Art Of The Day Weekly
#125 - from 19 March 2009 to 25 March 2009
IN THE AIR
Master Bergé and his Warhols
He does not tire from being in the limelight and could almost outshine the very active French president. Pierre Bergé is omnipresent. When it is not for the sale of the collection amassed with Yves Saint Laurent and for the discussions that surround it (the rat and the rabbit from China), it concerns he is with a gala against AIDS or is the MC for the Friends of Ségolène (former Socialist candidate to the French presidency). The patron for the December literature prize and owner of an auction house, he retains the droit moral over all of Jean Cocteau’s work and is a member of the Jean-Michel Frank committee: the French man of culture with one thousand arms sometimes overdoes it, and falls into the trap of having diva’s whims. Everyone expected Yves Saint Laurent to be present at the Warhol retrospective at the Grand Palais, but he will not be there: a struggle opposed the organizers of the show to Pierre Bergé. The latter did not want the four portraits of his companion to be in the midst of fashion people (whom he generally scorns) but rather with the real «creators», Man Ray or Hockney. The organizer Alain Cueff did not accept his request and therefore YSL returned home. « Who today could dare pretend Yves Saint Laurent was only a designer? » Pierre Bergé wrote in a letter to the newspaper Le Monde. No one, no doubt. But does this authorize that? By the way, did anyone tell Mao he is next to transvestites?
EXHIBITIONS
From Romania with love
COMPIÈGNE – What we most remember of the foreign expeditions led by Napoléon III are the Crimean war and the fiasco of the Mexican empire. Other projects, less mediatised, had a longer lasting success, such as the contribution to the birth of the Romanian state. The leading idea of this exhibition is the support given to the autonomy and then the union of the provinces of Moldavia and Valachia in 1859. The reinforced links with France were materialised with the arrival of various Rumanian artists to Paris, who participated in particular in the Universal Exposition in 1867. We know very little about Rumanian artists prior to Brassaï or Brauner. Here we have some, from Theodor Aman to Nicolae Grigorescu. We can also admire the Monet collected by a patron of the painter’s, Georges de Bellio, as well as the treasure of Pietroasa (Ostrogoth gold objects discovered in 1837), that had not come back to France since 1900. The choice of the castle of Compiègne can be explained by the time prince Karol I st stayed there in 1863: the furniture that was then in his apartments has been gathered for this occasion.
Galileo's skies
FLORENCE - Science can be beautiful. This is confirmed with the exhibition dedicated to the history of astronomy and to Galileo, who exactly 400 years ago, unveiled the existence of satellites of Jupiter and of solar spots. The international year of astronomy is obviously a unique opportunity to bring together these 250 objects that go very far back in time, from Antiquity to the XVIIth century, with atlases, telescopes and works of art (paintings by Brueghel the Elder, Botticelli, Durer, an «astronomic» tapestry from Toledo). It ends with the local specialist, Galileo (died in 1642), and we can admire not only a very rare telescope (one of the only two conserved) but an unexpected relic as well: a bit of the finger that he used to orient the telescope…
Lippi and Son
PARIS – His life was a novel, like so many others the Renaissance produced. A Carmelite monk, he led a dissolute life, kidnapped a nun and gave her a child. None of these events prevented Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) from being one of the greatest painters in Tuscany in the XVth century. The musée du Luxembourg is taking advantage of the closing for refurbishment works of its homologue in Prato and has brought a part of its funds to Paris. One can see work by Filippo – Virgin and Child or Nativity done together with Fra Diamante – as well as works by Filippino, his son, born from the scandalous union with Lucrezia Buti. The son deals with the same themes as the father, and gives them an esoteric and precious touch that would contribute to the birth of Mannerism. Among the nearly sixty paintings there are also works by Lorenzo Monaco or Sandro Botticelli, who was a student of the elder Lippi and master of the younger one.
