The newly restored Cyclop has been given a new look and a digital platform dedicated to its archives.
The Cyclop is a monumental sculpture by Jean Tinguely, a monster made of concrete and metal, covered with mirrors on its southern side. It is a giant's head planted in the middle of the woods in Milly-la-Forêt that scans the environment with its only eye. As high as a seven-story building, the head of this Cyclop can be visited like a museum, where the visitor wanders through a maze of works of art and curiosities.
Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and their friends began the construction in 1969. Numerous artists collaborated in a family and festive atmosphere. By inviting his friends to participate in the construction of this collective work, Jean Tinguely brought together several dozen works of art in one place. Without permission and with their own funds, they worked with recycled materials. Completed twenty-five years after the initial work, Le Cyclop was inaugurated and opened to the public in 1994.
The Centre national des arts plastiques launched the restoration of the Cyclop in March 2021. The site closed its doors in October 2020 to make way for a vast restoration site that lasted over a year, to reopen to the public on May 22, 2022.
For this occasion, the Cnap has designed a digital platform for the Cyclop, dedicated to its archives. Born of the observation that archive sources are geographically dispersed and that it is difficult to give an account of the history of this singular work in all its specificities and stages of construction, this platform will encourage the bringing together of these multiple archives and allow the public, whether curious or specialists, to (re)discover Le Cyclop thanks to the functionalities of the digital tool.