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Art Of The Day Weekly

#19 - from 19 October 2006 to 25 October 2006

IN THE AIR

For 4 million dollars more

LAS VEGAS - Millionair Steve Wynn, the owner of luxury hotels in Las Vegas, unwillingly damaged the most expensive painting in the world by putting a hole in it. According to script writer Nora Ephron, who witnessed the scene two weeks ago, it was while explaining to guests that he had just sold Le Rêve (The dream) by Picasso (a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter from 1932) for 139 million dollars that Steve Wynn committed the irreparable gesture. The tycoon suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, an eye illness that affects visual acuity. He hit the painting with his elbow, thus causing a tear in Marie-Thérèse's left forearm. The sale agreement reached with Steve Cohen, a manager of investment funds and also a collector with very big means, was annuled. Le Rêve will only virtually have been the most expensive work of art in the world (worth 4 million dollars more than the portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer, by Klimt, bought this Summer by Ronald Lauder). The coincidence is amusing: Steve Wynn destroyed the value of his painting by shredding it at the precise moment when Fontana's paintings with holes reaches its highest price. Art has never been so conceptual.

Nora Ephron's version of the event

ARCHITECTURE

My house in Japan

ORLEANS - How do Japanese architects make their towns their own? With more ease and iconoclasm than their French counterparts. It is what the 2006 edition of Archilab -the international architecture rendez-vous -seems to prove. Aside from a few important constraints - the neighbor's right to have the sun and the mini-distance of courtesy between residents - inhibitions are definitly not taken into consideration in the construction of individual houses. From Hitoshi Abe to Makoto Yokomizo, the younger generation is calling the cards by showing a great vitality in the choice of the forms and materials. Monographic exhibitions by Tadao Ando (who is currently finishing the Cognacq- Jay hospital in Paris) and Kengo Kuma are equally exhibited.

  • Archilab 2006 is held on the site of the Subsistance militaires, from 21 October to 23 December 2006

    The website of Archilab

  • MUSEUMS

    Bodegones raining down on the Prado

    MADRID - A very impressive collection of bodegones (still lives) has just entered the Prado museum: forty paintings by Spanish masters in this genre, that belonged to collector Rodrigo Naseiro. The purchase – for an amount of 26 million euros – was financed by the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) according to the donation mechanism, a payment in kind for taxes owed. Twenty six works are dated from the XVIIth century – the golden age of the genre – with some beautiful ensembles by Tomás Hiepes (7), Pedro Camprobín (4) and Juan Fernández el Labrador (4 shiny bunches of grapes). Aside from a piece by Luis Meléndez (XVIIIth century), the masterpiece of the collection is a composition with artichokes and prunes by Juan van der Hamen (1627). This fund, considered one of the most important to still be in private hands, will be one of the attractions of the new building of the Prado designed by Rafael Moneo, that should open in 2007.

    The 40 paintings presented on latribunedelart.com

    Hogarth, painting as a weapon

    PARIS - In terms of vividness, he is for the English XVIIIth century the equivalent of Swift or Daniel Defoe. William Hogarth used painting and engraving as writers used their pen and pamphlets to criticize the faults of his contemporaries: political corruption, the presumptuousness of the powerful, criminality. While the current themes have not changed with time, the way of daling with them has. Hogarth's series have a rare power that photography today has not completely replaced. Check this at the Louvre with famous ensembles such as the Fashionable Marriage or the Career of a libertine. But we must not forget that Hogarth was not only a vitriolic lampoonist but a refined painter as well: his radiant Pêcheuse de crevettes (Shrimp fisherwoman) alone can prove it.

  • Hogarth at the Louvre museum, from 20 October 2006 to 8 January 2007

    The website of the Louvre

  • Lille 3000, best of...

    LILLE / LE FRESNOY - The great inaugural parade is over, but the city of Lille remains on Indian time until next 14 January. From the train station that transforms as soon as night falls into a Maharadjah palace, to the radiant cascade of dishes set up by Subodh Gupta in the church Sainte Marie-Madeleine, it is difficult to escape from the metamorphosis of the city. Among the multiple temptations, two sites alone make your journey worthwhile. The Tri Postal where, over 5000 square meters, installations and exhibitions follow one another: Troisième oeuil, Bombay Maximum City (Third eye ,Bombay Maximum City or La Fabrique (The Plant) by Tania Mouraud, which haunts you for a long time: a multitude of monitors, in the deafening noise of the weaving machines, show the look and the mechanical gestures of dislocated bodies. And at the second floor, a surprising exhibition on the textiles of the future, interactive textiles or cuddly textiles... At the Fresnoy, London Bombay, Victoria Terminal. British artist Patrick Keiller and his chief Indian operator Dilip Varma have installed in the large nave thirty giant screens that restore the architecture, the swirming and sounds of the station in Bombay, the symbol of Indian society, while in the smaller nave, one cn find the London of the turn of the century. An installation with various readings, and the most succesful use of multimedia we can currently see. It is not always easy to go to the Fresnoy. Could there be a former covered market or an abandonded station available in Paris next Spring?

  • Le Tri Postal , Lille, until 14 January 2007
  • Londres Bombay, Le Fresnoy, until 17 December 2006

    The website of Lille 3000

  • ...off Lille 3000

    LILLE / ROUBAIX - Two museums of Lille 3000 still resist the Indian invasion. The Palace of Beaux-arts, with an original "exhibition-cabinet de curiosité" organized by Jeanette Zwingenberger. L'homme paysage(The landscape man), on the theme of the relations between the landscape, the human body and its environment, metamorphosed nature. Some one hundred artist works, from the Renaissance to our days, from Arcimboldo to Tony Cragg - among which many of the older ones have never been seen before, as they come from private collections. Anthropomorphic landscapes, bodies in full mutation, so many visual mysteries which put us face to face with man's place in the universe. La Piscine at Roubaix goes even further, to Finland, with a retrospective dedicated by another curator, Sylvette Gaudichon Botella, to Marimekko, the icon of textil and design. Ever since the fifties, Marimekko, animated and directed by women, has created materials of which the motives hve also deeply renovated the framework, the decoration and the fashion. In spite of the great diversity in the artists' signatures - Finns as well as Japanese - that appear on the selvage of each material, Marimekko has known how to develop a particularly coherent style, that has marked a an era ad is maybe already marked by the later. This style has had a brilliant success in the Northern countries, in their search for colors to live, as well as in the anglo-saxons countries, but it has not been able to impose itself in the Latin countries. Maybe there is still time...

  • L'homme paysage au Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille jusqu'au 14 janvier 2007
  • Marimekko : textile, mode et design à la Piscine de Roubaix, du 21 Octobre au 14 janvier 2007

    The website of La Piscine

  • BOOKS

    Plants and Co.

    All Parisians know it as they must cross it o their way down to the Seine. But do they know the extent of the wealth the Jardin des Plantes holds? Not only flower beds and roses… Writer Jules Merleau-Ponty tells us, in a style that makes us nostalgic for the past, about his fascination during his youth with the diplodocus. A way of reminding everyone that the Jardin des Plantes, is not only the cedar planted by Jussieu and the Mexican greenhouse. It is also a great source of pleasure for aspiring(or not) paleontologists, with the Gallery of Evolution. And for mineralogists with the stone collections, for aesthets with its varied architectures, its watercolored plates of hummingbirds, its boxes of multicolored coleopterous insects. We could draw up a long list witout hitting the end nor using up all the charm of the place. In his sensitive introduction, Gilles Clément is right in underlining that while this garden is a tribute to intelligence, it is also and above all a «friend garden». To be checked on site during these beatiful autumn days.

  • Le Jardin des Plantes, ouvrage collectif, éditions Nicolas Chaudun/éditions du Muséum, ISBN : 2-35039-023-3, 2006, 49 €

    Buy that book from Amazon

  • IN BRIEF

    LEIPZIG - The Denkmal, one of the most important European fairs in the field of restoration (with Restauro in Ferrara) will be held from 25 to 28 October.

    The website of the Denkmal

    LONDON - British architect Richard Rogers has been awarded one of the most prestigious architecture prizes, the Stirling Prize, for the year 2006. It rewards one of his most ambitious projects, the airport of Barajas in Madrid.

    LONDON - The auction of Italian art of the XXth century at Christie's on 16 October brought in 15.6 million £. The most expensive lot, Concetto spaziale, Attese (1963) sets a new world record for Lucio Fontana at 2.1 million £ (3.1 million €). The corresponding sale at Sotheby's brought in 11.5 million £.

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    NEW YORK - The magazine Art Review has just published its list of the 100 most influential personnalities in the world of art. The first place is awarded to François Pinault, the owner of Christie's and of palazzo Grassi in Venice. He is head of art dealer Larry Gagosian and the two deus ex machina from theTate Gallery, Nicholas Serota.

    PARIS - The gallery Bérès (25 quai Voltaire, 75007) will present from 20 October to 31 January an exhibition on the decade 1910-1920 in cubism. It wil bring together some 250 works by artists from different countries of which the French Braque, Herbin, Gleizes, Russian artists Larionov, Gontcharova, Survage, the Czechs Guttfreund and Filla, the Italian Severini.

    PARIS - Fifteen photographers have been selected for the first photography prize of the Jeu de Paume, that will be awarded on 13 November. Among them, Antoine d'Agata, Dolores Marat, Arno Gisinger and Denis Dailleux.

    To know more

    PARIS --Show Off opens its doors on the 24th: 28 galleries of strictly contemporary art, from eight different countries, with their 200 artists. All practices are represented: painting, photography, sculpture, video and new technologies. A fair with artistic discoveries, and a more relaxed alternative to the established art fairs

    The complete program on art-of-the-day.info

    ON ARTOFTHEDAY.INFO

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    Correspondences

    Once again, the Musée d’Orsay offers two contemporary artists, one French and the other foreign, the opportunity to present one of their works in relation to a work of art they themselves chose in the museum. An opportunity for the visitor to see the collections under a new angle and to grasp in a different way their everlasting modernity. This time Jeff Wall, Rear View, Open Air Theater faces Paul Cézanne, Le pont de Maincy, and François Morellet, Three démonétisations Claude Monet, Three Cathedrals of Rouen...

    read the article on art-of-the-day.info...