Art Of The Day Weekly
#36 - from 1 March 2007 to 7 March 2007
IN THE AIR
To lend or not to lend...
The head of the museums in Berlin, Klaus Dieter Lehman, has exploded against the Louvre and accused it, in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, of copying the Guggenheim and behaving like a listed company only seeking to maximise its profit. One point in his demonstration is interesting, and it concerns loans of art works to exhibitions abroad. In this competition to attract an audience, one can only fear that paintings will only travel to the largely mediatised events, thus avoiding retrospectives that are well thought out but poorly «located». Italy offers examples of the two cases this week. On the one hand, a «blockbuster» announced in the most touristy city of the country, Florence: the enth retrospective on Cézanne (at the palazzo Strozzi) with drum rolls,a website, booming announcements on discoveres. On the other hand, in the city of Genoa, that is not as visited by the crowds, an exhibition patiently prepared on a native painter,Luca Cambiaso, a brilliant colourist from the XVIth century but unknown to the general public(at the palazzo Ducale). We can easily bet that tour-operators and the evening news on TV will talk loud and clear of the first exhibiton, while the second remains in the shadows. Consequently this type of event grows increasingly difficult to organize. If the internationalisation of the major museums means they will follow in the footsteps of this sort of tendency, it would definitely be a shame in a world that each day looses a little more of its cultural diversity. It is up to them to prove us wrong.
EXHIBITIONS
Lalique is all sparkles
PARIS – His name symbolises the greatest success in French decorative arts as well as the perfect marriage between art and industry. While René Lalique (1860-1945) is known for his jewels, he was also a brilliant entrepreneur, and opened glass factories in Combs-la-Ville, near Paris, and in Wingen-sur-Moder, in Alsace, where he applied the most advanced techniques of the time. The exhibition brings together over one hundred pieces to describe a long life of creation. At the age of 30, Lalique already had a workshop with 30 workers. In 1927, at the age of 67, he had a new child with his third companion while he prepared the fair of the artist decorators; in 1935, at age 75, he decorated the first class dining room of the liner "Normandie". Sketches, vases, lamps and perfume bottles for René Coty are accompanied by jewels inspired by Nature and which surprised one and all by the unexpected materials used to make them: an enamel necklace, opal and amethysts or a comb made out of horn, gold and nuts…
Lynch power
PARIS - As all heroes of the Greek Antiquity, he has a talent with various aspects. He is a movie director of course, with Eraserhead, Sailor and Lula or the recent Inland Empire, acclaimed at the last Mostra of Venice. But he is also a musician, a photographer or a painter. David Lynch, born in 1946, likes nothing more than erasing the barriers between the different forms of art. The retrospective at the fondation Cartier approaches this varied production from a unique source: the personal collection of the one-man band who has kept in wisely organised boxes all he has created since he was a teenager. Oil paintings, drawings and collages, images turned away from their objectives, noises and of course, a strong component of animated images. David Lynch's resourcefulness is also expected at the foundation's Soirées nomades, for which he will be the organizer in the month of March.
Armenia, a long christian memory
PARIS – The khatchkars: we can bet a pretty penny they will be a discovery for the French public. These are vertical stone slabs, decorated with a cross, presented in a suggestive fashion in the medieval ditches of the Louvre. In order to describe fifteen centuries of Armenian civilisation, strongly marked by Christianity (Armenia is the first State to have chosen it as its religion, in the IVth century), the museum also presents steles, decorated canopies, door leaves from monasteries, silver reliquaries and other liturgical objects, manuscripts in the national alphabet perfected in the Vth century by the monk Mesrop Machtots. At the often violent intersection with various influences – Arab, Monghol, Persian, Turkish – the country had his golden age from the XIIIth to the XVth centuries: it is the Great Armenia, marked by the foundation of sanctuaries and monasteries.
