Art Of The Day Weekly
#161 - from 11 February 2010 to 17 February 2010
L'Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti sold 3 February 2010 at Sotheby's London
IN THE AIR
World record
Giacometti on top of the world: the mind-blowing sale of the Homme qui marche I, sold for the equivalent of 66.3 million Euros at Sotheby’s in London last 3 February, has been in the headlines of the press all around the world, and not only in the art magazines. This auction, carried out in sterling pounds, beats the previous winner, Picasso’s (Boy with a Pipe, sold in 2004 in New York) by very few thousands of dollars thanks to the fluctuations in the exchange rates. It pushes back the same artist’s Dora Maar au chat to third position and kicks Van Gogh off the podium, even though the painting (Portrait of doctor Gachet) –together with Starry Night- makes its author the most reproduced artist in the world. Is this a sign of a recovery or rather a confirmation of the crisis? We would tend to believe it is the latter. The event tends to prove the axiom of hard times according to which competition focuses on undeniable masterpieces, leaving the inferior categories the record rates of unsold works …
EXHIBITIONS
José María Zepeda de Estrada, Portrait of Francisco Torres, 1846 © Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico.
Portrait of the artist as a Mexican
BRUSSELS – Donned with a sombrero and a guitar, eating a tortilla and marked by a wide, Emilano Zapata-style moustache. If one had to draw the typical portrait of a Mexican of the XXth century, we can rest assured he would have one of these characteristics. Here is an opportunity to enrich our imaginations: with 150 paintings, the exhibition multiplies the venerable image. There is the poor peasant and the politicized worker of the great muralists Rivera and Siqueiros and of movie director Eisenstein. There is also the man on the street photographed by Alvarez-Bravo or sketched by cartoonists Estrada and Bustos. But if we go back in history there is also a first interpretation of Mexican identity, as it was perceived by travellers in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. This mosaic reaches its objective, to blur up the clues. No doubt, the Mexican is not a monolithic character.
•Imágenes del mexicano at Bozar from 11 February to 25 April 2010.
Zoomorphic mask, Bamiléké tribe, Cameroon © musée du quai Branly, photo Sandrine Expilly
As complicated as an image
PARIS – The exhibitions on civilizations and regions at the musée du quai Branly are interspersed with a few transversal retrospectives, illustrating a theme by loans from various cultures. Following Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? and Planète métisse, now has come the time for La fabrique des images. The subject is so wide that this exhibition does not pretend to do more than to open perspectives, such as how does man see the world, here and there, yesterday and today? By juggling with paintings on tree bark from Papua New Guinea, Flemish paintings, Inuit masks and Kachina dolls, the curator, Philippe Descola, brings out four large families: animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. The idea is complex and while we manage pretty quickly to place the Parisian bourgeois or the Indian from the Amazonia into this modelling, the categories can often get confused …
•La fabrique des images at the musée du quai Branly, from 16 February to 17 July 2010
Adam © Musée de Cluny, musée national du Moyen-Age, Paris
Paris, gothic style
PARIS – The city of lights: at the beginning of the XIIIth century the capital was just beginning its historic parable. It was the permanent headquarters of power under Philippe-Auguste, and as such developed a program of «major works» that would turn it into one of the Western metropolis. The Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame are two of the construction sites that would change the face of the city. The exhibition groups together objects from these two emblematic sites (of which some were only found per chance very recently, such as the heads of kings from Judah), and brings back to life that period of great creative effervescence that expressed itself in particular in stone. Keystones, characters (such as the Adam from the southern transept of Notre-Dame or the angels from the priorale of Poissy) are accompanied by another category of clearly crafted objects: reliquaries in silver and gold plate and illuminated manuscripts.
•Paris, ville rayonnante at the Musée du Moyen Âge - Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny from 10 February 2010 to 24 May 2010
Artaujourdhui also recommends
•In Madrid, the fondation Canal de Isabel II dedicates an exhibition to photographer Julius Shulman (1910-2009), with close to 150 images of Los Angeles. From 17 February to 2 May 2010.
