The first major post-lockdown reopenings in a still semi-deserted Venice are the ones that the Pinault Collection is offering to the public in its two venues, four-month after its due official opening: two major photography exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi – Henri Cartier-Bresson and Youssef Nabil – and “Untitled 2020”, a contemporary art group-show at Punta della Dogana.

“At a certain point we had to take a decision and we decided to reopen” so Bruno Racine, director of Palazzo Grassi/Punta della Dogana, explained with a French accent to the group of masked journalists who asked him how they had dealt with the lockdown. “We were lucky because we managed to move the art pieces here before international borders closed, as the original vernissage was supposed to be in March.” In addition these three generous exhibitions, he announced a solo show on Bruce Nauman at Punta della Dogana that will open in 2021. A strong name to make up for the temporary closure of Palazzo Grassi which will undergo structural intervention on the building facilities.

“Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu”, the most prominent of the three, occupies all the rooms on the highest floor of Palazzo Grassi with a selection of original photographs from the famous Master Collection, a collection of 385 images that the French photographer decided to print in 1973 at the request of the couple of patrons Dominique and John de Menil. Six copies of the collection are kept around the world, from the V&A in London to the University of Fine Arts in Osaka, then the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Menil Foundation in Houston, the Pinault Collection in Venice and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

In Venice, general curator Matthieu Humery has asked five exceptional figures to curate two rooms each with the sole rule to select 50 of the 385 photographs from the original corpus by Cartier-Bresson. The rule of the game (le grand jeu, in fact) was that no one would see the selection of the others. The curators are photographer Annie Leibovitz, film director Wim Wenders, writer Javier Cercas, photography-conservator Sylvie Aubenas and, of course, collector François Pinault. The result is a succession of rooms divided by curator in which Cartier-Bresson’s framed photos are classically arranged along the walls. The difference between the five layouts is subtle and revealed by compositional details such as the position of the photos or the colour of the walls. Many shots inevitably repeat themselves because they were chosen by more curators at the same time, such as Lac Sevan, Arménie, USSR, 1972 where a father lifts his very young son by holding his foot or Alberto Giacometti, Rue d’Alésia, Paris, France, 1961 where a sixty year old Giacometti crosses the pedestrian crossings in the pouring rain covering his head with his jacket.

“Seeing the works of Cartier-Bresson made me want to become a photographer,” says the great rock stars and Hollywood portrayer Annie Leibovitz in the introductory text to the exhibition. Among the anecdotes she tells of when she managed to meet Cartier-Bresson in Paris, with whom she spent a whole day with the only condition not to be photographed: knowing that in the morning she would meet him again along the same street, she sneaked around and photographed him. When he noticed that he became extremely angry and made her swear never to publish it because as a street photographer no one had to know what he looked like. The exhibition is not meant to be a monograph on the great photographer but an interpretative game of the curators, a personal look at a name that portrayed an era.

Downstairs “Once upon a dream” is a large retrospective of the artist Youssef Nabil curated by Matthieu Humery and Jean-Jacques Aillagon with over 120 works that trace his career. Born in 1972 in Cairo, he began photographing in 1992, portraying characters that evoked the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Among the subjects, pop singers like Natacha Atlas, Hollywood stars and the artist himself. His silver jelly prints are all meticulously hand-painted, giving a timeless vintage touch, with sugary colours and a glitter. The exhibition tells a Middle East between reality and fantasy, with its wonders and idiosyncrasies. A world from which the photographer has moved away (today he lives between Paris and New York) but which he recalls with nostalgia in every work.

And lastly, “Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present”, brings together the works of over 60 artists born between 1840 and 1995 who crossed paths with their practice in Los Angeles. The exhibition is curated by Caroline Bourgeois, artist and art historian Muna El Fituri and artist Thomas Houseago and takes shape from conversations between the three, on various themes in the contemporary art world. It is divided into 18 rooms, divided by themes including activism, utopia, sex, death, loss... Here, unlike the more didactic exhibition on Cartier-Bresson, it is more difficult to orient oneself among the works left free to act on the sensitivity of the visitor: Perhaps a clearer reference to the intense dialogue between the three curators (printed in the catalogue) would help to grasp the intertwining and mutual influences between the artists in the exhibition.