Art Of The Day Weekly
#34 - from 15 February 2007 to 21 February 2007
IN THE AIR
A history of bones
The major Anglo-Saxon museums are greatly disturbed by the increasingly demanding requests made by countries that consider themselves "despoiled". Italy and Greece are the leaders of the pack of nations that intend to recover the objects illegally placed in foreign collections and have succeeded to have some pieces returned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Getty in Malibu. The domino theory -if it applies- could have devastating consequences: one part of the French collections was not regularly acquired (just think of Napoleon in Italy or in Spain through general Soult). And Italy is not protected from any demands: Turkey has not forgotten the crusades nor the ransacking of Constantinople in 1204… The ultimate exoticism is seen in an article published in The Guardian, recently underlining a danger that is right in their back yard. Neo-pagans and druidic societies have started demanding as well, sotto voce for the time being, but they want the bones of their distant ancestors. As long as they are kept in anthropology or natural history museums, their authentic owners will not rest in peace. Various institutions among them the National History Museum, the British Museum and the museum of Manchester take these new demands quite seriously . They have understood what can happen when a clumsy guard reactivates an ancient curse: skeletons start moving about! The demonstration is made in A night in the museum with Ben Stiller, currently on the movie screens.
MARKET
LONDON – There was a lot of talk in November on the mind blowing results of sales in New-York: one billion dollars in modern and contemporary art in one week. America seemed out of reach. And now London has almost equalled this figured with 757 million dollars in the week of 5 February: 392 million at Christie’s, who keeps a slight advantage over its eternal rival Sotheby’s (365 million). In detaila, there is an avalanche of records: 153 works went past the one million dollars figure. A Bacon from Sofia Loren's collection (Study for Portrait II has become the second most expensive work in public sales in the post war era (27.5 million dollars at Christie’s). At the age of 47, Peter Doig is now the most expensive living European artist (his White Canoe sold for 11.4 million dollars). Photography has surpassed its own maximum (with Andreas Gursky and his 99 cents II at 3.4 million dollars). Raoul Dufy has shattered his own record (going from 3 to 8 million dollars) with the Foire aux oignons. The list of peaks and excesses, fed by the cash of the new fortunes in Russia and elsewhere, is endless. Pessimists will note that major crisis have often been preceeded by this type of speculative increases…
Arco on Lourdes time
MADRID – The Spanish fair on contemporary art has a new leader. After being conducted for two decades by Rosina Gómez-Baeza, another woman will rule: Lourdes Fernández (born in 1961), who worked for 5 years at the Marlborough gallery and took care of the biennale Manifesta in San Sebastián in 2000-2001. Her first year is marked by a slight decrease in the number of exhibitos - 271, that is twenty less than two years ago - compensated by the return of heavy weights such as New-York artist Pace-Wildenstein. The general Western interest in Asian scenes will be nurished by the presence of Korea, the guest country, while the back drop of new technologies will meet at the Black Box, animated by Carolina Grau and Marc-Olivier Wahler, the new boss at the Palais de Tokyo. In the section Proyectos (special projects), we will note many galleries from Bejing, Berlin, Madrid and Lucerne and the blattant absence of French galleries. This is quite disturbing at a time when the country quetions itself constantly on its loss of cultural influence … Deep transformations are expected for the 27th ARCO in 2008 with the move towards bigger, newer pavilions, that will allow in particular for better staging of the larger installations.
EXHIBITIONS
Gilbert & George, the irrefutable proof
LONDON – This is probably the most emblematic couple in the current art scene. And yet they are so deeply «British» (even though Gilbert was born Italian, in the Dolomites) that the organizers of the retrospective hesitated before hosting it at the Tate Modern rather than at the Tate Britain. Forty years of creations (they met at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967, when they were 25 years old) expressed through their plastic works as well as in an unchanging posture: always together, often in impecable suits and a neutral look, sometimes in the nude in indecorous positions or next to enlargements of parts of their anatomy. From the performances of their beginnings, when they pretended to be statues, to the giant reproductions of the 80s, that become increasingly colored, Gilbert & George systematically ask the same questions -through their own image- regarding identity, sexuality, idolatry. The Tate Modern reviews all their itinerary, including -through the Dirty Words Pictures- the Gingko Pictures from the Biennale of Venice or the Sonofagod Pictures, exhibited last year. And to show they are not completely immortalized, the artists also created some works specifically for this exhibition.
