Modern Treasures For a long time Russia jealously guarded its modern art treasures, its breathtaking Matisses, the climactic sensations of its Monets, its radically cubist Picassos, the lost paradise of its Gauguins, without determining exactly where the paintings came from. Scattered at random They were scattered almost at random across Moscow at the Pushkin […]
Made in USA Art is eminently political. Towards the end of the Second World War, when Europe had been bled dry and the way was paved for new forms of expression that were “made in the USA”, like the abstract expressionism of artists like Pollock and Rothko, the most powerful theorist of the time […]
https://youtu.be/mIKp-LgjBts Unconditional acclaim There are certain artworks which, however disconcerting their appearance, are still met with unconditional acclaim. Cézanne, El Greco, Picasso People never question El Greco’s elongated forms stretching up to the sky. Nor do they criticize the crooked tables in Paul Cézanne still lifes, or Picasso’s square, multifaceted figures. It is […]
https://youtu.be/KwssqQpCJEU The “weaker” sex One good thing about trends is that they can lead us to rediscover certain major artists who have spent too long under the radar. This is true of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) who, within the official narrative of the early 20th century avant-garde, displays several handicaps: she was a woman, she […]
J’ai deux amours “J’ai deux amours” … On 18 September a new gallery space is due to open across 400m2 at 18 Avenue Matignon, in Paris, run by the French-Somali art dealer Mariane Ibrahim, with an inaugural exhibition that takes its title from the most famous song by Josephine Baker, star of […]
https://youtu.be/hbhprpFeE_0 Large scale and large number It must be the sensation of the season in Paris. At the Fondation Cartier, Damien Hirst (born in 1965), the superstar from the 1990s and former leader of the Young British Artists, is displaying his new work in his usual fashion – on a very large scale and […]
https://youtu.be/RLKOwokicu4 Son of a giant How to exist in your own right when you’re the son of one of the giants of 20th century painting? To put it another way, how do you “kill your father” when your father is Henri Matisse (1869-1954)? An ocean between them The tried and tested solution, as […]
https://youtu.be/VnR1g5Y0BoY Dumas, Doig and Serpas Ser Serpas is 26 years old and she is astonishingly free. This young woman, who was born in Los Angeles and whose mother is a police officer, is one of the stars of the Pinault collection with her remarkable paintings of fragments of bodies, which are displayed not […]
Major Phenomena We didn’t expect to go to Arles in Provence to learn that society is being rocked by major phenomena relating to gender or the perceptions of black men and women. Around Arles While these subjects have already been covered extensively, this year’s edition of the Rencontres d’Arles illustrates them in a timely […]
Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski 14 July 2021 All his life Christian Boltanski was obsessed by death. At his final large-scale exhibition, a retrospective conceived as a single artwork in 2019 […]
https://youtu.be/w2a4_K2Yfm0 Famous Jeff Koons is one of a small number of contemporary artists of whom the general public often says “I know them” and frequently follows up with “I don’t like them.” Money But people don’t tend to be familiar with the actual works by the American artist, born in 1955, so much as […]
Not the architecture Biennale No, it wasn’t the architecture biennale that made me rush to Venice. I initially found it intellectually stimulating, with all the societal and ecological questions it raises, but it was weak and difficult to access in terms of the visual form these issues were given. Palazzo Grimani In […]
