From September 27, 2025 to February 1, 2026, the Halls of Arts at the Reggia di Venaria will host the exhibition Fernand Léger! Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Keith Haring, curated by Anne Dopffer, General Conservator of Heritage and Director of the National Museums of the 20th Century of the Alpes-Maritimes, together with Rébecca François, Heritage Conservation Officer at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice, and Julie Guttierez, Chief Conservator of Heritage at the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot. The exhibition, a collaboration between the Consortium of the Royal Residences of Savoy, the GrandPalaisRmn, the Musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes/Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot and the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC) in Nice, with contributions from Manifesto Expo and MondoMostre, is dedicated to Fernand Léger and the influence his work had on the New Realism movement.
The exhibition is largely based on the collections of the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot and MAMAC in Nice, enriched by important loans from the Centre Pompidou and the Yves Klein Archives in Paris. The exhibition will bring together more than 30 works by Fernand Léger, considered a pioneer of modern art, placed in dialogue with works by European and American avant-garde artists from the 1960s to the present.
The exhibition aims to highlight the historical and artistic link between Léger and the New Realists, a group launched in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany, which included Arman, César, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others. The artists of the movement appropriated everyday objects from consumer society and street aesthetics to give them poetic representation. Central remains the relationship with the object, but the exhibition also aims to explore other themes, such as the representation of consumer society and leisure, public art, the collective dimension of creative processes and the idea of an art accessible to all.
Restany, a great admirer of Léger, chose to call the movement “New Realism” precisely in homage to the artist, who already in the 1920s had used this definition to describe his approach, “a terrible invention to render the real [...] whose consequences can be incalculable.”
The exhibition’s itinerary also expands with references to other movements and periods, such as American Pop Art with Robert Indiana and May Wilson, to the 1970s and 1980s with figures such as Gilbert & George in London and Keith Haring in New York. While Léger’s role as a precursor of Pop Art has already been explored several times, the direct confrontation with the French New Realists represents a novelty.
The aim of the project is therefore not only to show the formal and conceptual links, but also to highlight the visionary and interdisciplinary dimension of Léger’s work.
The stop at the Reggia di Venaria follows two previous highly successful editions: Léger et les Nouveaux Réalismes (Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot, June 15, 2024 - February 16, 2025) and Tous Léger! avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring... (Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, March 19-July 20, 2025). For the occasion, the Italian exhibition is enriched with new loans, including more works by Léger and a nucleus of works by Niki de Saint Phalle from MAMAC in Nice, including Joséphine Baker and the Fountain with the Four Nanas.
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| At the Reggia di Venaria Fernand Léger and the influence of his art on the New Realism |
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