Gromaire, social-priest

Black lives matter, ” proclaims The Abolition of Slavery , a canvas painted in 1950 by Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971). Against a backdrop of social bricks, these 40 m2, both schematic and grandiloquent, structured around the figures of Victor Schœlcher and Marianne, welcome visitors permanently at the entrance to the Museum of Art and Industry of Roubaix. "The hall was even built according to this work when the old municipal swimming pool, an Art Deco jewel, was transformed in 2001" , specifies the director of the place Bruno Gaudichon. With Benjamin Findinier, Maïthé Vallès-Bled and Alice Massé, he is the curator of a retrospective dedicated to the artist.

It takes here, in this formerly working-class North which saw the birth of Gromaire, all its breadth and all its meaning. Already presented at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 in the co-producing museums of Honfleur and Sète, here it is largely completed and ideally installed on red, white and blue picture rails, reminders of the humanist and republican motto

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