Carlos Cruz-Diez in Paris et nulle part ailleurs at Palais de la Porte Durée

In the first half of the 20th century, Paris was the world capital of the arts, the home of the avant-gardes to which artists and intellectuals from all over the world flocked. After the Second World War, despite the increasingly strong attractiveness of New York, it was still in Paris, and, for many, nowhere else, that you had to go to train, create, exhibit, compare your work to that of others, to write the history of art.

The exhibition

Of the 15,000 artists active in Paris at that time, 60 to 65% of them were foreigners. Whether they only spend a few months, a few years, leave and come back, or settle permanently, why did these artists come? How have their works been marked by this change of universe, how do they express it? Are their migration paths similar to those of their compatriots? Paris and Nowhere Else is interested in 24 artists from various origins (Europe, Africa, Latin America, United States, Asia) who came to Paris and whose work makes it possible to grasp the issues of migration.

Organized into four themes: going into exile, mixing one's culture of origin and that of the host, reacting to the strangeness of the world that one discovers, building a universal language without borders, the exhibition evokes the motivations of leaving, settling in, sociability, a sometimes difficult daily life in a cosmopolitan city that has become their new home.

The exhibition brings together around a hundred works from private and public collections - drawings, sculptures, paintings, collages - by Shafic Abboud (Lebanon), Eduardo Arroyo (Spain), André Cadere (Romania), Ahmed Cherkaoui (Morocco), Carlos Cruz -Diez (Venezuela), Dado (Montenegro), Erró (Iceland), Tetsumi Kudo (Japan), Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Julio Le Parc (Argentina), Milvia Maglione (Italy), Roberto Matta (Chile), Joan Mitchell ( United States), Véra Molnar (Hungary), Iba N'Diaye (Senegal), Alicia Penalba (Argentina), Judit Reigl (Hungary), Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Daniel Spoerri (Romania), Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), Victor Vasarely (Hungary), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), Zao Wou-Ki (China).

Exhibition Curators

Jean-Paul Ameline
Curator of the exhibition, he was curator at the National Museum of Modern Art Center Pompidou in Paris. He was then General Curator of Heritage in 2003 and Head of the Modern Collections Department until 2013. He has curated numerous exhibitions including Face à l’Histoire. The modern artist before the historical event, 1933-1991 (1996), as well as Paris du Monde (the foreign artist in Paris 1900-2005) for the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2007.

Chloe Dupont
Exhibition Assistant, National Museum of the History of Immigration. A graduate in art history from the University of Grenoble and in museology from the École du Louvre, she has participated in the preparation of several exhibitions at the Musée d'Orsay, the Petit Palais and the Musée Cernuschi.