AUCTIONS
Coins of the world
PARIS – An ecu with a long wick? Or a quarter of an ecu with a short wick? Numismatics is sometimes a real tale. During the sale on 25 March, the 578 lots will make us travel through time and space. For fetishists, it is always touching to know they can become owners for just a few hundred euros – the equivalent of a full gas tank – of a coin that was manipulated by our Normand forefathers four centuries ago. For just a few euros more (400 euros), one can have a didrachme from Taranto from the IVth century B.C. with King Taras riding a dolphin. The older pieces from Sybaris and Crotona will go up to 2 000 or 3000 euros. A tetradrachme with the head of Athena on the head and an owl on the tail is expected to go for 5 000 euros or more. Sinop, Corinth, Thebe, Pergame or Magnesia on the Maeander: what we are being offered is the whole Greek world before the Romans, the Byzantine, the Catholic kings or Dole and his semi-Patagonians. At a tie when our dematerialized currencies lose their value, why not find refugie in the silver and bronze of the past?
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Pascale Mérita, Sans titre, 2005, 114 x 146 cm, courtesy galerie Marion Meyer, Paris.
Pascale Rémita : recycling the image
In a world in which the avalanche of images kills the image – as each event is quickly replaced in our memory by the next – why create others? Pascale Rémita prefers reusing the huge stock that is poured on us by the various screens from morning till night. It is not a purely conceptual procedure, aimed at taking over other persons’ production, but rather a reelaboration of a material to transfer it on the canvas. The artist plays with selected images – landscapes, satellite images, films from surveillance cameras- playing with close-ups, out of focus, to the point where the observer loses his references and is forced to look in a new way. A healthy distance that was recently demonstrated at the FRAC Pays de la Loire and that we can look at up close at the Marion Meyer gallery.
BOOKS
The Beehive is still buzzing
Chagall, Archipenko, Léger, Modigliani, Soutine all went through there. La Ruche –literally the Beehive-, the artistic phalanstary created by Alfred Boucher, one of the masters of Camille Claudel, entered the legend of modern art a long time ago. Janine Warnod or Jean-Marie Drot have already spoken about it in their works but it was still lacking an exhaustive catalogue. The latter, that accompanied an exhibition presented at the Palais Lumière in Evian, develops a rich iconography. We regret there is no index to find one’s bearings in the profusion of artists who lived there, and we are sometimes irritated by the difficulty to associate the legends to the corresponding images. But it does fill out its main objective: one can follow the great moments as well as the miserable ones of the Ruche, and in particular the very difficult hours of the 1960s, when i twas saved from the bulldozers by fighting spirit of Chagall, of Gisèle Halimi or of Rebeyrolle. And one makes many discoveries: over more than one century of existence (1902-2009) it was inevitable that many unknown or forgotten artists appear along the pages.
IN BRIEF
BRUSSELS-The Eurantica fair, with 150 international antique dealers and galleries, wil be held at Brussels Expo from 20 to 29 March 2009.
BRUSSELS-The Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr auction houses which just merged, will organize their first joint sale, dedicated to comic-strips, at the Théâtre de Vaudeville.
GUATEMALA-Richard Hansen,the director of diggings on the Maya El Mirador site, has announced the discovery of the most ancient low-reliefs dedicated to the myth of Popol-Vuh.
LONDON-A new space dedicated to European Medieval art, the Paul and Jill Ruddock Gallery, will open on 25 March 2009 at the British Museum.
PARIS-The 9th fair of modern and contemporary art, Art Paris will be held at the Grand Palais from 19 to 23 March 2009. This year it will be marked by a comic-strip section, by the Nuits d’Art Paris (from 19 to 21, until 2:00 AM) and by the awarding of various prizes, in particular the Noilly-Prat for contemporary sculpture and the Henriot for the artist catalogue
PARIS-The sale of drawings from the Lebel collection, at Sotheby’s, on 25 March 2009, will have as its main piece a sanguine by Parmigiano, a preparatory sketch for The Madona with a long neck, estimated at 500 000 euros.
PARIS-Ader auction house will present the Jean Bourgogne collection of Art nouveau glass on 20 March 2009.
The ADMICAL conference on corporate patronage will be held in Paris on 24 March 2009.
STRASBURG – A weekend of contemporary art is organized in the Alsace region on 21 and 22 March 2009.