METZ.- At the crossroads of art, literature and ethnography, this exhibition focuses on Michel Leiris (1901-1990), a prominent intellectual figure of 20th century. Fully involved in the ideals and reflections of his era, Leiris was both a poet and an autobiographical writer, as well as a professional ethnographer and very close friend of many great artists and writers of his times.

Encompassing nearly 350 works, including many masterpieces by his closest artist friends (Joan Miró, André Masson, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Wilfredo Lam, Francis Bacon...), African and Caribbean artefacts and works of art, along side a plethora of archives and original documents (manuscripts, books, films and music), this exhibition aims at highlighting Michel Leiris' multifaceted character, his passions and commitments, as well as the innovative aspect of his oeuvre and the pertinence of his ideas which, at a time of globalisation and post-colonial studies, have made him an essential contemporary reference.

Leiris was influenced by Raymond Roussel as a child and was later involved in surrealism from afar, movement which he left in order to join George Bataille and his dissident magazine, Documents . He combined his quest for self-identity with his thirst for change and alterity. His ethnographic research and methodology began when he participated, as an archivist, in the first French ethnographic mission to Africa, “Mission Dakar-Djibouti” (1931-33) led by Marcel Griaule, during which he wrote L' Afriquefantôme , combining ethnographic field study with autobiographical style. After the war, he travelled to the West Indies accompanied by Alfred Metraux who introduced him to voodoo rites and rituals. Passionate about bullfighting, Leiris also enjoyed jazz, opera, pictures and shows which he considered as “grounds of truth“. As a professional ethnographer, Africanist at Musée de l'Homme, he initiated the first work on visual arts in Sub-Saharan Africa, Création plastique de l’Afrique noire.

His literary oeuvre is among the most novel 20th century literature. Michel Leiris revolutionised the autobiographical genre with L’Âge d’homme and the four volumes that comprise La Règle du Jeu.

As an enthusiastic explorer of the nuances in language, he strongly felt that literature should bear the aesthetics of risk (“De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie”). Engaged in the anti-imperialism and anti-racist struggles from their start, Michel Leiris was a militant public figure, yet continued as a solitary writer until his death. He remains a complex and undefinable figure today, his modern vision is now more significant than ever.

Exhibtion Layout
This cross-disciplinary exhibition provides a different perspective and approach to the artistic and intellectual history of the 20th century. It encompasses a wide range of works from Raymond Roussel to Pablo Picasso and includes pieces from Africa, the Caribbean, Spain, Cuba and China, resulting in a poetic web of links between writing and painting, jazz and opera, trance and bullfighting, voodoo and Ethiopian possession rites, the quest for selfknowledge and the knowledge of others.

Alternating between chronological presentations and thematic clusters, the exhibition provides room for exchange between disciplines and subjects that reflect current debates present in the work of contemporary artists such as Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Jean-Michel Alberola, Kader Attia, Miquel Barceló, Marcel Miracle and Camille Henrot.

1. THEATRE OF CHILDHOOD
This miraculous chaos of childhood. Michel Leiris
“Magical” objects, childhood books and games, “crucial” performances of all sorts – tragic operas, films ( The Man with the Rubber Head by Georges Méliès) and popular or avant-garde theatre ( Parade and Petrouchka ) –, fashioned Leiris' personal mythology. This brick-a-brac of images and objects, presented here as a kind of emblematic first self-portrait, was considered highly “sacred” by Leiris. It is at the heart of his memoir-type works, L’Âge d’homme and La Règle du jeu . His childhood years were dominated by theatrical enchantment: the magic of life, the prestige of adventure and art (figure of the artist as a jester), and a taste for the exotic (familiar characters such as the cantatrice Claire Friché, and the traveller, writer of secrets Raymond Roussel whose Impressions d’Afrique fascinated young Leiris).

2. A MARGINAL SURREALIST
Throw the dice of words. Michel Leiris
“To be a poet”: under the aegis of Max Jacob, that is what the young Leiris aspired to, commencing his literary oeuvre in 1922 ( Simulacre , Le Point cardinal , Aurora ) as well as the writing of Journal, his private diary. Live as an artist lives, he mingled with painters, writers and musicians including Georges Limbour, Roland Tual, Joan Miró, Juan Gris, Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos and Erik Satie, who he socialised with in his “mentor” André Masson's workshop, rue Blomet, and in Boulogne at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery for cubist art. Influenced by Masson in a concrete and profound manner, Leiris' quest for the enchanted hidden within adventure, dreams and language was fostered through his taste for the esoteric, and his interest in alchemy and mysticism. The free, poly-semantic potential in language was of utmost importance to his quest, as it was for Miro. The poetic and fantastic powers of this search are examined in Glossaire, j’y serre mes gloses .

