The Museums of Strasbourg
Director of Museums
Fabrice Hergott

Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Emmanuel Guigon

Exhibition organizers
Christian Derouet , Curator of the Pompidou Centre, Paris

Thérèse Willer, Curator of the Tomi Ungerer Centre

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
1, place Hans Jean Arp
F-67000 Strasbourg
tél : 03 88 23 31 31
Opening times
Daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Thursdays from 12 noon to 10 p.m.
Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed on Mondays

Communications Department
Marie Ollier
Gwenaëlle Serre
Cathy Letard
2 place du Château
67000 Strasbourg
Tél. 00 (0)3 88 52 50 15
Fax 00 (0)3 88 52 50 42
www.musees-strasbourg.org

Press release

ROLAND TOPOR
Panic drawings

18th June - 5th September 2004

Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

“Unclassifiable, acerbic, an artistic polymath…”, there has never been a shortage of adjectives to describe Roland Topor. Born in 1938, he later became a member of the Panic movement and rose to fame through his many and varied talents as draughtsman, writer, actor, and as director for film, theatre, and television…
Since the artist’s death in 1997, his drawings had not been shown in any museum in France. Now, as a tribute to this facet of Topor’s output, the Strasbourg Museum’s Graphic Art Room will present a collection of 200 drawings from both public and private collections.

Roland Topor has produced satirical drawings for publications such as Bizarre or Hara-Kiri, and political drawings for the newspaper Libération; he has illustrated many books among which Marcel Aymé’s Oeuvres Romanesques and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, drawn posters for both film and theatre, and collaborated on the animation films Les Escargots and La Planète Sauvage.

Topor’s work, whatever the chosen form of graphic expression, is shot through with recurrent themes bordering on the obsessive. His is an odd universe, with a macabre, sometimes cruel, humour; and it is filled with metamorphoses and distortions, haunted by thoughts of death, the body, dreams, intoxication, love, and woman. Roland Topor’s caustic mockery mauls complacently accepted clichés and unlocks the way to the absurd.

Federico Fellini, for whose film Casanova Topor had designed the magic lantern, defined his work thus: “It seems to me that Topor is the last of a line of great illustrators such as Blake and Daumier, Doré and Carlo Chiostri, who were able to create a complete and fully detailed universe of their own”.
A thematic and chronological itinerary will enable the visitor to appreciate Topor’s rich and astonishing oeuvre, which by its fantastical aspects borders on a form of surrealism close to Magritte, but also akin to that of Kubin or even Bosch.

To complement the exhibition, Marquis, a film by Roland Topor and Henri Xhonneux, will be shown on June 24th at 8.00pm at the Museum’s Auditorium; three animation films by Roland Topor and René Laloux, Les Temps Morts, Les Escargots and La Planète Sauvage, will be shown on June 27th at 5.00pm.
Éditions des Musées de Strasbourg, in collaboration with Éditions Hazan, will publish a catalogue featuring texts and accounts pertaining to Topor’s drawings, alongside reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition.