Home > ArtoftheDay Weekly > #62 - from 18 October 2007 to 24 October 2007

Art Of The Day Weekly

#62 - from 18 October 2007 to 24 October 2007

IN THE AIR

Help, Harry Potter is coming!

ROME – Harry Potter was almost everywhere already: in bookstores, in movies, on T-shirts, on mugs, on school bags and on cereal boxes. Galleries and museums were until now some of the few spaces not touched by the good boy with round glasses. The miracle – or anomaly according to who's side you are on - was too good to last. So here we have Harry the conqueror entering the world of high culture. And it is in Rome, at the Casina di Raffaello, a game and toy library recently inaugurated at Villa Borghèse. This time Serena Riglietti, the Italian illustrator of the series, is propelled to the level of star. She is the one responsible for drawing the hero's green coat and the one who leads children and adults alike through a make-believe forest, towards the room of colors and the room of fables, meeting Peter Pan or the Wizard of Oz on the way. We hold no particular grudge against Harry Potter, except maybe the fact of seeing him too much, too often - up to exhaustion. Couldn't this exhibition, which opens the movie festival, initiate the young public to more original discoveries? Go save Don Camillo from oblivion for example! Or bring circus games back to life! In order to do so there is but one possibility: head straight for Naples! A retrospective is about to open there which promises to be fascinating, on Alma-Tadema and Neo-Pompeian painting.

  • Harry Potter and the fantastic art of Serena Riglietti at la Casina di Raffaelle, from 17 October to 9 December 2007

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  • Alma-Tadema and the nostalgy of Antiquity at the National Museum of Archeology, from 19 October 2007 to 31 March 2008

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  • EXHIBITIONS

    Giacometti, the foundation

    PARIS – We know Alberto Giacometti preferred works of small dimension, but the quantity of works shown arouses admiration anyway: nearly 600, be it sculptures (200), paintings (60), drawings (170), photographs (190). The greater part of this exceptional patrimony comes from the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation whose gestation has been long and painful, with legal episodes involving Roland Dumas (former Minister of Foreign Relations) and the auctioneer Jacques Tajan. The retrospective at the Centre Pompidou is organized around the work carried out in the workshop. It presents in particular unknown pieces from the walls of his space in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in the XIVth arrondissement, a space that has hardly changed since the artist's death in 1966. An aspect often neglected in sculptors'posterity – the edition of their work under the form of bronzes – is also referred to.

  • L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti at the centre Pompidou, from 17 October 2007 to 11 February 2008

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  • Titian, the last scene

    VIENNA - The elderly Titian had no reason to regret his younger years, in terms of vitality and creative power. That is what we learn from the exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, focused on the Venitian master's last quarter of a century, prior to his brutal death from bubonic plague in 1575, at the age of 85. The demonstration is carried out in sixty paintings of various origins. Two versions of Danae and three Venuses, respectively from Madrid, Vienna, Rome, New York and Washington symbolise the artist's cosmopolitan success. We can also admire his Saint Sebastian from the Ermitage, Tarquinius and Lucrece (Cambridge) or Marsyas' torment (Kromeriz). The quick brush, giving preference to a pre-Impressionist treatment in colored spots, was seen as a scandalous innovation. And his taste for ample feminine nudes was not deemed particularly appropriate for a respectable elderly man. Prints from the funds of the Albertina are proof of the way in which Titian's most popular motives were spread about at the time. The Viennese visit will be well completed by that of a retrospective on the same theme but in situ since it is held around Belluno and Pieve di Cadore, Titian's place of birth.

  • The Last Titian at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 18 October 2007 to 6 January 2008

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  • Tiziano, l’ultimo atto at Belluno, until 6 January 2008

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  • Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and friends

    THE HAGUE - After the National Gallery in London, the Mauritshuis will welcome the exhibition Dutch Portraits from the Golden Century, the age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Some thirty painters, some sixty paintings, with a few exceptions the same as in London. Among them the dazzling Portrait of Jan Six by Rembrandt, that had remained for three centuries in the hands of the Six family, had never been shown and exceptionally loaned: this work alone justifies the trip to The Hague. No hieratic or advantaguous poses of men in black suits, here Rembrandt painted with large strokes similar to those of Frans Hals a man richly dressed, nonchalantly slipping on his gloves. Around the two artists who dominated the century, an army of painters illustrates, with major works, the quality and the variety of the genre - individual portraits, double portraits, group portraits - that marked the periods in life for the wealthy merchants. The art of portraits, born in the specific context of the bourgeois Republic of The Netherlands, slowly went international and the works of the end of the century were close to European and English painting.
    Some very beautiful portraits remained in the permanent collection of the Mauritshuis, starting with the Child by Frans Hals to Vermeer's Young girl with the pearl, to be seen on the first floor

  • Dutch Portraits, the age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals Mauritshuis, from 13 October 2007 to 13 January 2008

    The website of the Mauritshuis

  • THE MARKET

    FIAC and surroundings

    PARIS - With the growing competition from the very young London Frieze fair which this year once again will publish awesome results, the FIAC has been constraint to be more dynamic these last years. The most recent innovations – return to the Grand Palais, extension of the design section, installation of an antenna in the cour carrée of the Louvre, a sculpture itinerary in the Tuileries gardens – are all obviously repeated. We count nearly 170 galleries among which a remarkable number of international «heavy weights», from Cheim & Read to David Zwirner, from Hauser & Wirth to Yvon Lambert. And the FIAC will also benefit from the traditional phenomenon of parallel fairs, the number of which does not yet reach the vague quantities of Art Basel Miami. Next to Slick, very focused on digital creation, and Show Off, which offers an inventive cocktail at the espace Cardin with conferences, encounters and treasure hunts aimed at the younger public, we must count this year with the arrival of Elysées de l’art, with some sixty participants along the Champs-Elysées and directed by Baudoin Lebon.

