Held on 20 Nov 2018
This encounter, which opens the exhibition Lost, Loose and Loved. Foreign Artists in Paris, 1944–1968 in the Museo Reina Sofía, sets out to examine the complex fabric of post-war national identity and cultural politics through jazz and the relationship it bears to modern art. The encounter comprises a short lecture by art historian Serge Guilbaut, the exhibition’s curator, and a concert by bebop pianist René Urtreger.
Guilbaut is behind the renowned theory that argues how the transfer of art’s capital status from Paris to New York in the aftermath of the Second World War was in response to a string of actions aimed at building up American hegemony from culture. In parallel, something else was conversely “stolen” — the consideration of jazz as a purely French art form, despite its invention in the USA. In this lecture Guilbaut sets forth his ideas about post-war French painting drawing from jazz to cling to modernity on account of American Abstraction.
Upon its arrival on French shores in 1917, jazz was immediately understood as a free and spontaneous style of music, yet these qualities would soak in progressively; on one side through cosmopolitanism, in identifying the genre with the music of racial minorities and, on the other, in the sense of a distinctly French composition. Thus jazz would be split into two styles: the classical, ordered French-style jazz of New Orleans; and the improvised, frenetic and impromptu jazz of bebop. Both styles would have a hand in the reinvention of the School of Paris — a name that brought together different pictorial trends in the city between 1920 and 1959 — at a time when the French capital had become an erstwhile centre of the art world.
Upon the conclusion of the lecture, René Urtreger, one of the most eminent composers and pianists around since the 1950s — when he played with Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Chet Baker — will perform a concert, running through the major themes in bebop.
With the support of
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Serge Guilbaut is an art historian and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His publications include How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Sobre la desaparición de ciertas obras de arte (Curare, 1995) and Los espejismos de la imagen. Ensayos de arte contemporáneo (Akal, 2009). He is also the curator of Be-Bomb. The Translatlantic War of Images and All that Jazz (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, MACBA, 2007–2008) and Lost, Loose and Loved. Foreign Artists 1944–1968 (Museo Reina Sofía, 2018–2019).
René Urtreger is a musician and composer. Regarded as one of the founders of bebop, he has played with Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Konitz, Johnny Griffin and Sonny Rollins, and numerous others. In 1958 he worked with Miles Davies on the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Lift to the Gallows), which was based on the album under the same name, recorded by both artists in 1957. The record also featured Daniel Humair on drums and Pierre Michelot on double bass, both of whom would form the HUM trio with Urtreger in 1960. His discography also includes René Urtreger Plays Bud Powell (1955), Modern Jazz au Club Saint-Germain (1955), HUM (1960, 1979 and 1999) and Onirica (2000).
Más actividades
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.