Welcome to the MICG
You commonly use a smartphone, a computer, a tablet. You write on your keyboard, on your screen, you choose fonts, font sizes (Times new roman, Helvetica, Arial, etc.), you highlight in bold, in italics, you format your ideas and your pages. texts. You play with words and images. You print, too.
In short, you communicate!
It is for this reason that the musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communication graphique (MICG) proposes to give you historical, aesthetic, technical landmarks, to allow you to understand these everyday gestures better. By immersing yourself in the birth and evolution of printing since the Renaissance, you will be confronted with a living heritage that gives meaning to current technological changes. Alive, because regularly animated by temporary exhibitions and demonstrations of techniques and graphic arts, led by specialists in their field, moments of meeting, exchanges, with the possibility also of practicing, through numerous workshops throughout of the year.
The musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communicatoin graphique was born in 1964, thanks to three figures from the book world: the printer Marius Audin (whose brother Amable founded the Gallo-Roman museum of Lyon, Lugdunum), Henri -Jean Martin, director of the library of Lyon and theoretician of the history of the book, and André Jammes, Parisian bookseller, great connoisseur of typography.
Our museum first celebrates the place of Lyon in the early days of the printing press, a veritable Silicon Valley of innovation and distribution of printed books between the end of the 15th century and the middle of the 16th century, at the same level as Venice or Leipzig. Lyon also plays a leading role in the dissemination of innovative techniques, such as photocomposition in the 20th century. With the latter, the inventors René Moyroud and Louis Higonnet changed the way of printing and marked the end of the typographic composition inherited from Gutenberg. The chronological journey of the museum invites you to embrace five centuries of graphic evolutions, on two floors and three galleries. A journey from the appearance of the printing press in Asia to the triumph of print for all, the irruption of the image and the pre-eminence of advertising, the development of graphic design.
Since 2017, the temporary exhibitions have been considered as a counterpoint to the permanent exhibition of the collections and are immediately based on contemporary subjects or directly related to the 20th and 21st centuries.
At a time when our society is preading so many images and digital texts, the strength and uniqueness of the Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication lies in the possibility of constantly working and echoing the traces of the past. and contemporary forms of creation, current topics and the deep relationships that unite audiences to texts and images.
The museum in 2023/2024
Dear visitors,
Writing and language are wastelands, where one can play, try, make mistakes, always start over. Places of affirmation, signposting, contestation and domination too, which must be viewed from a distance to gradually tame them, like wild animals.
With inclusive writing, each of us has a new register, a joyful and political repertoire, which aims as much at gender equality as at reconnecting with our past as a living and evolving language. The feminisation of words that accompanies it thus clashes directly with the wave of masculinisation of vocabulary that took place between the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe.
You just have to come to the museum to see in the letters, the punctuation, the typography, how inclusive writing only continues to conquer our public and personal spaces. The more we see ourselves in words and images, the more we exist and are able to say what we want, to express our desires and our anger, to fully participate in the world that is ours and that we share.
You have been many and many in recent months to come to the museum. And, thanks to you, we have found colors, strengths, to offer you a whirlwind of stories and experiences in this new season which promises to be as sensitive as it is energetic and twirling. Hayao Miyazaki will thus make a sensational entrance into our walls from April to September 2024. The exhibition Le musée ambulant, which will be dedicated to him, will not return to the 1001 ways of making an animated film. It will rather be a question of discovering all the books, all the authors, the textual and visual references, graphics, which are hidden behind the films of the Japanese master.
The French graphic designer Michel Lepetitdidier will come to tell you about his life as a designer, his way, discreet and moving, of carrying high the author's graphic design, far from communication and closer to the feelings of those who, often faithful, one day place an order with him. The retrospective exhibition of his work will be held from November 2023 to February 2024, and will be preceded in the rooms by a strong tribute to the poet Emily Dickinson and her frenzy to write verses on the back of the envelopes placed all around her, as natural receptacles of her literary power in action.
Add the presence of the artist Laura Ben Haiba in the fall of 2023, and the possibility of going to the hundred visits, workshops and demonstrations led by our mediators, and you will get the recipe for a museum. blooming, in balance between printing and graphic design, which will already celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2024...
Looking forward to welcoming you all, seeing you, and seeing you again soon!
Joseph Belletante, Director, 2023.
