EXHIBITION - REPETITION

In 1936, Marie Laurencin painted La Répétition. At first glance, there's nothing to distinguish it from a conventional genre scene.

A group of young women are assembled; one holds a booklet for the singing, another a guitar for the music, yet another sketches a dance step, while the other two look on. Without appearing to be, this painting is nothing less than a reformulation of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of the inaugural works of modernism: same curtain opened by one of the models, same number of female figures in a pyramidal composition, same chromatic rhythms - a dog replacing a still life in the foreground. Except that, far from multiplying heterogeneity, the entire painting is marked by a principle of repetition. Repetition is not only the subject of the picture (a repetition as is necessary for a successful show), it is also its method, embodied by the fact that all the faces are identical - a redoubling within the redoubling.