In 1936, Marie Laurencin painted The Rehearsal. At first sight, nothing sets it apart from a conventional genre painting. We can see five female figures in a group. One is holding a songbook, another a guitar, a third is making a dance step, while the two others look on. Without seeming to, the picture echoes the composition of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1907, inaugurating Cubism and playing a part in painting's new, modern momentum. Picasso himself made references to art history in his painting, from The Valpinçon Bather by Ingres to the Renaissance Arcadia.  

This is the starting point chosen by Eric de Chassey, art historian and director of the National Institute of Art History, for an exhibition examining repetition as a gesture and a pattern, as a constraint and as a principle of freedom, as a subject or as a method, as an approach and as a pathway to reflection.  

The exhibition will show how creation can develop by means of repetition through a subjective choice from the Centre Pompidou collections, alongside a selection of additional major works. It will bring together the work of artists such as Marie Laurencin, Frantisek Kupka, Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Aurélie Nemours, Josef Albers, Niele Toroni, Samuel Beckett and Marthe Wery. The exhibition will be open to visitors for almost two years, giving them the chance to discover and rediscover it !