Art Of The Day Weekly
#160 - from 4 February 2010 to 10 February 2010
Copyright of video
IN THE AIR
Botero, not too expensive
It is not easy today to buy a Botero. With some of his work sold at over 2 million dollars in 2006, the Columbian artist is one of the stars of auctions. Yet it is possible to have one for a much lower price. In Cartagena, the capital of the Columbian Caribbean and the most tourist-ridden town in the country, visitors to the recent literary festival Hay had works offered to them in the street for a ridiculous price, around 50 000 pesos, approximately twenty Euros. At a time when by-products are closely controlled, at which the most insignificant reproduction of a work on Tintin or by Magritte must undergo very strict examination, false Boteros seem to flourish. It is obvious though that the artist would have a very hard time trying to trace the networks of these fat lying women. While this illegal market flouts his copyright, he may find a slight consolation in the fact that it does not affect his potential clientele, represents a (meagre) revenue for the sellers, and does help maintain his fame at a very low cost …
EXHIBITIONS
Henri Rousseau, Portrait de Monsieur X (Pierre Loti), circa 1910, oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm, Kunsthaus Zurich © 2010 Kunsthaus Zurich
Rousseau, the explorer
BASEL -He painted jungle scenes without ever having set foot in one. His images of dense forests, inhabited by tigers and serpents, were built like collages. A Parisian customs officer, Henri Rousseau would fit in motifs he had seen in images, heard of in conversations or simply imagined. He ignored all the rules of representation and of reality and in doing so fascinated the Surrealists, Kandinsky and Picasso: he ended up by creating a far more lasting truth, forever printed in our memory. At the Beyeler foundation, where 40 paintings have been brought together to commemorate the artist’s centennial (1844-1910), the jungle compositions obviously occupy a central place since Ernst Beyeler had bought a very notable one in 1988, Le lion, ayant faim, se jette sur l’antilope. But we can also admire views of Parisian boulevards, popular scenes (weddings, football games) and portraits.
•Henri Rousseau at the foundation Beyeler, from 7 February to 9 May 2010.
El Greco, Saint James the Mayor, Ca. 1610-1614, oil on canvas, Toledo, Museo del Greco
Greco, a great master from the XXth century
BRUSSELS -No one today would argue regarding the Greco’s central role in the history of art in the XVIIth century. That status though is only recent. Indeed, until 1900, the painter waited patiently until the joint efforts of three Spanish scholars, Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, the marquis de Vega Inclán and photographer Mariano Mereno, pulled him out of that limbo. The first published a monograph of reference in 1908, the marquis founded in 1910 the museum dedicated to the painter in Toledo, and the third was the first to systematically reproduce his tortured figures. By bringing forward these three «discoverers», the exhibition retraces through some forty works the resurrection of an artist who was famous in his time. He was born in 1541 in Crete, and took advantage of the occupation of his island by the Venetian power. Following a stay in Venice and then in Rome, the former manufacturer of icons became one of the most expensive artists in the great Spanish convents. Following his death in 1614, in a continent attracted by Caravaggio’s realism, his Mannerist tendencies would turn him into a «has been» for three centuries.
•El Greko, Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900 at Bozar from 4 February to 9 May 2010. Catalogue.
Lisette Model, the street as one
PARIS -A daughter of the cultivated Viennese bourgeoisie, an art and music student, Lisette Model (1901-1983) could have become a soprano or an ambassador’s wife. The uncertainties of History – the rise of Nazism – and her vocation led her down a very different path: she would become one of the best interpreters of the American way of life of the XXth century. The retrospective at the Jeu de paume presents some 120 snapshots of the 40s and 50s in which the New York and Californian crowds rush: images of reflections in shop windows, hurried legs of women off to work, spectators at the race tracks or at the theatre. These uncomprimising slabs of life framed like a movie -we note her taste for low-angle shots – were already announced by her first works, a series on the wealthy vacationers on the Côte d’Azur, impervious to the rise of dangers in Europe in the thirties.
•Lisette Model at the Jeu de paume from 9 February to 26 June 2010.
Artaujourdhui also recommends
• The Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates a retrospective Elliott Erwitt (born in 1928), an ironic observer of the small deeds of every day life. From 3 February to 4 April 2010.
•At the Grand-Hornu, in Belgium, Le fabuleux destin du quotidien studies the relations between art and design. From 7 February to 25 May 2010.
