The exhibition "Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934-1947)" revisits the early career of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), marked by the influence of regionalism and Mexican muralists, right up to his first drippings in 1947. This body of work, rarely exhibited for its own sake, bears witness to the diverse sources that nourished the young artist's research, crossing the influence of native American arts with that of the European avant-gardes, among which Pablo Picasso figures prominently. Compared to the Spanish painter and the great names of European painting by the critics, Pollock was quickly established as a true monument of American painting, and in so doing, isolated from the more complex networks of exchanges of influences that nourished his work during his New York years. The exhibition aims to present in detail these years, which were the laboratory for his work, by restoring the artistic and intellectual context from which both were nourished.

A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) is one of Brazil's best-known and best-loved artists. She created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous imagery and the modernising elements of a rapidly-transforming country.

Starting in the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila do Amaral navigated between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having constructed a "Brazilian" iconographic world in Paris, put to the test by the Cubism and Primitivism so in vogue in the French capital, her painting was the root of the "anthropophagic" movement advocating the "devouring" by Brazilians of foreign and colonial cultures as a form of both assimilation and resistance.

Brightly coloured landscapes, dreamlike compositions and abstract geometry confirm the power of a body of work firmly rooted in its time and always ready to renew itself. Her work also raises social, identity and racial issues and invites us to reconsider the divides between tradition and avant-garde, centres and outskirts, high culture and popular culture.

Widely exhibited in her native country, very few exhibitions have so far been dedicated to her work abroad. This first retrospective in France which gathers together more than 150 works aims to bridge this gap and takes us to the heart of modern Brazil and its cleavages.

Exhibition organised by GrandPalaisRmn

Under the patronage of Mr Emmanuel MACRON, President of the French Republic

The exhibition will then be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, from February 28 to June 8 2025.

The exhibition on show at the Musée d'Orsay in autumn 2024 focuses on Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and his predilection for masculine forms and portraits of men, and seeks to examine this artist's profoundly radical modernity through the lens of art history's changing perspective on 19th-century forms of masculinity.