A Day with Marie Vassilieff

Marie Vassilieff & Jean Börlin costumed for le Bal Olympique, 1924, photograph by Isabey, All Rights Reserved, Claude Bernès collection

The Fondation des Artistes and the Villa Vassilieff join forces to pay a tribute to Marie Vassilieff. At the begin­ning of the 1910s, the artist moved in a studio 21 Avenue du Maine, and spent the last years of her life, from 1953 to 1957, at the Maison nationale des artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne.
A day with Marie Vassilieff bor­rows its title to A Day with Picasso (1997), a book by art his­to­rian and engi­neer Billy Klüver, in which, thanks to a series of pic­tures by Jean Cocteau, he tries to reenact an after­noon of Picasso’s wan­ders in the streets of Montparnasse with Marie Vassilieff, among others. A tribute to Klüver’s method­ology, this exhi­bi­tion how­ever turns our gaze away from Picasso to examine a pro­tag­o­nist almost on the fringe of the offi­cial his­tory of art: Marie Vassilieff.

Marie Vassilieff was a key artist of Montparnasse in the first half of the 20th cen­tury: for her plastic works and her charis­matic role as a medi­ator between Parisian artists, intel­lec­tuals and critics in the 1910s-1930s. In her life and work, Marie Vassilieff dis­tin­guished her­self by a con­stant desire to decom­part­men­talize domestic and public space (she turned her studio into an academy and then a dining hall), fine arts and applied arts (she cared as much about her pic­to­rial works as her dolls, the­ater sets and bottle covers). Artist, woman and state­less, Marie Vassilieff is res­o­lutely con­tem­po­rary in her research, artistic approach and life.

The exhi­bi­tion takes a fresh look at this fed­er­ating artist, which art remains too little known. To that end, author Émilie Notéris wrote a text about her role in the his­tory of fem­i­nist art. Her essay is used as the common thread of the exhi­bi­tion, which gathers about ten con­tem­po­rary artists invited to open a dia­logue with the work of Marie Vassilieff, imagine fic­tional encoun­ters with the Russian cre­ator or make ref­er­ences to her prac­tice.

Contemporary art inter­ven­tions and works by Marie Vassilieff bor­rowed to her pas­sionate col­lector Claude Bernès are dis­played in the space of the Fondation des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne, which, for the first, is entirely ded­i­cated to the exhi­bi­tion. It also includes the recently ren­o­vated Smith-Lesouëf Library, which will reopen for the occa­sion; as well in the Villa Vassilieff, in the heart of Montparnasse.