GÜNTER BRUS — Dessins autrichiens dans les collections du Cabinet d’art graphique. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987

Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1 April–7 June 1987. Opening 31 March, Salle d’art graphique, 4th floor. Original exhibition invitation. Colour offset print on matte card stock, 15 × 21 cm. Reproduction of Günter Brus’s Watteaus Rache (La vengeance de Watteau), 1983, to recto; formal invitation text and institutional details to verso.

Condition: Good. General age toning, scattered handling marks and spotting, minor corner and edge wear, and a small stain toward the lower-right margin.

The exhibition presented approximately sixty works by twenty Austrian artists held in the Musée national d’art moderne’s collection. Alfred Kubin and postwar artists including Alfred Hrdlicka and Georg Eisler appeared alongside the generation associated with Viennese Actionism — Brus, Arnulf Rainer and Walter Pichler. Its accompanying catalogue became the first volume in the museum’s documentary series Carnets du Cabinet d’art graphique.

Brus had moved away from performance-based Actionism during the early 1970s, developing drawings and ‘picture-poems’ in which bodies, writing and art-historical references occupied the same surface. The reproduced work combines grease pencil, graphite and gold gouache on kraft paper and had entered the Pompidou collection through purchase in 1983.

Four years later, the museum returned it to circulation at invitation scale. A large drawing held within the collection becomes the public face of an exhibition about that collection: acquisition, reproduction and announcement condensed onto two sides of card.

Ships flat, securely backed and tracked from the UK.