3. JAZZ
Jazz represents the true sacred music of today... not to say the only music. Michel Leiris
Leiris' fascination for primitiveness, the exotic and the erotic is fulfilled by that AfroAmerican jazz capable of making crowds dance into a trance, the perfect means to escape, transgress and unite. Beyond the myth of a coloured Eden, he fashioned his future interest for hybrid creations during this period. On a backdrop of musical extracts (Duke Ellington), films ( Halleluyah by King Vidor), photographs and documents from negro magazines ( Blackbirds, 1929) will be displayed. His future associates for the Documents magazine , Georges Bataille and Georges Henri-Rivière, shared these interests with him. As a counterpoint, extracts from the film The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire, Leiris' model of the dancing artist, will also be shown.

4. DOCUMENTS
Breaking with surrealism in 1929, Leiris shared with Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein, the notion of the anti-idealist blank slate, a theory set forth in Documents, with formlessness as its focus. Leiris contributed to the critique of western values, rejecting aesthetics in favour of “reverse” humanism, using words such as “debacle”, “spit”, “liquefaction of forms”, “medusas”, “massacres”, and by writing stark articles (“L’homme et son intérieur”, “Une peinture d’Antoine Caron”, “Le Caput Mortem”). He released his first texts – to become fundamental - on Miró, Picasso, Giacometti and Arp in Documents . For Leiris, these works constituted “documents” on this “savage ancestrality”, which he would strongly like to see reemerge like a new kind of fetichism. In “L’œil de l’ethnographe”, dedicated to Raymond Roussel, he mixed childhood stories with an anthropologic approach.

5. L’AFRIQUE FANTÔME
Break free of the habits in which I was trapped, cast off my mental corset of a European. Michel Leiris
As an archivist, Leiris participated in the first major ethnological mission led by the French. The aim of Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-33), led by Marcel Griaule, was to collect documents on the colonised “negro” cultures. Using scientific research methods, Leiris wrote L’Afrique fantôme , a sort of hybrid text, combining field studies with personal diary entries. Disillusioned by a “fantom” Africa, and with astonishing subjectivity, Leiris was an independent fully aware of the ambiguity and paradoxes of this emerging discipline. This fabulous voyage and the “loot” brought back by the mission are underscored in this section. The apprentice ethnographer's material is presented in detail (travel logs and notes - this style was later adopted by Leiris' autobiographer). His passion for the sacred was further fuelled by the studies undertaken on this mission, leading him onto his ethnological career. Studies on circumcision rites, masks and secret languages from the Dogon people in particular ( La langue secrete chez les dogons de Sanga, 1848), and scenes of possession (sacrifices, trances) among the Zar Ethiopians ( La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar , 1958) are also on display.

6. L'ÂGE D'HOMME
“Expose oneself”, revealing certain sentimen tal or sexual obsessions… Michel Leiris
Leiris' first autobiographical work, L’Âge d’homme, is written like a patchwork of childhood memories and sexual fantasies. This full-scale personal assessment is composed in the stunning style of the dyptich by Cranach representing Lucrèce and Judith, which was found in 1930 when Leiris was in psychoanalysis. L'Âge d'homme is a founding element in confessional literature. Leiris claimed its cathartic virtue, thus hailing the powers of writing. This story of the self at risk is an act, a “moment of truth”, beautiful like when the “horn of a bull” threatens the bullfighter in the ring. Incidentally, “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” prefaced the 1945 republication of L’Âge d’homme .

Cruelty, debilitating, mortifying scopic drive: Leiris had an interest in the same tragic themes as Bataille, Masson and Giacometti.

