Art Of The Day Weekly
#61 - from 11 October 2007 to 17 October 2007
IN THE AIR
The artist, the judge and the shopping center
Art, like God, moves in many mysterious ways. At Gateshead, the police is investigating a photograph by Nan Goldin and has let it be known that it could be considered as pornography (Elton John, the owner of the collection exhibited at the Baltic center, has asked that it be closed to the public rather than show it in an amputated version). In a shopping center in North America, some conceptual artists who had set up a clandestin apartment for themselves to closely observe the commercial animation were condemned by a judge for offence against private property. While it has become difficult to define what art is in terms of aesthetics, materials or representation of reality, one criterium seems to always apply, a century and a half after Courbet and Manet: to contravene the rules, the standards imposed by society. An artist prospers in our day as a destroyer of the hypocrisies of all types. There is always work to be done: a sculpture in foie gras is exhibited in York, where the animal defense associations are about to succeed in having the cruel food forbidden.
EXHIBITIONS
Bourgeois, the Great
LONDON- Her exceptional longevity brings her close to creators such as Manoel de Oliveira or Mario Monicelli, comfortably in their nineties. Over 95 years old, the «grande dame indigne» of contemporary art is still around. The exhibition at the Tate Modern has the ambition of presenting all of her very varied work, influenced by the Surrealists as well as by Léger (who was her teacher), by conceptual art as well as by feminist, committed art. Though born in France in 1911, Louise Bourgeois developed most of her career in the USA, where she settled right before World War II. She is the object of a true cult, especially after the retrospective in 1982 at the MoMA, one of the first dedicated to a woman artist. From her monumental metal sculptures (such as the giant spider that inaugurated the same Tate Modern in 2000) to her drawings, from the installations to the sexual compositions in latex or in dolls, Louise Bourgeois' repertoir defies all classification. This presentation, meant to travel throughout the world and in particular the USA (Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim New York, Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum) aims in a way at being the definite retrospective, with 200 works of which the most recent are in material.
Is Courbet still scandalous?
PARIS – Many spectators will undoubtedly go to the Grand Palais to see the Origine du monde even though this close-up of the feminine anatomy has been visible for a few years now at the musée d’Orsay. Today, the painting symbolises, with Les Baigneuses, the nefarious dimension of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Actually, the real scandal at the time was something else: it was the excess of realism, of naturalism - to represent modest persons in their mediocre daily life, in the same way as the privileged classes. L’Enterrement à Ornans or L’Atelier du peintre were in this sense a lot more contraversial. This agitated career, that wound between Paris, the "Midi" (where his patron Alfred Bruyas resided), his native valley of the Loue, in the Doubs region, and Switzerland (where he found refuge following the fall of the Commune, in which he participated), is retraced in 120 paintings and 30 drawings, three decades after the last large Parisian retrospective. As we have recently seen for other artists (Maurice Denis, Vuillard), another aspect of Courbet's work is brought forward: his photographs.
Carriés and his monsters
PARIS – A retrospective of Carriès? This is a rare opportunity to rediscover a strange sculptor from the second half of the XIXth century. The fact that many of the works shown are already in the storerooms of the Petit Palais in no way lessens the interest since they are not all visible and that here they are magnified by a delirious work, the Porte monumentale, commissioned by billionair Winaretta Singer (the dynasty of sewing machines). It is to Carriès (1848-1894) what the Door to the Inferno is to Rodin: a total work of art, filled with hundreds of archetype characters. With Carriès, they all more or less look like monsters, semi-men semi-animals, wrinkled, making faces, with large ears, hooked beaks, pimples and scars. Carriès died of tuberculosis before finishing it. But what remains of it shows enough of the artist's virtuosity in working with sandstone, the invention of unseen patina based on prune juice, old ocres or macerated peels. While the world was at the eve of the automobile, planes and the washing machine, Carriès was still at the time of alchemists.
