Who hasn’t gazed with admiration or tenderness at a framed image of a crying child, a red-cheeked Poulbot or a Bernard Buffet clown? For many, that’s what painting is all about. Who are these painters who had a moment of popular glory before falling into oblivion, these artists of undeniable success, yet relegated to the shadows of history?

BEAUBADUGLY – The Other History of Painting unabashedly shows the original paintings of these artists on the bangs of the common imagination and taste, who sometimes sold thousands of reproductions of their works in supermarkets and whose posters are familiar to us.

This catalog accompanies the exhibition at MIAM from June 28, 2024 to March 9, 2025.

This panorama of commercial, media and popular painting, from Vladimir Tretchikoff to Bernard Buffet, staged by Hervé Di Rosa and Jean-Baptiste Carobolante, looks at the different trajectories taken by this pictorial field in the 20th century: from the idealization of the female body to the tourist landscape, via the mediatization of painters and the birth of a new popular artistic public.

This exhibition is particularly important for Hervé Di Rosa, who, in addition to curating the exhibition with Jean-Baptiste Carobolante, has initiated the publication of MIAM’s first research grant, financed in full by the Fondation Antoine de Galbert and supervised by INHA. Since 2021, Jean-Baptiste Carobolante, winner of this grant, has been carrying out research into commercial painting, of which BEAUBADUGLY – L’autre histoire de la peinture will be the first event, prior to the forthcoming publication of a scientific work.