A Heady Experience

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Ever wonder what would happen if two of Paris' greatest art museums put their heads together? In a rare collaboration with the Louvre, the Pompidou Center's National Museum of [an error occurred while processing this directive] Modern Art is hosting Tête à Tête, an exhibition dedicated to all facets of the human head. By juxtaposing works like a Cycladic marble (ca. 3,000 B.C.) and Constantin Brancusi's stylized bronze Sleeping Muse (1910), the exhibit, which runs through Sept. 4, invites visitors to consider the head as the birthplace of thought, emotion and identity.

Dominating the exhibit foyer is a giant sculpture, Cosmos (2001), by contemporary French artist Boris Achour. Made of dyed resin, the cartoonish noggin with protruding nose rotates in space while humming a Brazilian lambada; the sound evokes an artist contentedly at work and fills the lively, labyrinthine exhibit with creative energy. Other artists prefer to turn their heads, well, on their heads. Sébastien Leclerc's 17th century engravings representing a range of emotions face off with an interactive portion of the exhibit in which children can assemble magnetic eyes, ears, noses and mouths on a wall to create faces that make Picasso's Femme au Chapeau (1935) look banal.

Says American museumgoer Anne Stetson of her two young daughters: "Typically they last about 15 minutes at one of these exhibitions." One-and-a-half hours later, Stetson's children were still busy turning their own faces into digitized kaleidoscopes on a computer installation. With all its sculpture, video, paintings, death masks and distorting mirrors, Tête à Tête is exhaustively stimulating. Afterward, you might just find yourself resting in Georges Pomipidou Plaza, while a portrait artist preserves your head for posterity. tel: (33-1) 44 78 49 13; centrepompidou.fr