Mainly known for her musician career as one of the leaders of the New York seventies scene and unforgettable anthems such as Gloria, Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen or People Have the Power, Patti Smith expressed herself in many different arts. The ongoing exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris gives the opportunity to discover a work that goes beyond its mediums of expression and deserve to be discovered in its totality.

Born in Chicago, Patti Smith moved to New York where she met and lived with Robert Mapplethorpe. Together they linked with major writers such as Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. Fascinated by poetry since her childhood, and particularly by Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith first appeared on stage reading poems put in music. She started very early to take pictures and she initiated Robert Mapplethorpe to this art. In 1975, the cover of her debut album Horses -a picture of her in an androgynous style taken by Mapplethorpe- struck a whole generation. In 1978, a year after a tragic stage accident, her drawings were shown for the first time in the Robert Miller Gallery in New York.

The exhibition which just opened at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (until June 22) relates forty years of the artistic journey of an artist who always considered singing as only one of her ways to express a creativity largely fed on European culture. The hundreds of photos sum up her encounters and emotions, her trips, and open the doors to the influences that marked her work. A few portraits, a not so technical work, the photos of Patti Smith are essentially a work of impressions, a way to capture the moment, a saving of memories, memories of the places she went to, the people she met, and most of all the memory of people she admires : a picture of Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, the tomb of Arthur Rimbaud. This idea is also in the exhibition of objects as relics of the authors that nourished her : original manuscripts, a stone Patti Smith took on the bank of the river where Virginia Woolf drown, Pope Benoit XV’s slippers. We can see on different places this attraction to Catholic religion : an installation about La Cène, a Christ and a crown of thorns, and many photos of religious statues. This impressionist art of photography is also in her work as a painter, an art close to calligraphy, an art of sketches which goes with words that often surround the drawings. The films shown there are based on a similar approach, a capture of impressions and poetry to go with it. That is the real nerve of Patti Smith’s art: poetry. Patti Smith could be thought about as a singer who loves photography, drawings or films, she is in fact a poet and the mediums she chooses to express herself are only different entrances to her striking art of poetry, which is beautifully illustrated in this exhibition.

Francis Chérasse.