The museum is paying tribute to Fred Deux to mark the centenary of his birth. It presents a series of works that entered its collections following the major exhibition devoted to the artist in 2017: The World of Fred Deux.

Fred Deux, cartoonist, spoken-word poet, writer and author of a cult book, La Gana, is a singular artist, irreducible to fashions and trends.

Born into a working-class family in the basement of a middle-class house in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, this self-taught artist never stopped, as he used to say, ‘passing through’. Passing through the cellar wall to access the life that calls out and burns. Crossing the boundaries between the arts, going from drawing to the written word in order to explore ever more deeply the unknown within him. Passing through and passing on: gradually disappearing into the drawing, so that it is life itself that passes and gives itself.

The exhibition, which brings together 30 drawings, recreates the polyphonic world of Fred Deux, following a chronological thread, that of the cycles between which the artist felt the need to ‘break his hand’. It shows the profound coherence of a body of work that, from the outset, set down as two matrices the tools that would shape it: the line and the stain. From the so-called Kleepathology drawings of the late 1940s to the ultimate work, via the major milestones of this oeuvre - Hostages, Black Sperms and Coloured Sperms, Self-Portraits and the monumental drawings of the 1980s - the world of Fred Deux is revealed and explored.