Facing up to a different look

West Bund Museum delves into the numerous aspects of the representation of people both famous and ordinary, Zhang Kun reports.

An ongoing exhibition at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai titled Mirrors of the Portrait is presenting 300 artworks from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In this exhibition, works of art by famous and forgotten artists are juxtaposed, and images of renowned artists, musicians and authors are displayed alongside those of anonymous people.

Taking place from July 21 to Nov 5,2024, the exhibition is the third part of the five-year collaborative project between the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum, following The Shape of Time and The Voice of Things.

In 2019, when the West Bund Museum opened, the two sides agreed to hold three semipermanent exhibitions in Shanghai, with the collections of the Centre Pompidou presenting a panoramic view of the modern art history.

At the same time, several significant Chinese cultural and artistic projects will be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The curator of Mirrors of the Portrait, Frederic Paul, who is also the conservator for the contemporary collections at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, selected 300 works from the Centre Pompidou collection dating from 1895 to the present day, and divided them in 15 sections highlighting the multiple facets of the art of portraiture.

The first section, In All Colors, takes visitors to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the realism convention collapsed and with it the preoccupation with likeness that imposed the need for a naturalistic color palette, according to Paul.