7. MIROIR DE LA TAUROMA CHIE
The bullfighter face to face with the bull, face - to - face with a cruel mirror. Michel Leiris, 1937.
Leiris attended his first bullfight in Fréjus with Picasso in 1926. Marked for life by this “revealing spectacle”, his exhilarating tale is told in Grande fuite de neige . His trips to Spain in the 1930s strengthened his afición. Rafaelillo's fight in Valence in 1935 further marked his passion, following which he wrote three texts on the art of bullfighting: Tauromachies, 1937, Abanico para los toros, 1938, and Miroir de la tauromachie , 1938, a theoretical and poetic essay on his vision of the corrida, as a metaphor for art and love.

This ritualised sacrificial ceremony between man and animal is, according to him, the realm of real tragedy containing danger and death. Leiris shared his passion with André Masson, who illustrated his works, and Pablo Picasso whose entire œuvre is marked by this topic. The intellectuals from this period were fascinated by Spain and its traditions, backing the Spanish Republic and condemning fascism. Georges Bataille and Colette Peignot (aka “Laure”) shared his interest in erotism, death and the sacred ( Le Sacré dans la vie quotidienne ).

8. LA RÈGLE DU JEU
I write to fully experience what I live . Michel Leiris
Sources of inspiration, Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Roussel ( Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres ) lead us into Leiris' writing room here. Drafts, manuscripts, notes and other records presented constitute the material which make up the four volumes of La Règle du jeu : Biffures (1948), Fourbis (1955), Fibrilles (1966), Frêle Bruit (1976). Each work is illustrated by the main episode that defines it. This autobiographical work is a large undertaking, a memoir and the construction of self, fashioned on “fourbi” (stuff), words, dreams, images and real-life experiences, that Leiris noted on “cards” like an ethnographer in the field and strung together in writing. Searching for a “savoir-vivre”, the author expressed his idea of the world by unveiling “everything he knows about himself” with great objectivity, bringing Livre by Stéphane Mallarmé or La Mariée mise à nu by Marcel Duchamp to mind.

9. WAR
The poet's inner agony weighs nothing against the horrors of war. Michel Leiris
During the Phoney War, Michel Leiris was assigned to Beni Ounif in the Algerian desert. Then during the occupation, he spent time in Paris and Saint-Léonard de Noblat, where the Kahnweiler family had taken refuge. He used this time as a retreat to write. He started the first volume ( Biffures ) of what was to become La Règle du Jeu, in 1942. However, he only published in clandestine magazines ( Messages , Lettres françaises ) at the time. He met JeanPaul Sartre, and took part in Temps modernes . His real commitment to writing and the risks involved was of crucial importance to Leiris.

The arrest of members from the resistance network at Musée de l’Homme and of his friend and colleague Deborah Lifchitz, who had taken refuge at his home, left a deep mark on him. A number of artists and intellectuals grouped together with Picasso at his home for a reading of Désir attrapé par la queue (1944).

10. PIERRES POUR UN ALBE RTO GIACOMETTI
Complicity between two creators, between the writer of Biffures and Fourbis, and the sculptor of eroded post-war effigies, with whom he had become close, Pierres pour un Alberto Giacometti written in 1951 demonstrates the degree to which Leiris contemplated the sculptor's work. They shared the shame goal, “provide substance to the elusive and fleeting in any act... left open, stick to that which is proper in man: the upright position, walking”. They shared the same methods of assembling scattered matter together; the same relentless quest for “presence”, between life and death; the same concern with leaving the print of their fingers, or the trace of their voice. This brotherhood was confirmed when Giacometti came to Leiris' side after his attempted suicide in 1957 (etchings for the poems, Vivantes cendres, innommées ), just as Leiris went to Giacometti's workshop in 1972 to undertake its conservation.

11. CROSSROADS OF CIVILISATIONS
“The Caribbean and Poetry at the Crossroads”: three month s in which I lived, virtually daily, in a magical world. Michel Leiris
Michel Leiris went on two missions in 1948 and 1952 to Guadeloupe and Martinique, at the invitation of Aimé Césaire. He discovered métis civilisation in the West Indies, and criticised yet another form of racism and exploitation – which equally revolted Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon. This led him to actively participate in the magazine Présence Africaine , founded in 1949 by Alioune Diop. In Haiti with Alfred Metraux, he rediscovered his former interest in “rites of possession” in voodoo ceremonies which he defined as “lived theatre”.

