In a landmark exchange, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) is lending 200 works of art to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for an exhibition opening this autumn. Etre Moderne: Le MoMA á Paris (11 October-5 march 2018) will present key works from all six MoMA departments, including examples by Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Ellsworth Kelly. Some works, like Andy Warhol’s 32-part Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), have never before been shown in France. The show will occupy the entire Paris museum and includes documentary materials chronicling MoMA’s acquisition history.
Suzanne Pagé, the Paris foundation’s artistic director, says the aim is to question the role of a museum of Modern art. “The definitions are changing,” she says, noting that the cannon has expanded beyond Western art. “The rest of the world exists too.” To stress the point, the final section of the exhibition will be devoted to contemporary artists like Shigetaka Kurita, the Japanese designer who created the 176 original emojis.
The show is another cross-institutional coup for the Fondation Louis Vuitton. In March, it closed a blockbuster exhibition of 130 works from the Sergei Shchukin collection borrowed from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum. That show drew more than 600,000 visitors through early January before its run was extended.
