Art Of The Day Weekly

Dial M for ...Museum

There is nothing easier, in theory, than calling a museum M. … To date we knew acronyms that were slightly longer, such as the three signs for the V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum), four letters for the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) and even five for the new generation of Macro, Maxxi (both in Rome), Mambo (Bologna) or Mucem (Marseille). The Belgians are also tempted by short cuts – and we only hope that no analogy will develop with Fritz Lang’s famous movie… A real museum with its own history hides behind this new name, that of the Vander Kelen-Mertens museum in Louvain, completely redesigned by Stéphane Beel. Its collections of Renaissance sculpture and painting on panels remain remarkable and obviously motivated the opening exhibition: a retrospective dedicated to Rogier van der Weyden. The choice is also remarkable in the literal sense: five centuries before the creation of the M museum, the great Flemish master had decided to modify his identity by translating his native French name into Flemish. An exhibition of Roger de le Pasture at the Vander Kelen-Mertens museum would surely have sounded less exciting …

Turner, under the influence

LONDON – Who could forget the success of the exhibition «Picasso and the great masters» in the winter 2009 with nearly 800 000 visitors at the Grand Palais which was open 24/24 during the last days (the success was echoed later at the Tate Modern)? The managers of the Tate Britain were tempted to use the same recipe, and set out to find the national artist who could equal this feat. Not surprisingly, their choice went to Turner, the only one capable of arousing the crowds (Gainsborough is too aristocratic, Constable surely to close to the country scene). So Turner is confronted to all the geniuses he considered worthy rivals of his own fame. His Crossing the brook hangs next to Moses saved from the waters of the Nile by his idol Le Lorrain, a Moonlight, a study from Millbank next to Flight to Egypt by Rembrandt. But there are not only ancestors: the most beautiful dual is undoubtedly the one that opposes him to Constable with the return of the two works presented at the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1832. To distinguish himself from his rival, Turner had added at the last moment a red buoy in the middle of his port scene…

Nuvolari, on the other side of the lens ...

MANTUA – While France boasted of a «Bouncing Basque» (Borotra), Italy prided itself at the same era with a «Flying Mantuan», who was just as famous in the sports circles. It was Tazio Nuvolari (1892-1953), who won 141 car and motorcycle races. The mannerist Palazzo Te (decorated by Jules Romain) is the stage to the saga of this native son, who one day reached the victory line in bandages as he had just come out of hospital; and who another time driving at night, turned off his headlights in order to surprise his rival at the Mille Migliarace… The most surprising aspect of this hagiographic exhibition is not due to the exceptional vehicles – Bugatti or Auto Union – but rather to its photographic side. Nuvolari, marked by family dramas (his two sons died, ten years apart), developed a passion for the dark room. The two thousand negatives recently found present a true family and social chronicle from the end of the thirties, remarkable by the true talent in framing and seizing the «decisive instant».

The magnificent Venetian three

PARIS – In the middle of the XVIth century the artistic scene in Venice saw the confrontation of three major artists: Titian the elderly giant still capable of surprising by his innovations, the ambitious Tintoretto and Veronese the «foreigner» (he arrived from Verona in 1553). Through more than eighty paintings the Louvre traces the original conditions that allowed for these geniuses to live side-by-side. The existence of numerous amateurs (the State, the patricians, the scuole or religious brotherhoods) who were interested in a very wide choice of themes (religious or profane) and a system of public commissions not very foreign from the one we know (for example for the room of the Great Council at the palace of the Doges). This explains the abundant production of these three men, who often competed for the same project or challenged one another at a distance by treating identical themes (Danae, the Pilgrims of Emmaus or portraits of popes or doges). And if Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto were so radiant, it was also due to that permanent competition that constantly gave way to new talents, ready to throw themselves into the arena, such as Bassano or Palma the younger.

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A pinch of snuff?

PARIS – When the French tobacco producer was called the Seita, it had a museum where one could see excellent exhibitions (on Baroque art in Paraguay for example). It also had a permanent collection, which Altadis, the Franco-Spanish entity that came after the Seita, seems not to want to deal with since it was absorbed in 2007 by a dreadful predator, Imperial Tobacco. The contents of this collection – grinders, snuff boxes, oxygen based lighters, exotic signs, tobacco jars, pipes – are consequently going to be dispersed at an auction. This first sale of nearly 500 lots – most of them estimated at a few hundred euros – will be followed by a second one in Riom, with auctioneer Butant, at a date not yet given. This is a sad ending for an adventure that had started with flying colors. Indeed, in 1937, the Monopole des Tabacs showed its first purchases at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris, in a building designed by Mallet-Stevens himself…