"Gainsbourg"

From Tuesday, October 21 2008 to Sunday, March 1 2009

A central icon on the margins.

The Music Museum in Paris is organising a major exhibition dedicated to global icon Serge Gainsbourg. This exhibition comes at the right time, when London and NY pop music is rediscovering his genius, and in Tokyo there is a veritable "gainsbourgmania" going on.

Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) was one of the first French music performers to embody the modern definition of an "artist". Alternately a painter, writer, poet, composer, actor, director and author, Gainsbourg was unafraid to play on image and representation (of himself in particular) to create music that cuts across the highbrow/lowbrow chasm, blending pop with grand classics without a second thought.

The exhibition sheds a new light on Gainsbourg's particularly protean artistic evolution, with a focus on his ability not only to stay on top of contemporary trends but to be a trend-setter himself. Four distinct eras have thus been thought up to organise this biographical, critical expo: Blue Period (1958 - 1965), Idols (1965 - 1969), Decadance (1969 - 1979), Ecce Homo (1979 - 1991).