  • FIAC 2007 at the Grand Palais, from 18 to 21 October 2007
  • Slick at Bellevilloise, from 19 to 22 October
  • Show Off at the Espace Cardin, from 17 to 22 October Elysées de l’art on the Champs-Elysées, from 18 to 22 October

    The website of the FIAC

  • ARTIST OF THE WEEK


    Sans titre, 2000-2004, ping-pong table, inox, ping pong balls, variable dimensions . One of 3 multiple. Photo Achim Kukulies. Courtesy Art:Concept, Par

    Richard Fauguet

    He is one of the four artists chosen this year by the jury of the Marcel-Duchamp prize, together with Taitana Trouvé, Pierre Ardouvin and Adam Adach. And he is probably the one that most resembles M-D, given his casual manner in recycling our modern products, whether it is bicycle chains, marbles, vacuum cleaners, pyrex dishes or Duralex glasses that haunt our school cafeterias throughout France. He takes all of these objects and assembles them in very architectural constructions (with the help of silicone) or marries them in a hilarious manner.

    Born in the department of the Indre in 1963, Richard Fauguet is at the crossroads of disciplines, and practices drawings as well as sculpture even if his base is very conceptual: whether it is in his shadows of famous sculptures(at the Centre Pompidou for the exhibition Airs de Paris) or in his ping pong table riddled with bullets, there is always a hidden message.

  • Richard Fauguet is exhibited from 18 to 22 October in the Cour Carrée du Louvre, during the FIAC, on the stands of the ADIAF – Association pour la diffusion internationale de l’art français -Association for the international diffusion of French art(C 8, 9, 11 et 12). The winner of the Marcel-Duchamp prize will be announced on 20 October.

    The website of the ADIAF

  • BOOKS

    Lucien Clergue, beyond nudity

    To the public at large, the matter is closed: Lucien Clergue is the specialist in nudes, of those beautiful bodies of women in the midst of sand and waves one frames over the mantle piece. The character, born in 1934, is a lot more interesting than that, if for no other reason than the fact he is one of the founders of the famous Rencontres photographiques in Arles (his native town), undoubtedly the best known festival in this specialty. Thanks to Gabriel Bauret's talented pen, we relive the exciting years of these creations in 1976 but also what preceeds: learning to develop with the neighborhood baker, his brief career as a toreador, his friendships with Picasso and Cocteau. And the major themes that punctuated his work, Arles in ruins after the war, the Camargue region, from the gypsies to the bullfights. In short, various lives concentrated in one, well justifying his recent election to the Académie des beaux-arts…

  • Lucien Clergue, by Gabriel Bauret, éditions La Martinière, 2007, ISBN : 978-2-7324-3569-5, 232 p., 50 €.

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  • IN BRIEF

    BOGOTA – The first editionof la Otra Fiera («the Other Fair») wil be held from 18 to 23 October in an abandonned industrial building in the Colombian capital, with some fifty local and latinamerican galleries.

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    FERRARA – The Italian antenna of the Ermitage museum will be inaugurated on 20 October by the President of the Italian Republic, Mr. Giorgio Napolitano. Hosted in the castle of the Este, it will be a study and research centre on the Italian art of the Russian museum.

    NEW YORK – Following Ariane Dandois, another French antique merchant, Bernard Steinitz, has decided to disperse his funds in New York. The first sale, at Christie’s, will take place on 19 October.

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    NEW YORK – The International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show will be held from 19 to 25 October, at the Armory.

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    PARIS – The Artist Book International fair, dedicated to artists' books, will be held at the Centre Pompidou, from 19 to 21 October

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    REYKJAVIK – The artists' film festival Sequences will be held until 21 October in Iceland's capital.

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    ROME – The Trajan markets have reopened to the public on 18 October at the same time as the museum of the Fori Imperiali was inaugurated.

    VERONA – ArtVerona, the contemporary art fair, wil be held from 18 to 23 October.

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    ON ARTOFTHEDAY.INFO

    This week, do not miss

    PORTUGAL, ENCOMPASSING THE WORLD

    BRUSSELS – In the context of Europalia, this retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts tells the story, through nearly 200 exceptional objects, of the great adventure of Portuguese explorers and discoverers of the Renaissance.

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    FRIESZ, THE BAROQUE FAUVE

    LE HAVRE – After Vlaminck and Dufy, the Musée Malraux pays tribute to another native son wo was one of the great representatives of the Fauve movement but whose production also had a very classical aspect .

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