Art Of The Day Weekly
#119 - from 5 February 2009 to 11 February 2009
IN THE AIR
Inventory...34 000 works of art missing!
The term "recolement" in French is delightfully incomprehensible and it was rather an expresion common to home distillers(it was used to determine the quantity of alcohol in spirits). In other circumstances, it is the inventory of furniture: a simple habit in good management, that should have been a second nature in the country’s administrations. Actually, it was not at all the case for the artistic heritage of the French State. Over 34 000 paintings, pieces of furniture or sculptures from the state-owned furniture office, from national museums and from the FNAC (the National Fund of contemporary art) and left in deposit in ministries, embassies and other institutions have disappeared without leaving a trace. Such is the conclusion the "national commission to re-label" reached afer ten years of a job worthy of Titan. The task was indeed colossal. The Manufacture of Sèvres, for example, as it did not have the means, had never carried out this type of census.The results show it: out of 120 000 pieces listed to date, over 17 000 cannot be found. The same situation prevails for the FNAC, the heir of an institution founded in 1791: 7000 of the 52 000 pieces already censed are missing. This does not only concern minor works of art: a Vlaminck, Village street is missing from the French Institute in Bucharest. But three carpets from the manufacture of the Savonnerie have been found in the French embassy in Washington and a painting by Jean-François Thuaire from 1822, that was believed had been destroyed, was found in the museum of Toulon. The investigation continues…
EXHIBITIONS
Darwinism in art
FRANKFURT – The author of the blistering book On the origin of species by means of natural selection would be 200 years old in 2009. A great number of conventions and symposiums will study its influence on modern science. The initiative of the Schirn Kunsthalle is more original – to track the influence of the British scientist on the visual arts. It is not always easy to know if that influence is direct: did Redon and Klimt paint and draw their mutant creatures after specifically reading Darwin? In other cases, it is easier: we know Böcklin spent a week in the zoo in Naples, together with its director, a Darwin follower, and that Max Ernst, a palaeontology fan, quenched his thirst for knowledge in specialised works. One is never a prophet in his own country: among the 150 works grouped together, very few are by English artists. Only George Frederick Watts enthusiastically embraced the new theories on evolution.
All you ever wanted to know on Futurism
MILANO – This is the main rendez-vous of the events organised to celebrate the centennial of futurism. The goal of the Palazzo Reale, in presenting nearly 400 works, is to give a very wide vision of the movement. Of course, the five musketeers - Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini- from the years 1910, have a dominant place. Following the manifesto of Marinetti (1909), the golden age was shattered by WW I, which some artists did not survive. The period between the two wars was ever more fascinated by mechanics and technique, embodied in particular in airbrush painting. But the exhibit also pushes back the traditional chronological limits by searching for the roots much earlier, in Medardo Rosso’s symbolism and in divisionism, and even in searching into the second half of the XXth century to determine the influence of futurism – on Burri, Fontana or Fluxus.
Thailand before the Thais
PARIS – What was Thai spirituality like between the VIth and XIth centuries? The Guimet museum not only asks itself the question but it also tries to bring a rather sketchy answer. Indeed, all the constructions of the time, that combined brick and stucco, have all disappeared and all that is left to evoke the so-called Dvâravatî period are elements of decor, in particular the stone with sculptures in the round. The arch of time chosen corresponds to a Buddhist art that is hardly known, expressed in a system of city-States, before the arrival of the Thaïs. Therefore no architecture, but superb Law wheels, steles and narrative panels on which Buddha is systematically represented, in stone, in bronze or in terra cotta. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to admire major masterpieces never shown before in France and brought from a dozen of the major Thai museums.
AUCTIONS
The second death of the France
PARIS – The France was launched in 1960, retired in 1974 following the oil crisis, launched again under another name and ended its career in 2006 on an Indian construction site, to be sold as scrap. A lover of ships, Jacques Dworczak, allowed her though to have a last fling, somewhat like the Concorde. Auction house Artcurial is indeed going to put up for sale 446 lots saved from the rubbish bin. While the various menus, crew jackets and dinner trays will not break any records of sales, buyers will be more attracted by the ironwork of Raymond Subes (fragments from the staircase banister, estimated at 15 000 euros), a chandelier by Gilbert Poillerat (same estimate), dressers by the Nusbaumer manufacture (starting at 3 000 euros) or a table by Jules Leleu with a gilded glass top, for the living-room den (estimated at 50 000 euros). These are the last reminders of the great French decorative art for floating palaces. The highest bid will surely go for a symbolic piece, the liner’s nose, that can currently be seen on the threshold of the Artcurial house, and which is estimated just under 100 000 euros. After this episode –the last- the France will remain forever a legend.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Canada. Baffin Island. Eclipse, 2005 © Gueorgui Pinkhassov, courtesy galerie In Camera, Paris
Gueorgui Pinkhassov: from Magnum to art
In photography, there is a great difference of quoted value between the «visual artist» and the ones that are «merely» photo-reporters. While a Sugimoto (born in 1948) can see the price of his work at public auctions soar up to 1.2 million euros for his images of horizon lines– the sea, the sky, the night – a Pinkhassov (born in 1952), though a member of the Magnum agency founded by Cartier-Bresson and considered one of the best photo-reporters of his generation, stagnates
at 2 500 euros, i.e. 500 times less! And yet, some of his images definitely have an abstract or a purely aesthetic dimension, as can be seen in these shots taken in the most northern seas of the world. And the fact of having been «dubbed» by movie director Andrei Tarkovski, who asked him to follow the shooting of
BOOKS
A coyote in New York
What can push a contemporary artist to wrap himself up in felt, pick up a cane, a complete collection of the Wall Street Journal and an electric lamp, and to live during a whole week in captivity with a coyote in a New York gallery? That is what spectators must have asked themselves when faced with this performance by Joseph Beuys, carried out in May 1974 and now a well-known legend. Brown gloves, the recording of noises and turbines, a triangle one strikes to establish harmony, the cane that extends the head: it still remains difficult to decrypt thirty odd years later. Caroline Tisdall’s images in black and white show a strange dialogue and question us on our relationship to time, to education and to nature. They preserve a part of unfathomable mystery that authorises all interpretations and which makes the magic of this New York week.
IN BRIEF
ANTWERP-Zaha Hadid won the contest for the headquarters of the port authority of the Flemish town.
HASSELT (Belgium)-The 2nd Triennale of contemporary art, fashion and design will be held at Hasselt from 7 February to 10 May 2009.
MADRID-The 28th edition of ARCO, the modern and contemporary art fair, will be held from 11 to 16 February 2009 at teh Exhibition Park.
MADRID-The 9th edition of Art Madrid, the contemporary art fair, will be held from 12 to 16 February 2009 at the Pabellón de Cristal de la Casa de Campo.
MOSCOW-The Moscow World Fine Art Fair, that was to be held from 25 May to 1 June, has been cancelled.
PARIS - The exhibition "Picasso et les maîtres", which closed on 2 February 2009, attracted 783 352 visitors, i.e. 7270 per day. Nearly 10% of that total, in other words 70 000 persons, visited it during the last 83 hours, when the museum was open nonstop, day and night.
PARIS-The prize of the Silver Square (l'Equerre d'argent), awarded by the magazine Le Moniteur to the best architectural work of the year, was handed on 2 February to Marc Barani for the multimodal pole of the tram in Nice.
PARMA - The exhibition on Correggio, that just ended at the Galleria nazionale, hosted 430 000 visitors, that is 3387 per day.
ROTTERDAM-The 10th edition of Art Rotterdam, the contemporary art fair, will be held from 5 to 8 February 2009.