Camille Morineau: Promoting Women Artists of the 20th Century

“elles@centrepompidou” sparked your mission for women artists, could you tell me about the experience of curating the exhibition? It was not really an exhibition: it was a permanent collection display with only women artists. The principle was simple: we displayed only women artists from the permanent collection but it was a massive project because the 4 th and 5 th floors make up a big space in Centre Pompidou (80,729 square feet). We had to literally push out of the museum the grandmasters such as Picasso , Matisse etc. to put women artists in their place. And all of that in a relatively short time, with little published information available on women artists. We worked quickly with what we had in storage, organized the works and biographies, and that's how I realized how little information existed on women artists from the past in general. We had these works in the collection, but we didn't know anything about them, or very little. I was “directing” a team of five curators, mostly all of them now directors of institutions and still friends of mine: I’m thinking of Emma Lavigne (Palais de Tokyo), Cécile Debray (L’Orangerie), Quentin Bajac (Jeu de Paume) and Valérie Guillaume…