Under the title “Faces”, the center of history of resistance and deportation proposes a poetic string from multiple drawn or photographic portraits, drawn from its collections.
By
At the History of Resistance and Deportation History of Lyon, the first exhibition hall “Faces” opens onto a disturbing installation, in appearance more artistic than historical. Gas masks, placed on stems, fix the visitor of their vitreous look. In 1939, the French government, fearing the use of the chemical weapon in case of German invasion, pushed the population to bring these equipment.
At the time when masks come back in the daily life of a world in health crisis, the wink is not trivial. Yesterday gas masks, today surgical: at each troubled era, faces are affected. “We see the irruption of a warrior vocabulary against the virus that attacks us, the faces are hidden again, explains Marion Vivier, Commissioner of the exhibition. On the occasion of the thirty years of existence of the center, we propose a poetic string to meet the faces of our collection. “
Drawings, Paintings, Photos, Posters, Lyon’s Chrg Drawn in his collections for Tell the story through the faces, in a subtletic scenography. The central room of the exhibition presents fifty-four portraits, full frame. These are prisoners of war, drawn to the gouache by Jean Billon, in 1940, in Stalag VIII C of Silesia, Poland. Out of the camp in 1942, the portraits of the painter Lyonnais served as propaganda to the Vichy regime to reassure the fate of the 7,500 French deported in Poland. They were given in 2002 to the museum, by the artist’s family. In 2022, these faces express everything else. Suspended by invisible son, above a mirror, on the ground, they give the impression of souls returning from the limbo of the past, expressing the visitor all the distress or anger of the captives. They also inform about their conditions, their origins and their common fate in Europe at war.
“Culture of war”
The chrd was opened in 1992, under the impulse of the Mayor Michel Black, in a wing of a highly symbolic building. The Berthelot Avenue website, in the e Arrondissement of Lyon, was military health school, in the nineteenth century, then seat of the Gestapo commissioned by Klaus Barbie Between 1942 and 1944. The exhibition “Faces” deploys in a gallery of underground rooms that served as cells to Nazi torturers.
In the soft light of the vaulted halls, the crowd of faces is gradually revealed, populating the memory of the places. Gypsies of the Saliers Camp (Bouches-du-Rhône), in Camargue, deported Jewish families, resistant arrested, the looks of the absentees cross those of contemporary witnesses, photographed by Frédéric Bellay for the chrd.
You have 31.71% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.