His involvement in revolutionary utopias took him to China in 1955 ( Journal de Chine ), then to Cuba in 1967 for the Salon de Mai, during which he participated in the great Cuba Colectiva Mural. He returned in 1968 for the Congrès des intellectuels, with his painter friend Wifredo Lam, whose syncretic work provided a connection between Africa and the West Indies.

12. ARTS AND OCCUPATIONS: MICHEL LEIRIS, THE POET, ETHNOLOGIST AND ART WRITER
Increase our knowledge of mankind, through the subjectiveness of introspection and poetic experience, as through the less personal means of ethnological study. Michel Leiris, Titres et travaux , 1967.
Michel Leiris took his three occupations, poet, ethnologist and art writer head on. Africanist at Musée de l’Homme from 1938 to 1984, he conceived pioneering exhibitions (Passages à l’âge d’homme , 1968), took stances ( L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme , 1950, Race et ci vilisation, 1954) and dedicated his time to a vital work: Afrique noire, la création plastique , the first work by an ethnologist to consider the “aesthetic feel” in African sculpture. His texts and prefaces continued to multiply during this time, in particular for exhibitions at Louise Leiris' gallery, for his artist friends: Masson, Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, Bacon, as well as Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, Henri Laurens, Josef Sima, Élie Lascaux, etc. His main activity however remained poetry and literature. Following La Règle du jeu , he wrote texts inspired by his continued interest in painting ( Le ruban de cou d’Olympia ), by his lively passion for language ( Langage Tangage) , and his renewed interest in singing ( À cor et à cri ).

13. PAINTING AS A MODEL: PICASSO AND BACON
Michel Leiris dedicated twenty-some texts to Picasso, the “genius without a pedestal”, between 1930 and 1989. These bear witness to their friendship, strengthened by the connection with Louise Leiris' gallery, to their bullfighting complicity and to the shared values characteristic and vital to the painter’s oeuvre: humour, tragi-comic, fondness for mankind and realism, and the autobiographic nature that is manifest in the main theme of “peintre et son modèle” which have virtually become “a genre in their own right”. In his 1954 text, “Picasso et la comédie humaine ou les avatars de Gros pied”, Leiris alludes to the ambiguous relation between fiction and reality, between art and life, as well as to the problem of ageing and death which do not, despite all his genius, spare the artist. A series of portraits of the writer, as well as works from his collection ( La Pisseuse , 1965, La Petite fille à la corde , 1950) highlight the true and lasting complicity between the two.

Leiris' last great discovery in 1965 was the paintings by Francis Bacon, with whom he became friends as well as one of his best critics. They provide a magnificent answer to his quest for the “screaming truth”, which from then on was for him the ultimate criterion in art, and the epitome of his ultimate quest as a writer. A fertile and intimate understanding bonded the two men. The “bloody scream”, the “rage to grasp”, the “sudden nakedness” of “timeless cruelties” fascinated Leiris. He was deeply affected by what the “builder of mirrors” handed to him: theatricality alongside the everyday nature of “crises” that convulse the human body, in which he had always seen the sign of the sacred.

14. OP É RRATIQUES
To improve the operine race. Michel Leiris.
His passion for corrida was followed by his passion for the opera, a new theatrical space where life's tragedies are played, love, death, and where Michel Leiris rediscovered the heroic female characters that obsessed him. In love with bel canto and Italian operas by Verdi and Puccini ( Turandot , Fanciulla del West , Paillase, Tosca… ), he took notes of his feelings and impressions which were later published in Opérratiques , 1992. The music, or rather the performance, that he so admired as a child, thus remained with him to the end of his life.

15. “LEIRIS FANTÔME”
The “fantom” presence of Leiris is revealed here through a series of photographs he took of himself at various ages, presented in an absurd display case he imagined for an exhibition in Frêle Bruit. Alongside this ironic timeline, a list of his last tragi-comic self-portraits written in the form of “Brand-images” are also on show.

Whether in the field of anthropology or in literature, the influence of Leiris works need not be proven. Many artists associate themselves with his name. Some of their works are among those on display. Each, in its own way, attempts to draw the impossible portrait of Leiris (Jean-Michel Alberola), or tries to illustrate his poems (Marcel Miracle), or seeks to pay homage to his pioneering vision in the field of ethnography having led to post-colonial studies (Mathieu Abonnenc, Miquel Barceló, Kader Attia, Camille Henrot).