HERITAGE
Mobilization for a Poussin
PARIS – The French press has echoed the crusade carried out by the museum of Beaux-Arts in Lyon, together with the Louvre museum, to ensure the possession of a painting by Poussin from 1657, The flight into Egypt. The painting, part of a private collection, was judged a national treasure by the French administration and therefore it was not authorized to leave the country . The 30 months required for a ban are soon going to be over and now the administration has 4 months to draw up a certificate for the work of art to leave the country. That means the museums have until 11 June to gather the 15 million euros needed to buy the painting…According to the law of 4 January 2002, the corporation that would buy the Poussin for the museum of Lyon would benefit from a 90% corporate tax rebate. Hear ye all those interested: other certificates will be losing their validity in the next three months, concerning less expensive works: a Cerf aux abois(Stag surrounded) by Alexandre-François Desportes (1729) and a vanity of Eugène de Beauharnais in mahogany, ebony and gilded bronze by Biennais (1805-1810).
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Christina Iglesias: in hommage to vegetable
She is the talk of the town in Madrid: indeed she signed the doors of the new building of the Prado museum (designed by Rafael Moneo), to be inaugurated in the Spring. The two parts of this bronze door weighing various tons bear on their surface her traditional motifs of vegetable interlacing. Cristina Iglesias (born in 1956) also has an exibition at the Elba Benítez gallery, with a few large pieces she was commissioned to do in the last decade. Aside from the doors of the Prado, a fountain in Antwerp and projects ofVegetable dwellings, her work includes her best known productions, the Corredores or corridors made of a canopy suspended over the visitor. A transparent canopy, in «lace», on which texts are reproduced and the light projects in shadows on the ground. In Iglesias' life, with all the honors she seems to have already known (represented Spain at the Biennale of Venice in 1993, monographic exhibitions at the Reina Sofía, at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and New York, at the Whitechapel in London), we must also mention the retrospective that will open on 10 March at the museum of Grenoble, dedicated to Juan Muñoz. He died suddenly in 2001, and was one of the enfants terribles of Spanish art of the 90s, with Cristina. He was also her husband…
BOOKS
Désiré Charnay, when photography was an adventure
When an exhibition invites one to travel, the catalogue is an additional reason to escape reality. Especially when it draws up the portrait of an adventurer, a constant traveler, with a biography full of obscure corners such as Désiré Charnay, a photographer and explorer of the XIXth century. Though he is not as familiar to us as he is to the North Americans, we knew a little about his epic photography campaigns in the Maya jungle, at the time of the rediscovery of the great temples (Palenque, Uxmal, Yaxchilán). Would he have liked digital cameras, instead of the heavy plates of collodion he carried around? He who was forced, when his luggage did not arrive in time, to make his own cellulose nitrate…During his career, that was as long as that of Lalique's (see above), he taught in New-Orleans in 1850, photographed Yucatan in 1858, Madagascar in 1863, Indonesia in 1878, Yemen in 1896, Algeria in 1897. All this traveling was before the invention of low-cost flights… And in 1910, at the age of 82, he was still a lecturer at the museum of the Trocadero! This little catalogue combines reproductions, technical remarks and thoughts about traveling (the title, « Yucatán is elsewhere», is taken from a work by the artist Robert Smithson), and can be read like an adventure novel. What a shame it is a little expensive…
IN BRIEF
LONDON - Christie's, owned by François Pinault, has just bought Haunch of Venison, the London gallery of contemporary art. This is the first time one of the duettists of auction houses takes a stance on the "primary" contemporary art market.
MOSCOW - The second biennale of contemporary art of Moscow will be held from 2 March to 1 April, in some fifty cultural venues in the Russian capital.
NEW YORK-On 24 February Yvon Lambert inaugurated the new venue of his New York gallery. It is in Chelsea, at 550 West 21st Street.
PARIS-German art dealer Henry Berggruen, a great collector of Klee and Picasso, died on 23 February at the age of 93 . A museum in Berlin carries his name.
TORINO- A new form of public commission has presided the creation of Totipotent Architecture, in front of the Fiat Mirafiori plant, by Lucy Orta, inaugurated on 3 March. The commissioners consulted for this assemblage that recalls cells include the students of the two highschools nearby .
ON ARTOFTHEDAY info
This week do not miss
EARLY NETHERLANDISH PAINTERS The finest diptychs
ANTWERP -During the XVIth century, the Reform gave birth to a new more personal, more intimate form of devotion. At the same time diptychs, the religious compositions on two mobile wings one could open or close, multiplied to accompany these moments of prayer . The museum of Beaux-Arts of Antwerp presents some thirty eamples, renowned masterpieces, the work of Hugo van der Goes, Gerard David or Rogier van der Weyden.