Art Of The Day Weekly
#112 - from 4 December 2008 to 10 December 2008
IN THE AIR
Michelangelo at McDonald's
Berlusconi’s announcement that he would name a Big Boss to head the Italian Museums, with the mission of increasing profitability created an uproar that has led to the opening of a protest petition. One can easily expect the implementation of aggressive marketing methods, including for example the payment for loans of works of art. Is that really new? The Guggenheim or the Louvre, in Abou Dhabi and Atlanta, have already shown the example. What has stigmatised the project is the professional itinerary of the person chosen for the position, Mario Resca: in the past he was at the head of McDonald's Italy, a corporation that does not necessarily have the same values of the administration of a public entity. There had been talk a few years ago of conceding the museum of the Veterinary school of Maisons-Alfort to Eurodisney. Its recent renovation that respects its history proves the decision to avoid that choice was the good one. The procedure is surprising. Economic liberalism, the market mechanisms are questioned today by the supporters themselves of the capitalist ethic. Is this the moment to introduce them in the universe of national heritage? This is a true contradiction. Let us remember though, Berlusconi does love football.
EXHIBITIONS
Lurçat: Angers calling
ANGERS - In 1937, Jean Lurçat (1892-1966) was marvelled when he discovered the hanging called the Apocalypse in Angers, the largest tapestry of the European XVth century. He put painting aside, adapted his pallet to the nuances of the wool and decided to dedicate himself to this discipline. As of 1957, he started drawing the cardboards that would become the modern equivalent of the l’Apocalypse and which he would name, as an antidote to the horrors of the war, the Chant du monde (Ode to the world). This exhibition does not concern that giant work that was bought by the city in 1967, and that can be admired in the hospital ward of the former Saint-Jean hospital. But it does focus on all Jean Lurçat’s creative itinerary as a weaver, through some thirty works created in Aubusson, from 1940 (Le petit fabuleux) to 1965 (Mangeur d’ombres). These compositions, each between 4 and 20 square meters large, from purchases made by the Jean-Lurçat museum between 1981 and 1996, from the Simone Lurçat collection and the donation made to the Académie des beaux-arts, represent the renaissance of the art of tapestry in the XXth century.
Magritte, al naturale
MILANO - In 2008 we celebrated the 110th anniversary of his birth. The year 2009 should be even more spectacular with the opening of the Magritte museum, announced some time ago, on the place Royale, at Brussels. Rather than suggest a general retrospective of the Surrealist artist, the curators of the event in Milano wished to give it a bias: the one hundred or so works presented, both from public and private collections, show the link between Magritte (1898-1967) and nature. The green apple in Souvenir de voyage or the tree with the street light in L’Empire des lumières are famous works from his mature years. The exhibition aims at unveiling lesser-known creations such as the Futurist tests from his early years or the production between the two wars. Magritte’s nature is very intellectualised and is more a symbol than the representation of reality: a vision that reflects the manner in which modern man increasingly detached himself from his environment.
MUSEUMS
MAO's long walk
TORINO-The persons in charge of the new oriental art museum must have been pretty happy when they came up with the name for the new museum dedicated to far-east civilisations, to open on 5 December in the Mazzoni palace following a long preparation. They gave it the immediately identifiable acronym MAO (Museo d’Arte Orientale), the Museum of Oriental Art. Bringing together ancient and recent purchases by the municipality, donations, loans from institutions (the San Paolo bank in particular) and from private collectors, it presents some 1500 objects spread over five sections, which one accesses through a glass cube installed in the courtyard by architect Andrea Bruno. While the collections can not be compared to that of the very wealthy Egyptian musem, they do include some very beautiful pieces, in particular schist statues from Gandhara, a glazed sandstone ewer with the head of a phoenix (China, VIIth century), wooden covers used for the books of the Buddhist canon law and a Japanese cemetery guard (dvarapala), from the Karakura era (XIIIth century), sculpted in a cypress tree trunk.
AUCTIONS
Lot 212: Travelling clock manufactured for the Chinese market, signed 'F. Rossel & de Lacour, Rue de la paix à Paris", ca 1870. Estimate: €4,000/6,000 Courtesy SVV Chayette Cheval
Objects that take you through time
PARIS-We only use wristwatches nowadays and a few grandfather clocks still tick away the hours in houses in the country. What poverty if one considers the typology of the past in instruments to measure time: savonnette or buttonhole watches, anchor or verge watches, collar watches, not to mention wall clocks, cuckoo clocks, lantern clocks and other portico pendulums … The Chayette Cheval sale on 8 December will allow us to rediscover this wealthy heritage– and to buy it for very little. A day watch from the end of the XIXth century, signed Giovanni Bione, estimated at 400 euros, and a silver savonnette watch by Grandjean à la Chaux-de-Fonds about 250 euros. If one is looking for more ancient objects, there are models from the XVIIIth century at the same price. The touch of uniqueness is given by the presence of curious objects, from American crowbars to cutting machines, from watch glasses to the rounding machine (200 euros), including the decree dated June 1793 by the General Security Committee (Comité de Sûreté générale) that gave a passport to Abraham Louis Bréguet (800 euros). A Boris and Johnstone equation pendulum, 1800) estimated at 12 000 euros but the most awaited for lot is number 202, a watch in white enamel with a mechanism in golden brass: it was Abraham-Louis Bréguet personal watch and it has always stayed in the family (from 120 000 to 150 000 euros.)
