Art Of The Day Weekly
#137 - from 11 June 2009 to 17 June 2009
IN THE AIR
This is my blood
In partnership with Venice, Basel is today the world capital of art. At the Art Basel fair, the most prestigious gallery owners present the artists most spoken of. There is Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (Marconi gallery), German artist Hans Peter Feldmann (Fischer gallery) as well as Cameroun artist Pascale Thayou (Continua gallery). All three of them have already triumphed incontestably in Venice with, respectively, their installations of giant flowers, moving shadows and an African village. How much does this cost? From this point of view, given the crisis, we are more cautious. In any case, the market is crazy, as certain artists like Italian Gabriele Di Matteo (Pepe Cobo gallery) declare. The former has copied the works of Chinese artist Yue Minjun (worth millions of dollars) and sells them at one same price, 3000 euros, whatever the dimension of the canvas. Marc Quinn, a friend of Damien Hirst’s among the Young British Artists puts the question differently. In the basement of the Beyeler foundation, he presents four Self, busts of himself, done in 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006, with his own frozen blood. Each one of them, kept in a refrigerated cupboard, required five litres of liquid, in other words the total amount of what flows in his organism. That is definitely priceless (the Self belong to institutions) but undoubtedly has value…
EXHIBITIONS
Florence in the Settecento
FLORENCE – The major Florentine centuries are the XVth and XVIth centuries, the birth and expansion of the Renaissance. Our perception of the Tuscan capital is much vaguer beyond that period. As an example, regarding the XVIIIth century (or the Settecento), while we can attribute the “veduttisti” as Canaletto to Venice, who can we place next to the Arno? It is what the exhibition at the Uffizi wishes to do, in 150 chosen pieces: to illustrate a period of transition that corresponds to the last fires of the Baroque period and to the dynasty of the Medici. Next to the masterpieces of decorative art (of which the mosaics of hard stone), here we see appear ill-known interpreters of neo-classic art, bronze sculptors (Foggini), good fresco artists who were active in the villas on the hills (Giovanni Domenico Ferretti), landscape artists (Zocchi). The real stars remain nevertheless the foreigners who came through, such as Magnasco, Vanvitelli and all the travellers of the Grand Tour, among which Zoffany and Fabre are the most notable representatives.
Richard Long, the artist with wings on his feet
LONDON – Here is the real puzzle exhibition: how to present one of the main representatives of Land Art while remaining locked between four walls? The name of Richard Long (born in 1945) invites us to travel: to Scotland, to Bolivia, to Spain, to find the traces of the paths he drew, the shape of the stones he put together, the mud walls built here and there. All these works have been continually and definitively modified by time and by the elements. Luckily, Richard Long took photographs and also limited himself to create in the space of the galleries. The retrospective at the Tate therefore allows us to synthesize, in 80 pieces, nearly half a century of creation, from his first work in 1967, the straight line drawn by a walk, to the chalk and granite circles in Alaska, in India or in the Sahara.
