munari’s experiments, including Prelibri (Pre-Books, 1980), which invites very young children to familiarize themselves with books by handling them, and Libro Letto (Bed Book, 1993), a book for both reading and bedtime: children can literally burrow into its pages and fall asleep. Munari also designed games, like the pioneering Images projetées (Box for Direct Projections,1959-1973), in which children can choose how to combine and overlap different materials in order to compose slides that resemble small abstract paintings. 

The artists make use of all the possibilities that design offers: the interplay of folds, planes and even volumes (Rodchenko, Bataille, Cox, Komagata, etc.); rustling pages (Munari, Curtil, Godard, etc.); forms of assembly, which highlight the cyclic nature of certain phenomena in works that have neither a beginning nor an end, and are held together by a simple ring (Mari, Cvach, Cox, Komagata, etc.); the accordion folds of a leporello book that become the tipping point of a see-saw (Mari); and silk screen passages that follow the moon’s phases quarter by quarter (Mellier).

Beyond words, and sometimes even by dispensing with them, books create space for the senses through their composition (color, typography and drawings) and explorations of paper’s characteristics (texture, thickness, openings provided by layered cut-outs and transparencies, etc.). They invite us to grow aware of their materiality, which becomes a space for invention and artistic creation.

The exhibition design, developed by David des Moutis, showcases these fragile pieces of art (primarily books and works on paper) and helps us to better understand them.

VISITING THE EXHIBITION

Learning and playing

The exhibit begins with works that appeal to children’s senses and power of imagination so they can learn how to learn – to learn how to look, just like we learn how to read.

The small sidesteps around etiquette and norms that the artists offer here are hardly trivial. They accompany children along their own developmental path. Demonstrating the relationship between play and learning, their aim is to help children discover the world and language through books. Various genres contribute to this process and are displayed in the exhibition, from counting books and illustrated dictionaries to alphabet and animal books.

Drawing and still playing

The exhibition is surrounded by Fanette Mellier’s poster series Dans la lune (The Whole of the Moon: In the Moon). Like a frieze revealing the moon growing then shrinking, it illuminates the whole exhibition.

Under this lunar cycle and Andy Goldsworthy’s meandering river, other lines unfold. Katsumi Komagata’s game Line, which includes cushions traversed by a black line, allows children to set up a maze and play with shapes and colors.

In this part of the exhibition, lines snake from the page to the wall to the floor. They are like characters whose adventures we could choose to follow – including throughout Milos Cvach’s abstract theater sketches in Course poursuite (Highspeed Chase).

The succession of pages and folds continually offers new visual sequences whose narrative threads could make do without words and representations. Shapes and drawings take their rightful place here (Katsumi Komagata’s Plis et plans (Folds and Planes); Louise-Marie Cumont’s Noir et rouge (Black and Red); and Milos Cvach’s Presque rien n’importe quoi (Almost Nothing, Anything at All)). Young readers’ bodily movements can respond to the lines’ movements. Following the lines in drawings is a physical experience and an imaginary journey that allows children to interact in a tangible way with the materials the artists have employed.

Playing, imagining, inventing

As children do so well, the artists use their work to ask simple questions that sometimes call for complex answers. How can we explain the infinite? The creation of life? Space and time? The attention paid to books as objects, and their graphic and material components, highlights the sensory aspects of these abstract concepts and visually personifies the answers to such questions. These works’ shapes, colors, textures and even size can disrupt a story’s linearity: a simple ring generates a temporal loop (Cox, Cvach, etc.), and loose sheets held together with a clip have yet to be arranged (Munari), etc.

These artistic choices stir children’s imaginations and nourish their creativity. By choosing from this box of visual tools and imagining themselves in these fragments of emerging scenes, they can create their own images and invent their own stories.

Whether it be Tana Hoban’s photographs of the ground (abstract compositions that invite us to recognize shapes and figures within them, like we do when looking at clouds), or Bruno Munari’s and Enzo Mari’s games (in which children assemble various components into their own stories), books are considered a space for freedom, invention and emancipation.

The powers of imagination solicited in story creation are also called upon for understanding abstract events and detecting the invisible. Guided by the artists, children are simultaneously led to disassemble and recompose both short stories and natural phenomena, such as the rotation of the moon, the birth of a leaf, or the birth of a child.