Art Of The Day Weekly

And thus Louis XIVth finally arrived...

Louis XIV at Versailles? Never heard of him … It seems unbelievable and yet it is true. The castle has never organized an exhibition to the glory of its most famous resident. The great retrospective that has just opened will be the act of contrition to erase such a sin. At a time when our Republican leaders seem to have a weakness for royal practices, we can analyze all the pomp of the 17th century in France through 300 objects. The antique writing tables with numerous drawers, the bisque busts, the mythological bronzes and the bee-wax profiles, sent from Hamburg or Budapest, from New-Orleans or Caen, demonstrate an eternal magnificence. It rises to senseless heights, in particular under the period of Le Brun, when from 1670 to 1685 all the floor of the Great Gallery of the Louvre was covered. There were no limits to the project: over a length of more than 400 metres, the carpet was to be made up exclusively of masterpieces produced by la Savonnerie, in linen and wool. When observing one of the des 93 carpets manufactured at the time, one can not help being troubled by the capacity of authoritarian regimes to produce works that time cannot affect …

Sculptors of the XVIIth, the masters of Spain...

LONDON – Spanish XVIIth century painting, carried by Vélasquez, is well known. The same cannot be said about polychrome sculpture, a major discipline nevertheless, that employed great creators such as Francisco Pacheco (Vélasquez’s master) and Alonso Cano. The National Gallery has put paintings by Zurbaràn and his contemporaries next to polychrome altarpieces on the Passion of Christ, the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of the Virgin to show how painting and sculpture interacted and complemented one another in Spanish culture of the time. Juan Martínez Montañés and Pedro de Mena should finally go up in status after this profitable confrontation.

Eros through the ages

MADRID – Love and sex, seen through the lens of Georges Bataille, for whom eroticism was kin to a religious sacrifice: the exhibition shown at the Thyssen museum and at the Caja Madrid smacks a bit of heresy. How artists expressed their love torment and their desire, in all different forms – heterosexual or homosexual, fetishist, sadistic, voyeur -, is the project developed in twelve themed sections and over 100 works from the XIXth and XXth centuries, with a few flash backs to present testimony from Tiepolo and Rubens. From the various Renaissance versions of Saint Sebastian under his rain of arrows to Nastassia Kinski wrapped up by a serpent (and caught in the lens of Richard Avedon), including the Venus by official painters or Bellmer’s women with ankles and hands tied, passion takes on thousands of different appearances.

After Matisse came Rodin

PARIS – The Rodin museum has the aim of bringing closer two sacred monsters of modern art, and confronts its champion to Henri Matisse. The techniques of sculpture, the audacity of the treatment of certain themes, the shared passion for dance, the feminine nude, the walking man are all compared. In reality, the admiration was only in one direction: Matisse, who decided in 1891 to dedicate himself to painting, was greatly impressed by his elder and in particular by the Alma pavilion which Rodin set up on the margin of the Universal Exhibition in 1900. Rodin was not at all impressed by his young emulator. He even criticized him once, during one of their rare encounters, of having «too easy» a hand. Aside from the parallels it endeavours to show, the main interest in the exhibition is the abundant presentation of Matisse’s sculpted work, which we had not seen presented this way for over thirty years.

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Our article from 25 June 2009

Perfumes of photographs at the Guerlains'

PARIS – They are known for being great collectors of contemporary drawings. It was precisely to be able to completely dedicate themselves to this passion –also reflected in the annual prize awarded by their foundation– that Florence and Daniel Guerlain, heirs of the famous dynasty of perfumers, decided to put their collection of photographs up for sale. It has never been shown before to the public and includes close to 90 lots. Aside from the international stars of the discipline (such as Man Ray, present with a portrait of Catherine Deneuve from 1966), what is most interesting are the artists who carry out personal research over the years, often by cycles, such as Candida Höfer, with a passion for public and private interiors, or John Coplans, who observed for years the progressive degeneration of his aging body. Aside from the large serigraphs on Plexiglass by Jean-Marc Bustamante and the twilight and conceptual landscapes by Sugimoto, the average price should be well under 10 000 euros.