The Africa Tarzan dreamt of
PARIS – He has the «stoicism of an animal and the intelligence of a man». «He» is Tarzan, the ape man invented in 1912 by Edgar Rice Burroughs and who became famous all over the planet. Although his centennial has not yet turned up, he is already the subject of an exhibition at the quai Branly museum. A wildly «transversal» retrospective: one has an idealistic image of Africa (Burroughs never went there in the same manner Shakespeare never set foot in Verona to write Romeo and Juliet) but we also sense the construction mode of a super-hero or the birth of an ecologic sensitivity before its time. Drawing sheets by Burne Hogarth (not to be confused with William Hogarth!) as well as prince Arenberg’s stuffed leopard, Ethiopian amulets in leopard teeth and photograms of Johnny Weissmuller, this exotic trip is more comfortably taken in the company of specialized guides such as Ridder Haggard or Rudyard Kipling…
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AUCTIONS
The spirit of Kenzo
PARIS – Designers are definitely in the limelight. Following the sale of Yves Saint Laurent and Gianni Versace, now it is the turn of Kenzo’s art collection to be auctioned. It is abundant – over one thousand lots will be put up for sale over the two days – and is a lot less homogenous, combining trinkets bought for a few dozen euros (chandeliers, coffers, incense burners, bamboo pots), Neapolitan oil paintings, Orientalist scenes and a few sculptures and contemporary paintings (Cathelin, Pierre Skira, Billy Sullivan, Irmgard Sigg), up to plastic creations by Kenzo himself. The real master-pieces are among the Asian art objects: a Yuto ewer from the XVIth century (Japan) or Minqqi funerary figurines from the IIIth century B.C. (China). The most beautiful piece is a wooden Minqqi horse from a tomb in the North-West of China, estimated at nearly 100 000 euros.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Antoine de La Boulaye, Pause, oil on canvas, 2009, 130 x 97 cm, courtesy galerie Yves Faurie, Sète
Antoine de La Boulaye, retinal persistence
Where does an artist draw his inspiration from? What triggers off the creative moment? This could be the fruit of metaphysical thinking or… the result of reading a simple newspaper clipping. The last exhibition by Antoine de La Boulaye illustrates, precisely, that parable. On his large canvases of a uniform format (130 x 97 cm), we see reappear, like a musical «jingle», the motive of a woman’s fleshy mouth. In compositions in which we could find analogies with Surrealist collages as well as with notes Alechinsky wrote in the margin, the slightly opened lips are stuck to circles, to landscapes from the region of Sète, to typographic motifs, to targets that bring Picabia to mind. The artist had discovered this half opened mouth on the back of a gastronomic review. One day, after finishing his series of paintings, he found it again by chance on the advertising panel of a famous ad. In the time of communication, painting remains a quest that can take up unexpected shapes …
BOOKS
Back in the USSR
The famine in Ukraine, the instant photos of the convicted at the Moscow trials, Maïakovski after his suicide with a red stain at the level of the heart, the battle of Minsk – the worst battle of tanks during WW II. These are but a few of the uncountable images that draw forty terrible years of Russian and Soviet history, of which Stalin’s death marks the symbolic end in 1953. This iconography dug out by a well-known British graphic designer over a period as long as the one described (from 1970 to our day) combines photography, movie scenes, a remarkable ensemble of revolutionary posters and typographic manifests. While Stalin, Beria or Joukov obviously appear, the excluded from History are also present – Kolkhozians, workers from the canal of the White Sea or Iagov Djougachvili, Stalin’s oldest son captured by the Germans. The Great Leader refused to exchange him: «There are no Soviet war prisoners, there are only traitors.»
IN BRIEF
CALAIS – The Cité internationale de la mode et de la dentelle (International Site of Fashion and lace) will be inaugurated in Calais on 11 June 2009.
GENEVA - The artist Hans Erni, who has just turned 100, has unveiled his last work: a 30-meter long fresco on the wall of the U.N. headquarters.
LA GACILLY (France) – The open air photography festival at La Gacilly will be held from 6 June to 30 September 2009.
LYON – The musée Gadagne, the history museum of Lyon and museum of puppets of the world, will reopen its doors on 12 June 2009 after a decade of restoration.
PARIS – A notebook of Picasso’s– with 33 pencil drawings from 1917 to 1924– was robbed from the Picasso museum between June 8 and June 9 2009.
PARIS – The restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine, on place de la Concorde, which began in 2006, was finished on 11 June 2009.
ON ART-OF-THE-DAY.INFO
This week, do not miss
ROBERT MALAVAL An exceptional retrospective
ANGERS - The musée des Beaux-Arts presents, with some one hundred works, the career of a meteorite of the arts from the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1937, died in 1980, Robert Malaval burst open the borders of painting and was one of the rare artists to integrate rock culture into his work.