Art Of The Day Weekly

Does French art exist?

The organizers of La Force de l’art (The Strenght of art), the new triannual event to be held at the Grand Palais, swear blind the aim is not to enhance a French art, strangely under represented in the major international fairs, but rather to show the vitality of the national scene (essentially parisian) over the last 50 years. In a period of depressed political and social climate, Dominique de Villepin’s initiative obviously has a strong patriotic underlining – a way of saying, « No ! France is not going down. Look!» Each person will reach his own conclusions based on a choice cooked up by 15 curators that promises to be vast : from Cesar to Soulages up to Bruno Peinado and Pierre Huyghe, including Boltanski, Lavier and various foreigners (Lee Ufan, Roman opalka, Sarkis). It remains to be seen whether its main instigator, weary from the CPE and Clearstream affairs will be in a mood for contemporary art or, quite simply, whether he will still be at the helm on the day of the opening. Lord ! It is so difficult to govern a country that has at least 365 types of artists.

The Orangerie, walls included

PARIS – The principle that guided the renovation of the Orangerie museum was to return Monet’s Water Lilies to natural light. It took 6 years and 25 million € (of which a fourth were collected from the international tour of the master pieces of the Walter-Guillaume collection, the museum’s other treasure) to reach this point. The floor, built purposely to stage the collection (a superb group of Cézanne, Matisse, Derain, Soutine and Picasso), was demolished and the glass roof was reinforced. This allowed the museum to come back to its original form, which Monet himself wished to see done when he donated the White water lilies following the Armisice of 1918. But why did it take so long to implement the changes designed by the Lajus Pueyo Brochet firm? Actually, an unforseen obstacle got in the way during the heat wave of 2003, under the form of fortifications from the time of Charles IX. They were begun in 1566 and finished in 1637, and represent the last large circular wall in the history of Paris. The Ministry of Culture decided to keep them and the architects had to adapt their project consequently. Bringing together modern art as well as archeology and contemporary architecture shows the Orangerie museum has more than one asset to return to the attendance levels of the 90s.With peaks at 500 000 visitors per year, it was one of the most visited monuments in the capital.

On the EMOC website, photos and computer-generated images to understand the construction works

Friedrich, the exhilaration of Nature

ESSEN – One of the apostles of Romanticism in painting, known for his wild, deserted landscapes (or contemplated by characters in black, seen from the back) is the object of a retrospective in the heart of the Ruhr region. It wil be significantly inaugurated by the Queen of Sweden. Friedrich, born in 1775 in the town of Greifswald in Pomerania, was indeed a subject of the Swedish crown up to the Convention of Vienna, that is for two thirds of his life (he died in 1840). The exhibition groups together nearly 80 paintings and one hundred drawings, gathered together from fifty different institutions. The exhibition is sponsored by the energetics company E.ON and aims to prove Essen deserves to be the European cultural capital (it is a candidate for 2010), and will be used as the fireworks prior to the complete renovation of the Folkwang museum. Among the works shown, a number of « classics » such as The Glacier, The traveler over a sea of clouds, The Ages of Life, a painting-testament painted in 1835, the Cross in the mountain or the Rügen cliffs. It is deemed his most famous painting and had never been lent by its owner, the Reinhart collection from Winterthur, in Switzerland.

The desperados of Viennese actionnism

VIENNA – When compared to what the Viennese actionnists had the nerve to do in terms of happenings against the bourgeois morals – including blood, excrements, sperm – all other performances after the war remain cold. It happened during the sixties, but, in the midst of the liberalization of moral standards, the interventions by these militants of the extreme did not please everyone. Following the Art and Revolution session at the university of Vienna in 1968, Günther Brus and Otto Muehl, the objects of legal proceedings, had to flee the country. One of the members of the group, Rudolph Schwarzkogler went even further by presenting his own suicide in 1969 as his ultimate performance. The photos, films and works presented here belong to the Julius Hummel gallery, the main collector of the movement.

Gilbert & George strike again

MAASTRICHT – The immortalized duo remains nevertheless provocative, as can be seen in this latest exhibition in Batavian land. The ensemble called Sonofagod Pictures – Was Jesus a heterosexual ? - was created in 2005 and presented at the beginning of 2006 at the White Cube gallery in London. The colorful aesthetics is at the crossroads of various, a priori antagonistic, influences : the Celtic interlace, the stained glass windows in cathedrals, the Christian (the Crucifixion) and profane (the horse shoe) SYMBOLS. It poses a question that would not have been sacriligious not too long ago – Was Jesus a heterosexual ? – but which feels like a repetition following the Da Vinci Code... In any case its a good opportunity to visit Maastricht which does not only exist during the month of March, when it holds the TEFAF –its famous antiques fair.

Will little DFOTO grow up?

SAN SEBASTIAN – If the term were not overused we could say this young photography fair is at a human scale. Impulsed by a well-known collector, Ordonez Falcon, it hosts no more than forty galleries, giving the visitor the pleasant feeling he can see everything without rushing. Among the galleries we see Spanish ones such as Pepe Cobo and Juana de Aizpuru, Portuguese Mario Sequeira, French Anne Barrault, Vu, Kamel Mennour or les Filles du Calvaire, British Gimple and son, New Yorker 1-20 (representing Spencer Tunick who two weeks ago had one thousand Basques strip on the beach of San Sebastian). A posh public for a trial run prior to Photo Espana that will open on 1 June in Madrid and which, contrary to the current show, will submerge us with an overabundant offer. The exhibition program includes Beat Streuli, Toshio Shimamura and the Landcape factory, for which the curator is no other than Régis Durand, from the Jeu de Paume in Paris.