In Principle, an Attempt at Exhausting
Chronicle of an exhibition
The 20th anniversary of MAC VAL, a visionary anniversary
Twenty years ago, MAC VAL opened its doors. The museum’s anniversary is an opportunity to affirm the quality of a heritage that bears witness to an expert and remarkable sedimentation of more than 40 years of acquisitions, resulting in a unique collection. It is also an opportunity to reaffirm the expression of a renewed museum, open to the future.
The new hanging is the result of a broad shared curatorship: the selection of works offered to the public’s gaze was conceived in an unprecedented and collective manner with all of the museum’s teams.
Regularly brought together in workshops, proposals, choices, debates, and selections burst forth, raged, delighted, and were ultimately agreed upon. Visitors will therefore have the pleasure of discovering or rediscovering emblematic works from the collection. The exhibition route is thus intended as a call to the memories, emotions, and discoveries that all of us have been able to share over 20 years of life at MAC VAL.
Born of a departmental policy to support artists implemented as early as 1982, the MAC VAL collection is distinguished by its focus on “contemporary art in France since the 1950s.” Over the years, the collection has developed a strong and singular character, enabling encounters between essential and emerging artists. It is presented in a renewed manner approximately every 18 months: a way of rediscovering the works through an updated theme, context, and approach.
In spring 2025, MAC VAL imagines an exhibition route devoted to the hierarchy of genres and addresses this vast theme through the prism of works from the museum’s collection. In 1667, the art historian André Félibien set out the hierarchy of genres in the preface to his Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He laid down the precepts that would govern academic painting and thereby established the idea of noble genres and sub-genres, in which subject matter takes precedence over technical mastery or execution.
The exhibition route “The Ideal Genre. In Principle, an Attempt at Exhausting” playfully addresses each of the five genres in this hierarchy: history painting, portraiture, genre scene, landscape, and still life.
Curator Nicolas Surlapierre
Co-curators Yuan-Chih Cheng, Anaïs Linares, Margaut Segui, and all the MAC VAL teams
