Métèques et météores

Portrait de l’artiste déraciné

In Métèques et Météores, Annie Cohen-Solal explores the figure of the uprooted artist who, both yesterday and today, plays a crucial role in our societies: as a watchdog and a detector of faint signals, the artist charts new paths around the questions left unanswered by politicians. This gallery of portraits opens with the mythical figure of Antonello da Messina in Venice, followed by that of the young Picasso, who was placed on file by the “immigration police” in Montmartre in 1900, and concludes with Huang Yongping, who settled in France following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Through the life stories of Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Calder, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Annie Cohen-Solal reveals how, to borrow Sartre’s words, a foreigner, a “metèque,” can sometimes emerge as a “meteor” to “tear through the sky and the waters of the lagoon.”

At a time when the issue of migration continues to poison political debate, and as ParisArtBasel reflects on the loss of our spatial bearings, Métèques et Météores offers an original perspective on uprooted artists, whose urgent message concerns us all.