•In Paris, a retrospective on the theoretician of Renaissance architecture Androuet du Cerceau (1520-1586) is presented at the Cité de l’architecture. From 10 February to 9 May 2010.
•What is every day life like in the Parisian prisons since 1851? This is the object of the exhibition L’impossible photographie at the musée Carnavalet. From 10 February to 4 July 2010.
AUCTIONS
Souvenirs from Chandigarh
PARIS – Ignored by the authorities in charge of rebuilding France, Le Corbusier created one of his most emblematic works between 1951 and 1964 on the other side of the world: the city of Chandigarh. The new capital of Pendjab, commissioned by Nehru, was to replace historical Lahore, after it passed over to Pakistan following the partition in 1947. In this global project, Le Corbusier was town-planner, architect as well as designer and decorator, all-in-one. The auction at Artcurial, following the one in 2008, is based on the collection of gallery owner Eric Touchaleaume (who became famous with his commitment to save Jean Prouvé’s Maisons tropicales). The sale includes drawings (starting at 800 €), furniture designed with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (tables, window seats, bookcases), bas-reliefs in plaster (a zébu, estimated at 30 000 €) or moldings that were used to produce manhole covers (10 000 €) and imprints disseminated on the city’s walls. •Chandigarh Project II at Artcurial on 16 February 2010
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Paul Wallach, Foe, 2009, courtesy galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris
Wallach, in search of balance
Paul Wallach is an American artist born in 1960 and who has lived in France since 1994. He produces small, fragile structures. They are made of various materials – plaster, cloth, aluminum, glass – but wood, in general brut or colored with one single coat of acrylic paint, is his favorite material. These assemblages in simple forms – triangles, circles and straight – remind the viewer of the constructivist research carried out by artists from the Russian avant-garde. Though they are sometimes placed on the floor, they generally lean on the wall: indeed the search for a sometimes unexpected centre of gravity, thanks to makeshift equilibrium reached with threads and ropes, is the poetic essence of the artist’s work. •Paul Wallach is exhibited at the Jaeger Bucher gallery (5 rue de Saintonge, 75003 Paris) until 13 March 2010.
BOOKS
Lebel, the king of happenings
Man-snails slowly «swallowing» their partner covered with cabbage leaves or hidden under soft spaghettis, maniacs destroying a 4CV with an axe, a motorcycle backfiring with a naked girl in the back seat while someone reads an excerpt from the Larousse medical dictionary… In the public, we note Pierre Restany, Jacques Lacan, philosopher Jean Wahl and detectives from the Police Security who ran the risk of finding themselves sprayed with chicken blood by the end of the evening. The event called «Déchirex», took place on 25 May 1965 and delighted the foreign press. It led to the dismissal of the director of the American Centre of Paris, who had hosted him, but also to the fame of «Happener-in-Chief», Jean-Jacques Lebel. This was not the first attempt by the latter: this book looks closely at all the happenings he contributed to create in the decade of the ‘60s and which represented a significant side of the wave of protests that would culminate in May 68.
•Les Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel by Androula Michaël, Hazan, 2009, 256 p., 45 €. ISBN : 978-2-7541-0351-0
IN BRIEF
EDMONTON – The Art Gallery of Alberta was reopened on 6 February after a complete refurbishment, worth $8 million, by Randall Stout from Los Angeles.
MADRID – The modern and contemporary art fairs Arco and Art Madrid will be held from 17 to 21 February 2010.
SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) announced it has raised $250 million for its new wing that will host the collection of Gap founders Donald et Doris Fisher.
STONEHENGE – The construction of a new visitor centre for the megalithic site, at a cost of £20 million, has been criticized by a government watchdog from the CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment).
ON ART-OF-THE-DAY.INFO
This week, do not miss
LE MOUVEMENT. From Cinema to Kinetics
BASEL – The Tinguely Museum examines the birth of kinetic art, focusing on the seminal 1955 exhibition at Galerie Denise René in Paris. The survey presents the main artists of the movement like Tinguely himself, Pol Bury and Jesús Rafael Soto, but it also goes back in the past to include Russian suprematism.