Friesz, the return
ROUBAIX - He is not the most famous of the Fauve artists but is a very touching second role, the son of a captain of the Merchant navy. No retrospective has been dedicated to Othon Friesz in thirty years, the last one was held in 1979 to mark the one hundreth anniversary of his birth. The museum of Art and Industry of Roubaix, the former Art déco pool, likes to stage artists who have been forgotten or neglected: one remembers the exhibitions dedicated to Jane Poupelet, Gaston Lachaise or Agathon Léonard. Friesz deserved nothing less. From his first landscapes tinted with impressionism to the inevitable "return to order" and the influence of Cézanne, and obviously including the brief but major Fauvist moments, his carreer is dissected in 150 works, paintings, drawings, prints as well as ceramics.
ARTISTOFTHEWEEK
Christoph von Weyhe: a port is beautiful at night
PARIS – Christoph von Weyhe is one of those obsessive artists who constantly come back to the same motif. His Sainte-Victoire is the port of Hamburg. The industrial port with its cranes, its numbered docks, bridges, its flares and its powerful lighthouses that cut through the night. In order to limit the scope of his work even more, he is only interested in his subject at the waning hours of the day. « At the end of the vacations, when I would leave Hamburg and my family to return to the Beaux-Arts in Paris where I studied, the train would run along the port, at night. That image has been a part of me for a long time. » For fifteen years now he has been inhabited by this monomaniac passion and he has proceeded in the same manner. During the milder season he is on site. He spreads stiff cardboard sheets directly on the floor and works quickly, with gouache, to catch the scene. And once he is back in Paris, in his workshop in the Marais, he retranscribes it with acrylic paints on large canvases measuring 2 metres. This work is long and meticulous, and can take him up to three months per work. At the age of 69, the artist has no intention of changing themes. His journey through the night of Hamburg is not over.
BOOKS
Ten years with Charchoune
Catalogues raisonnés are generally not made for the public at large. Sometimes though, they allow us to go beyond the work of one single artist to seize the atmosphere of an era. It is the case of this first volume on the painted work of Serge Charchoune (1888-1975),a Russian painter of Slovak origin, settled in Paris at the beginning of the XXth century. It covers the period of 1914-1924 (four other volumes will follow, up to 1975), he presents of course the paintings of that period and various documents such as the fac-similes of letters to gallery owners where he exhibited. But posters of exhibitions, magazine covers and photographs of his friends of the time (Breton, Soupault, Eluard, Péret) bring the Dada and Surrealist eras back to life (with the trial of Maurice Barrès, accused of a crime against the security of the mind!) or the beginnings of Cubism which he took part in actively. During this decade in upheaval, Charchoune was always in movement. He was in Paris as well as in Barcelona (at the time of boxer-artist Arthur Cravan) then in Berlin: what is offered to us is a cut away diagram of Europe at the turn of the First World War.
IN BRIEF
LENS -Given the soaring costs for the antenna of the Louvre at Lens (by Japanese architects de Sanaa), the president of th ergional council of Nord-Pas de Calais, socialist Daniel Percheron has launched an alert procedure. He will be meeting wiht the Minister of Culture on thursday 15 in the evening.
LONDON -Following the fantastic results of the contemporary and modern art sales in the week of 5 February, Sotheby’s hopes to pursue this tendency with its first sale dedicated totally to contemporary Russian art (from 1960 to 1990), on 15 February.
MADRID -Taking advantage of the calendar, the Art Madrid fair will be held at the same time as ARCO, from 15 to 19 February, in the Pabellón de Cristal de la Casa de Campo.
PARIS -The Louvre museum has announced the purchase of a national treasure, a Sainte Madeleine by Quentin Metsys, that has been in the James de Rothschild collection since 1840, through the patronage of the Crédit Immobilier de France.
TORINO - The Palazzo Madama (the museum of ancient art) opened in December following 18 years of works. On 13 February, another institution of the city of Piedmont came back to life: the museum of Human Anatomy had been closed since 1898…
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This week, do not miss...
RICHARD POUSETTE DART
VENICE - He is one of the great names in American abstract expressionism, even if he was slightly in the shadow of those of Pollock or De Kooning. In 1941, he was the first one in the groupe, together with Adolf Gottlieb, to have a personal exhibition. Through 47 paintings, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection strolls along his carreer, marked by the founding myths of America and Oriental philosophy.
THE FORBIDDEN EMPIRE Visions of the World by Chinese and Flemish Masters
BRUSSELS - 143 works over 1200 square meters to express two different visions of the world: the Western one, through Flemish art , and the Oriental one, expressed through Chinese art. The very original exhibit prepared by Yu Hui and artist Luc Tuymans confronts drawings, paintings, calligraphy, cartography and seems to demonstrate tha while the world has shrunk, "mental" distances have not moved…
THE HUGUENOTS
METZ - With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of thousands of protestants left France. The exhibition follows the life of those who settled in the Moselle region: with the help of objects of daily life, paintings, engravings and archives, the drama of these families that had to leave their land towards England, the United Provinces or, further away, Berlin and Brandeburg, is recreated for us.