Jean Crotti

A survey of the highly personal artistic development of Jean Crotti, an artist who was both close to the great artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century and at the same time independent of them.

This exhibition catalogue explores the artist’s development, ranging from his early work that was strongly influenced by fauvism to his apogee as a dadaist and the creation of his own Tabu movement, the more intimist paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, including the invention of the gemmaux stained glass technique, and later return to a more universal form of painting. The text by Jean-Hubert Martin rebuilds the chronology of Crotti’s oeuvre throughout his life. He identifies three crucial periods in the artist’s development and explores them in detail: the dada period, Crotti’s psychological works painted between the wars, and the invention of gemmaux. The catalogue contains illustrations of the sixty or so works exhibited, some added by way of comparison and portraits of Crotti, alone or with his friends Marcel Duchamp, Drancis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, and others.

Jean Crotti (1878–1958) was an active participant in the great adventure that was the fashioning of modern sensibility.

Jean-Hubert Martin was the Director of the Berne Kunsthalle in 1983, when he mounted the Tabu-Dada: Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp exhibition. He later became Director of the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art, of the National Museum of African and Oceanian Art in Paris, and of the Kunst Palast Museum in Düsseldorf.