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Delphine Coindet, Chérie-Chérie, 2006, polyethylene foam, plastic, laquered metal, polished stainless steel, mirror, env. 44 x 300 x 170 cm. Courtesy galerie Laurent Godin / Galerie Evergreene
Delphine Coindet: the life of objects
Ropes, harps, masks, a torch, balls: these are a few of the objects of all sorts spread out this winter in the park of the castle of Chamarande. The objects, we must admit, are not always easy to recognize after they have been through a conceptual filter. Delphine Coindet, the artist who produces them, starts undoubtedly with images that «talk» to everyone. But her conscientious work on the computer, with 3D software, gives birth to other forms, which in turn are transcribed into sculptures, generally in shiny materials. Delphine Coindet adds new «collages» in Chamarande to this personal vein, in the style of Bluetooth (the wireless connexion), giving as many variations on concepts as the words that represent them. Other artists accompany Delphine Coindet with installations in the park: Eric Baudelaire, Cyprien Gaillard or Erwin Wurm.
BOOKS
Baghdad brick
In July 1936, Ahmad Mukhtar was the first Irakian graduate from a European school of architecture (Liverpool). The residents of Baghdad had obviously not waited until then to produce their own architecture: the ustâs, the local brick builders- sculptors, had mastered for more than a millennium the techniques that allowed them to build the traditional houses with an interior court yard (hosh) and rooms with corbelled sculpted wood constructions on the upper floor (shanashil). The author shows the permanent characteristic, in the middle of the XXth century and in spite of the upheavals of history, of the brick, the fundamental element. Even the British, who occupied the city as of 1917, used it in their symbolic buildings such as the museum of archaeology or the hospital. And even though habitat became more rational in the thirties with housing developments with houses all in a row and the introduction of concrete, bricks survived as an element of decoration. Moulded, chiselled, embellished by ironwork or cartouches of stucco, it continued to give the city that specific cream colour that is nothing else but the one of Ancient Mesopotamia.
IN BRIEF
LONDON – The Turner Prize, the main contemporary art prize in Great-Britain, was awarded on 1 December 2008 to artist Mark Leckey.
LONDON - The Photographers Gallery will inaugurate its new spaces on 6 December 2008 at 16 Ramillies Street.
LYON – The traditional celebration of Lights, with installations of contemporary art throughout the city, will be held from 5 to 8 December 2008.
MELBOURNE – The National Gallery of Victoria has re-attributed an anonymous painting from the Italian Renaissance to Dosso Dossi, a painter from Ferrara. The person represented could be Lucrecia Borgia, of whom this would be the only known portrait.
MIAMI – Art Basel Miami Beach will be held from 4 to 7 December 2008 with the participation of some 250 galleries. Various «satellite» fairs accompany the event, such as Scope, Nada and Pulse.
PARIS – Le Carrousel des métiers d’art, an event on art professions launched 8 years ago to reenhance the value of prestigious crafstmanship, will be held from 3 to 7 December 2008 at the Carrousel du Louvre.
PARIS – The Forum des images, the former Videolibrary of Paris, will reopen on 5 December 2008 at the Forum des Halles after being closed for three years.
PARIS – A «night of Saint-Nicholas» has been organized on the evening of 6 December 2008 by the 120 antique dealers and art galleries of the Carré rive gauche, that will remain open until 10 PM.
PARIS – L’Equerre d’argent -the Silver square- one of the main architecture prizes in France, was awarded on 1st December 2008 to architect Marc Barani for the multimodal pole of the new tram in Nice.
PARIS – Sotheby’s will be presenting a painting by Francis Bacon, Two Figures, estimated at 5 million €, in its sale of modern and contemporary art on 10 December 2008.
PARIS - For the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (La Déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme), an auction of works by contemporary artists has been organised by Artcurial to benefit Amnesty International on 10 December 2008 at the Palais de Tokyo .
TRIPOLI - The British agency Metropolitan Workshop has won the contest for the Museum of conflicts. The institution in the shape of a Bedouin tent, that is to open in 2011, will describe the history of Libya from the point of view of wars and uprisings.