THE MARKET
Frieze, act V
LONDON – A few years ago, Frieze was a magazine of contemporary art, that was passed around confidentially.Today, it is one of the two or three most visited fairs in the world: one goes to be seen (the openings have become one of the fashionable events of the season) and one can do business too. The 151 galleries admitted this year are the fruit of a strict selection but they should not regret their investment. Friez is very oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon market and leaves but a few chairs on the side to the French, who already are constrained to ubiquity with the Fiac held immediately after (18 October). Among those present, we can mention Air de Paris, Chantal Crousel or Emmanuel Perrotin. One of the fair's original aspects is that one can give commissions directly to the artists. Next to the American car fixed up by Richard Prince, we will see the productions of Gianni Motti, Elín Hansdottir or Lara Favaretto. The latter «invited» the Queen to Frieze. Following the stir caused by the session with Annie Leibovitz (the photographer asked the sovereign to remove her crown, and the comments on television have just cost the director of BBC his job), this is a potentially explosive intervention…
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
De gauche à droite, Débandade sur la pointe n°1 et Carrément décroché n° 1 Courtesy galerie Aline
François Morellet: geometry, sweet sin
In the big crisis French contemporary art is going through on the international scene, the visual artist from Cholet (born in 1926) is one of the ones who best exports. He is a star in Japan and the German museums have been collecting him for a long time. Until 16 September, a retrospective at the musée d’Art moderne of the city of Paris saw him play with old works he reproduced and enlarged. He always has the same ingredients in his constructions: the line, the metallic stem and the
neon, they draw geometric motives, rhythmed by rigorous screens and by chance. At the galerie Aline Vidal, Morellet starts from an English title, Senile Lines, that can be read as a palindrome (both ways) and has fun by provoking a confrontation, on one same right segment, of two relentless antagonists, the line and the band…
BOOKS
France and its monuments
After ten years of works, the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine has finally come out. Even though it intends to stick to the most recent events in architectural creation, its foundations are rooted in the XIXth century. It was the the museum of French Monuments, the work of Alexandre Lenoir following the Revolution, then the museum of compared sculpture, inspired from Viollet-le-Duc, which at the moment of its creation in 1882 occupied the two wings of the palais du Trocadéro. It was designed as a repertoire of the forms from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, saved under the form of castings b worthy artisans. The latter, from Jean Pouzadoux to Paul Landowski, receive a well deserved tribute. Directed by Paul Deschamps (from 1937 to 1961), the perfect copy is also made of the frescoes. The fire of 1997 damaged certain of these creations but most of all gave the opportunity to refound the museum. To those who were fascinated by the anachronic dimension of its predecessor, this work offers a nostalgic promenade.
IN BRIEF
GLASGOW- The Virgin and the spindle by Leonardo da Vinci, robbed in 2003 from the castle of Drumlanrig in Scotland, has just been found by the police in the office of a famous law firm.
MARBACH- (Germany)- David Chipperfield won one of the most prestigious architecture prizes (Stirling Prize) with the Museum of modern litterature.
PARIS-During La Nuit Blanche (the Sleepless night) in Paris between 6 and 7 October, vandals forced their way into the Musée d'Orsay and damaged a painting by Monet, Le Pont d'Argenteuil.
PARIS - The Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has just opned its doors on 10 October at Porte Dorée in the former museum of Arts africains et océaniens.
PARIS- Alain Delon's collection is up for sale on 15 October at Drouot-Montaigne, by auctioneer Cornette de Saint-Cyr. It includes significant paintings from the Cobra movement and the School of Paris.
The catalogue of the sale on the website of Cornette de Saint-Cyr.
PARIS-The traditional three days of the Drouot district, with numerous exhibitions at galeries and antique shops, are organized from 11 to 13 October.
PARIS - The winner of the Ricard Foundation prize, Vincent Lamouroux, is presented at the Centre Pompidou as of 16 October.