Brion Gysin, Le dernier musée

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the first retrospective of Brion Gysin’s work at a Paris museum.

Born in Great Britain in 1916, Brion Gysin was a multifaceted artist—a painter, poet, performance artist, photographer and musician often associated with the Beat Generation. The inventor of the Cut-up and the Dreamachine, he worked at the intersection of painting and writing, drawing on an ever-evolving range of visual languages. Fascinated by otherness and drawn to the margins, Gysin travelled the world and moved in alternative and underground circles. His travels brought him into contact with an exceptionally diverse range of creative and intellectual communities, where his work often resonated in unexpected ways and he enjoyed an almost magical aura. Fuelled by these encounters, his relentless creative drive found expression in sound and visual poetry, experimental film, performance, novels and music, as well as painting and photography.

The exhibition traces the key stages of this extraordinary career, which spanned all the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Alongside his work, it presents pieces by artists with whom he was close or whom he inspired: William Burroughs, Françoise Janicot and Bernard Heidsieck, John Giorno, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Ramuntcho Matta...
It also explores Gysin’s deep ties to Paris, where he spent much of his life. He lived there in the 1930s while studying at the Sorbonne. Around 1960, he socialised with Beat Generation artists at the famous Beat Hotel (9, rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris, 6th arrondissement). From the mid-1970s until his death in 1986, he lived in an apartment opposite the Centre Pompidou. Shortly before his death, he named the City of Paris the sole beneficiary of his estate.

Featuring more than 140 works by the artist, the exhibition draws on the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris’s Gysin collection, unrivalled in its richness, complemented by exceptional loans from public and private collections in France and abroad.

The exhibition

The exhibition takes visitors through the major stages in the creative journey of this artist who defies classification. It opens with a selection of works illustrating his interest in dreams, Surrealism and the effects of drugs on the mind. It then explores the impact of the principal places he visited on his travels around the world. From there, it examines the different facets of his creative process: the Cut-up and permutations; drawing, writing and calligraphy; the Dreamachine adventure; different forms of play and performance; his forays into magic and the truly spellbinding effect he had on his contemporaries; and, finally, his use of photography to express his relationship with reality and of photomontage to reveal his presence in the world.

The exhibition highlights the full scope and potential of the Cut-up, a technique Brion Gysin discovered in autumn 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris. A revival of a Dadaist practice, it involves cutting up a text and rearranging the pieces at random. The exhibition also reveals the central place of the Dreamachine in the artist’s work and imagination. This rotating cylinder has slits in its sides and a light bulb at its centre. As the cylinder turns, light from the bulb passes through the slits at a particular frequency that can induce a state of relaxation in the brain and produce visions when users face the Dreamachine with their eyes closed, viewing the light through their eyelids.

Throughout the exhibition, the emphasis is on the multimedia nature of his artistic output and his sustained dialogue with the work of other artists, both predecessors and contemporaries (Victor Hugo, Henri Michaux, René Laubiès, Mohamed Hamri...).

The catalogue

Published by Paris Musées, the catalogue is the first reference work in French devoted to the artist’s oeuvre. It includes an introduction by the curators; four essays (James Horton, Barry Miles, Olivier Quintyn, Brice Matthieussent) expanding on the exhibition’s themes; an interview with musician Marc Hurtado; a facsimile of Gysin’s travel journal from Alamut; and an extensive selection of reproductions following the exhibition’s narrative.