After the Second World War, in January 1947, Dina Vierny opened her gallery on Rue Jacob. The young woman was just 28 years old. As a model and assistant to Aristide Maillol during the last ten years of the artist's life, who passed away in September 1944, and to whom she dedicated her inaugural exhibition, she also posed for Bonnard and Matisse. The latter encouraged her to create her own gallery. Another key figure, a staunch supporter from the beginning, had a decisive influence: Jeanne Bucher, an art dealer whose gallery was located on Boulevard du Montparnasse. Dina Vierny spent a lot of time with her during the Occupation.

"I have always followed the path of my own sensation, good or bad, but it was mine, not others'. I am a dabbler, I love all forms of art. I like to take several paths. Without fear. Whatever the expression."

Dina Vierny claimed this powerful independence of thought and action in her choice of artists to champion. She fought perpetually to defend her policy: the love for the artists who touched her, the loyalty she devoted to them, against all odds, sometimes against the prevailing taste of her time. The anniversary exhibition organized for the gallery's 70th year does not aim to provide an inventory of the eclecticism of the artistic personalities presented during this period. It is much more about showing the transmission of a gaze, the opening of this gaze, beyond the divides of abstraction/figuration. Olivier Lorquin, Dina Vierny's son, has been part of this adventure for about thirty years. As the gallery director and event organizer, he has chosen for the occasion a bold and stimulating confrontation between different groups of artists that cannot be compared, neither by their era nor by their styles. However, while they were forgotten, denied, or even banned by their contemporaries, Dina Vierny knew how to defend them, to highlight them; she fought to reveal to the public their common ground: their talent, the expressive force of their modernity. This is how the French modern primitives (Bauchant, Bombois, Séraphine de Senlis, Jean Eve) and the Russian non-conformists (Yankilevsky, Rabine, Boulatov, Kabakov) as well as Poliakoff converse on the walls.

From the plurality of these particular worlds emerges the power and radiance of each of them. They do not harm each other; they illuminate each other. And their coexistence tells us stories. We discover that the warm, almost abstract efflorescence of a large Séraphine bouquet (1929-1930) converses very well with the fly lost in Kabakov's blue painting (1974). That Jean Eve's self-portrait (1936), timidly knocking at the door of Christian Schad's New Objectivity, confronts and unequivocally responds to Boulatov's cosmogonic self-portrait.

Each of these works teaches us to look at another, then to return to the first, and so on, passing through our own intimacy, beyond time and manners. It is a tribute to the diversity of vision that Dina Vierny so strongly advocated.

The second room is more representative of new artists introduced since the 1990s by Olivier Lorquin, particularly through photography, with Frank Horvat or Jerry Schatzberg. However, painting also explodes here with the hyper-realistic black and white oil portraits of Nina Mushinsky, or the dizzying flow of colors by Ra'anan Levy, a reversal of giant pigment pots. This painting entitled "La Rivière" discreetly and cleverly nods to Maillol's monumental sculpture of the same name, which is also overturned. And undoubtedly, the serene presence of the last work by the sculptor, placed by Dina Vierny, "Harmonie," alongside the large colorful painting, ensures the tranquil perpetuity of all the artists hung here.