« Whoever cares about you, you are only a card game! » Lewis Carroll makes light of cards, Alice also! Here is both of them who draw away the visitors in an interactive exhibition, full of pictures and creations: English engravings, real cards and enlivened cards, illustrated books, games of logic and society, nonsenses, artists' writings of which the famous series of the contemporary artist, internationally known, Pat Andrea.
What was only a marvellous story extemporized to distract three English little girls from Victorian epoch established itself in the course of time as a major work of "babyish" said literature, but also beyond. By editing Alice's Adventures in the country of marvels (1865), under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, deacon and teacher of mathematics in the university of Oxford, created a temperamental and poetic world, become a bottomless source of inspiration for a very big number of illustrators and artists, starting with John Tenniel.
Forerunner of the dream writing, master of nonsense, Carroll gives life in a group of unusual figures borrowed notably from counting rhymes (« nursery rhymes ») and other childhood pastimes. Among those, a Queen of heart and its courtyard of cards, such a game of fifty-two English cards, are emphasized for the first time in an exhibition on Alice. From The Party of croquet, in Trial and in The final Deposition of the heroine, redrawn in three chapters of Alice's tale, this mini-society guides us across a colourful, play and interactive course, rich in illustrated, rare and amazing works (Peter Newell, Arthur Rackham, Gwynedd Hudson, Ralph Steadman, Robert Sabuda, Rebecca Dautremer), and in contemporary original writings (Anthony Browne, Dusan Kallay, Alain Gauthier, Ann Herbauts, Thomas Perino, Jean-Claude Silbermann).
An important part of the exhibition is also dedicated to games, that they are created by very Lewis Carroll: games of cards (Court circular), of croquet (Castle croquet), tray (Lanrick), mysteries and literary games (Doublets, Syzygies, Mischmasch, Game of logic); or that they take Alice for topic or for motive: they do not forget on this subject the cryptic Alice, foghorn of surrealist dream drawn in 1941 by Wifredo Lam for the Game of Marseilles.
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