Art Of The Day Weekly
#162 - from 18 February 2010 to 24 February 2010
In 2007, présentation to the public of Toutankhamon's mummy © Mediascrape
IN THE AIR
Tutankhamun, daddy's boy
CAIRO – The Pharaohs are the all time champions of major international exhibitions. The record in 1967 has not been beaten in France: over 1.2 million visitors, among them general de Gaulle, had admired the treasure of Tutankhamun at the Petit-Palais. Consequently everyone was very attentive to the results expected on 17 February of the analysis of the DNA carried out for years by the service of Egyptian Antiquities with the help of the National Geographic. They were not disappointed as it is certain now that while Tutankhamun is definitely the son of Akhenaten, his mother is not the beautiful Nefertiti as was presumed until now. It seems that Akhenaton conceived his descendant in 1344 B.C. with his own sister, the mummy known as KV35YL. What a joyful scandal! It is the ideal ingredient to consolidate the love rate of this pharaoh who died of malaria at the age of 19 and was rediscovered by Lord Carter in 1922. Through a happy coincidence, an exhibition (sponsored by National Geographic) currently presents the treasures of «King Tut» at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto. No one should be afraid of missing it, since it will then travel to New York where it will be shown for nine months at Times Square. Pharaohs are the investment of our times …
• The Journal of the American Medical Association dated 17 February 2010 with the article on Tutankhamun.
EXHIBITIONS
HURRY UP! LAST DAYS! UNTIL FEBRUARY 28, DO NOT MISS... GENEVIÈVE ASSE; the search for purity and light by one of the greatest contemporary artists at the MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE ROUEN. See ArtoftheDay article.
AND ALSO... CERDÀ AND THE BARCELONA OF THE FUTURE; a rational city extension designed 150 years ago that is still a model for envisioning territorial growth at teh CCB in BARCELONA. See ArtoftheDay article.
Michel Denancé@ RPBW
Piano lesson
BORDEAUX – He is one of the stars of world architecture. He was revealed in 1977 with the building of the Centre Pompidou (he was then 40 years old). Since then Renzo Piano has built everywhere, adapting to the commemorative dimension of a centre Jean-Marie Tjibaou in New-Caledonia (1998) as well as to the needs of a major American daily newspaper (the tower of the New York Times in 2007). The retrospective dedicated to him in this city presents fourteen major projects and shows he has always been concerned by the environment as well as by town planning (he worked on social housing and also looked into the urban structure of Otranto, an historical town in southern Italy). The exhibition adopts the title of a work by Boulez - Répons - and unwraps as a dialogue by including «key-witnesses» such as Marie-France Tjibaou or sister Brigitte, from the monastery of the Clarisses in Ronchamp.
•Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Répons at Arc en Rêve, from 18 February to 23 May 2010.
Charley Toorop, Selfportrait, 1929, © ADAGP, Paris 2010 © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Toorop junior, the other one
PARIS – We all know her father Jan Toorop – a symbolist artist – and even her brothers, painter and movie director Edgar and John Fernhout respectively, much better than her. Charley Toorop (1891-1955) demonstrated throughout her life a strong attachment to the human figure which she expressed in particular in the form of peasant scenes of Zealand, of the self-portrait and the group portrait. In this last exercise, she showed a great number of members of the cultural avant-gardes she befriended – Mondrian, Léger, Zadkine, architect-designer Gerrit Rietveld or movie director Joris Ivens. This concluded her personal itinerary which took her through expressionism and then the new objectivity. The last part of the exhibition groups together works by this circle of friends.
•Charley Toorop at the musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, from 19 February to 9 May 2010.
The private side of Munch
PARIS – He is known for his The Scream , and its bumpy destiny (victim of a theft) that made him even more famous. But the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is not all contained in that icon. Munch was a portrait artist capable of exploring the depths of the human soul, and a forerunner of Fauvism and Expressionism. He was also a great painter of landscapes, marked by the nature of his native country and his stay on the Côte d’Azur, and a gifted engraver. The one hundred works presented– some sixty paintings and forty drawings and prints – have rarely been seen together before as they come from private collections, in particular the remarkable one of Pérez Simón in Mexico, which we will soon be able to admire at the Marmottan museum in Paris.
