Portrait of Billy by Kees Van Dongen in 1920. [Photo provided to China Daily]

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

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.

Mona-Vinci by Huang Yongping from 1986 to 1987. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The avant-garde Fauvism artists, such as Frantisek Kupka and Kees Van Dongen displayed a surprising range of hues. A more recent work that fits the bill is Bruce Nauman's self-portrait in white, pink, green and black.

Chinese artist Huang Yongping's Mona-Vinci is one of the first artworks visitors come across in the second section titled Disfiguring?

Inspired by the academic assumption that Mona Lisa was created as a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Huang combined the two images into one picture, and placed a light box on the side to display the magazine cover picture that gave him the idea.

A pioneer in China's contemporary art scene, Huang questions the division between the East and the West as seen in traditional art history books by placing these books in a laundry machine and displaying the resulting paper pulp.

Huang later moved to Paris, where he embarked on a productive and often controversial artistic career until his death in 2019. Visitors will then find more creations by Chinese artists, including Zhang Xiaogang's 1999 painting Father and Daughter No 1, and Chang Shuhong's portrait for his beloved daughter Shana, which was created in the 1930s when he was studying art in Paris. Chang later returned to China and devoted his life to the protection of the artistic heritage in Dunhuang, Gansu province. His daughter also turned out to be an important designer and art educator in China.

Visitors will also get to see portraits of prominent figures, such as composer Arnold Schoenberg and novelist James Joyce, the death mask of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, as well as pictures of anonymous people who are often at the very bottom of the social ladder.

In this exhibition, the artists gave them the same amount of attention as the others based on the belief that everyone, whether common people or celebrities, are entitled to a portrait.

If you go

Mirrors of the Portrait

July 21-Nov 5, 2024, 10 am-5 pm (last admission at 4:30 pm), Tuesday-Sunday.

West Bund Museum, Gallery 1 and 2.

No 2600 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui district

The Yellow Scale by Frantisek Kupka in 1907. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Mirrors of the Portrait, which runs at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai until Nov 5, 2024, presents 300 artworks from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. [Photo provided to China Daily]