Art Of The Day Weekly

Death and the artist

Aside from a few emblematic cases of sculptures that self-destroy or of installations that melt into the landscape, artists have the legitimate ambition of creating for eternity. Contrary to Zeno, the hero in Italo Svevo’s work, who constantly smoked his «last cigarette», artists cannot cheat with their last work. Are they at any moment aware that they are working at it? In an era that pretends to have surpassed a great number of taboos, the one of death remains very strong. The last important exhibition on this theme dates back to 1989 at the Fondation Maeght. Today it is the turn of the musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris (Paris Museum of Modern art) to look into this funerary problem. Through the cases of Chen Zhen, Gonzales-Torres or Robert Mapplethorpe, it examines the swan songs of artists who knew their time was almost up. While Gilles Aillaud frees animals who were previously in cages, if Hans Hartung escapes in large formats, Mapplethorpe prefers to multiply, with skulls, the references to the Reaper, while James Lee Byars stages his own disappearance. We can only regret the absence of a few living artists, such as Roman Opalka who has been working for nearly half a century on a unique and last work of art: the painting of a suite of growing numbers that brighten up with the years. The most impressive parable on the finished and the infinite…

Inks from China

BRUSSELS – In 353, a group of men of letters got together and produced a masterpiece in hand writing: the Préface du Pavillon des orchidées (Preface to the Orchid pavilion). Even though we are in the XXIth century, at the time of word processors and internet, calligraphy is still a very living discipline in China. The exhibition organized in the context of Europalia intends to prove it. Among the loans from the museum of the Palace of Beijing and the Art museum of China, we can of course find very old documents, in particular the ones that date from the golden age of the Son dynasty, as well as contemporary works (the 1956 version of Pavillon des orchidées by Fu Baoshi). The organization by sections helps one to better understand the role of calligraphy in religion, in the expression of power or in literary creation.

Maino steps out of the shadow

MADRID – Major exhibitions sometimes – too rarely- play the role of revealers. It is the case though of the one the Prado museum dedicates to Juan Bautista Maíno (1581-1649). Yet, this artist who only left four signed paintings reached the highest functions in his time: Philip II had named him drawing master for his son, the future Philip IV. This does not protect his biography from having large incomplete areas. The retrospective groups together the funds of the Prado – including his masterpiece, the monumental altarpiece of Saint Peter martyr, painted for the Dominican monastery of Toledo, where he had retreated to become a monk. His work is essentially religious, but includes a few portraits and history scenes. The nearly forty works here represent it well, while they are confronted to those of certain contemporaries such as Vélasquez or Guido Reni.

Lights on Soulages

PARIS – To celebrate the 90th birthday of the father of French painting, the Centre Pompidou offers an ambitious retrospective of Pierre Soulages' work, exhibiting the abstraction which certain projects of his (such as the stained glass windows at the abbey of Conques) helped to get him close to the public at large. We cannot accuse the institution of being opportunist, since in 1979 it had already shown an exhibition of his, while Soulages had just started his series Outrenoir (large compositions entirely black reflecting light). The time span is somewhat larger today, covering over 60 years of activity, from the walnut stains right after WW II and the tar on glass, up to the last polyptychs, not shown before.

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Vérité, the return

The first Vérité auction in 2006 marked everyone’s memory: the sale of primitive objects had an historic success in Paris, with a sales result superior to 40 million euros. Similar to Hollywood sequels and to one of its great heroes, Terminator, who promises he “will be back”, it is true for Vérité. We now have the Vérité II auction. It is focused on Asian art, and does not have the ambition of the previous one. Estimates turn around some 2 to 3 million euros for one hundred lots. There will be a handful of masterpieces such as a bronze Shiva from the Xth century from the Khmer culture (300 000 euros). It sits side by side with some twenty Hindu statues– from India this time – and some thirty Chinese sculptures that trace the evolution of Buddhist art up to the XVIth century with, among others, an impressive Bodhisattva with one thousand arms from the Ming period.