Centre Pompidou-Metz presents the first major retrospective in France of the drawings, paintings and films of Hans Richter (1888-1976). Curated and staged in partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this monographic exhibition views the artist in his broader context.
Draftsman, painter, writer and editor of periodicals, Hans Richter was at the confluence of avant-garde art from the 1910s. The life of this versatile artist was caught up in the sometimes tangled thread of twentieth-century history. He was in Munich at the time of the Spartacist uprising, then in the USSR in the early 1930s. He was forced to flee Nazi Germany for Holland, France and Switzerland. During the Second World War he found refuge in the United States. Yet as the century unfolded, as he often observed himself, Richter lived only for painting and film.
While the exhibition does not claim to transcribe its full size and scope, it retraces Richter's experience of the century step by step, from Dada in the 1910s and 1920s to its documenting in words and images by Hans Richter in a new role as the historian of the avant-garde of the 1920s and of his own time. From Dada experienced first-hand to a reconstituted Dada, the exhibition looks at the passing of time, political and artistic engagement, history and the repetition of history.