•In Jakob and Rudolf von Alt, the Albertina in Vienna presents over 200 watercolors commissioned between 1835 and 1848 by Emperor Ferdinand Ist to these artists to detail the main cities of the Austro-Hungarian empire. From 10 February to 24 May 2010.
AUCTIONS
INKPOT in porcelain from PARIS, polychrome series of characters: here a musketeer sitting on a piece of artillery. Circa XIXème. Haut. 12 cm
A taste for inkpots
VENDOME – Do you fancy one in the shape of a monkey’s head, or a shoe, of a ball of wool? Or a wedding cake that resembles the palace of the Trocadero? Do you like it in Bakelite, in green marble from the Pyrenees, in uralite or in blown crystal? As far as inkpots are concerned – an accessory that has completely disappeared from our desks and from that of schoolchildren’s– the diversity is mind-boggling. The Rouillac office in Vendôme presents a selection of all times and origins, collected by a passionate specialist, François Podevin-Bauduin. One single thing does not change, that is the starting price which is set at 100 € for all the lots. There is no doubt certain models will quickly soar above that floor price, in particular the ones signed by Cartier, Hermès and Montblanc, the refined creations in Art deco (lot 300 in tortoise shell) or some which have reached us through the ages (lot 314 in earthenware, from the XVIIth century).
•333 inkpots on 8 February 2010 in Vendôme (SVV Rouillac)
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Konrad Klapheck, The Audience, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 130 cm, courtesy galerie Lelong, Paris
Klapheck, a taste for jazz
For a long time he was a «painter of machines» in the tradition of the Surrealists and Fernand Léger. Born in Düsseldorf in 1933, Konrad Klapheck gave them a smooth and shiny appearance and enigmatic functions that Carelman, the inventor of unobtainable objects, would have appreciated. For some years now the German artist has entered a cycle that remains strictly figurative but has become more «humanised». Next to the tubes, pistons and track rods, men and women appeared, dedicated to an activity that is not linked to mechanics but rather to its antithesis, free inspiration. These characters are musicians, real or imaginary jazzmen, transcribed in acrylic paint on canvas or in pencil on tracing paper. At their own rhythm, and thanks to their burlesque virtuosity at the saxophone or with the cymbals, they maintain their dream-like dimension.
• Konrad Klapheck is exhibited from 4 February to 27 March 2010 at the galerie Lelong (13 rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris)
BOOKS
The splendor of embassies
To be an ambassador in Paris is, in a way, like being a blue-blooded prince or a cousin of the Emperor’s. One does not sleep scot-free in the sheets that belonged to Pauline Borghese or to Talleyrand… It is in any case what happened to the diplomats who had the privilege of living in these private homes charged with history, many of which are located on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré or Saint-Germain. This greatly illustrated book allows us to get near these exceptional homes and to admire their decorative elements: mind-spinning staircases like the one designed by René Sargent in the hotel de Lévy (the Portuguese embassy), Hungarian point parquets, chandeliers from Venice or Art deco (Mexican embassy), moldings and stucco, frescoes (from Sofonisba Anguissola to Jean-Baptiste Huet and Proudhon) and Gobelin tapestries. We only regret there is not a map that would allow us to visualise the locations of these temples of good taste in the Parisian geography. As for actually entering these embassies, one will have to be patient and wait for the National Heritage days and stand in endless lines …
•Ambassades à Paris by Elisabeth Martin de Clausonne, photographs by Hermine Cléret, published by éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2009, 192 p., 45 €, ISBN: 978-2-35039-076-5
IN BRIEF
LONDON - L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man) from 1961 by Alberto Giacometti set a new record price for any work sold at auction on 3 February 2010 at Sotheby's where it fetched £65 million (€74 million).
LONDON-The government is getting ready to declare certain bunkers used during WW II as historical monuments.
LUANG PRABANG (Laos) – The biennale of photography of Luang Prabang, held from 10 to 28 February 2010, dedicates various exhibitions to Laotian authors (such as Rasi and the young Hmong photographers) and to foreigners (Denis Darzacq, Laurent Monlaü, etc).
NEW YORK-According to the Bloomberg press agency, Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers, has bought the Magnum archives for approximately 100 million $.
ROTTERDAM-The art Rotterdam fair of contemporary and modern art will be held from
VENICE – The French pavilion of the next biennale of architecture of Venice (to open on 29 August 2010) will have Dominique Perrault as its commissary and the theme will be «Metropolis».