•Edvard Munch ou l’anti-Cri at the Pinacothèque de Paris, from 19 February to 18 July 2010.
Artaujourdhui also recommends
•The National Portrait Gallery, in London, dedicates a retrospective to the portraits of photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009) with over 120 prints, among which a large number of «vintage» works. From 18 February to 6 June 2010.
•The Fondation Juan March in Madrid dedicated a very complete exhibition (over 150 works) to Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the most famous British «Vorticist» artist. Until 16 May 2010.
•At the Petit-Palais in Paris, Les débuts de la photographie sur papier en Italie presents 140 prints from the 1846-1862. From 18 February to 2 May 2010.
AUCTIONS
Gaston Chaissac, Portrait de sainte Hermine, original drawing on newspaper, 1959, 33x26 cm. Estimate: €1500. Courtesy AuctionArt, Paris.
Surrealist odds and ends
PARIS - The choice is eclectic to say the least: comb drawings by Yolande Fièvre, letters by Joë Bousquet and André Breton, voodoo objects, photographs by Doisneau and Pierre Molinier, art brut by Sanfourche and Van der Steen, painted cobblestones by Georges Hugnet, notebooks from the school of pataphysics, a drawing by Gaston Chaissac on a newspaper page (that still allows one though to read the article on the moving funeral at Barre-de-Monts of the Mandin couple «accidentally drowned»)… The backbone of the sale is the former Anatole Jakovsky (1909-1988) collection. A native Moldavian, a friend of Chaissac’s, a pioneer in giving recognition to art naïf, with a passion for Alphonse Allais and pipes, he was a character just as baroque as the contents of this sale that once again places him in the limelight.
•Collection Anatole Jakovsky at Auction Art Pierre Cardin Rémy Le Fur on 24 February 2010 at 2:15 PM
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Ifigenia, 2007, pencil on paper, 48 x 36 cm. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris. Photo B.Huet/Tutti
Adami, a figurative artist above all
He has never negated his commitments. Since 1964-65, Valerio Adami (born in 1935) was one of the spearheads of narrative Figuration, a movement launched by art critic Gérard Gassiot-Talabot. Since then, impervious to abstract currents, he has not ceased with Hervé Télémaque, Jan Voss or Peter Klasen to explore human forms, thus becoming a sure value in current art (a Middle Class Interior reached the price of 110 000 euros at Artcurial in April 2009). His characters with neatly traced outlines present analogies with the saints from the painted glass from the middle ages as well as with the heroes of the clear line of Belgian comic strips. In his last exhibition, at the galerie Templon, he presents the other side of his work, that is, his preparatory drawings of the last three years that show how before reaching the immaculate canvas, there are numerous doubts.
•Valerio Adami is shown at galerie Daniel Templon (30 rue Beaubourg, 75003) until 6 March 2010.
BOOKS
Stolen art society
What do Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge, Caravaggio’s Nativity with Saint Laurence or Vermeer’s Concert have in common? They are all works of art that have been stolen and never found again (respectively from the Sofia Imber museum in Caracas, the oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo and the Stewart Gardner museum in Boston). The author of this work picks in a very deep reservoir (even if international agreements and the creation of special police forces tend to lower the crime rates), and describes these often incredible disappearances, some of which still keep the investigators and simple amateurs mystified. Whatever happened to Portrait of doctor Gachet, bought for a pretty sum by a Japanese billionaire in 1990? The buyer had announced he would be buried with Van Gogh’s masterpiece. The man is dead and gone and the painting is nowhere to be seen … It is a shame this interesting inventory is tainted by spelling mistakes such as saint Francis of Assises, a smell of suffer, Francesco Goya, chasse in émail (for enamel). Obviously the dictionary must have been stolen as well …
•Le musée invisible, les chefs-d'œuvre volés by Nathaniel Herzberg, du Toucan publishing house, 2009, 208 p., 39,90 €.
IN BRIEF
LONDON – The London Art Fair, specialised in contemporary art, will be held from 19 to 23 February 2010.
MADRID – At the same time as the Arco and Art Madrid fairs which opened on 17 February, the Just Madrid fair that hosts 35 young galleries will be held until 21 February 2010
NEW YORK – Nearly 1200 works from the Polaroid collection, including photographs by Warhol and Ansel Adams, will be up for sale on 21 and 22 February 2010 at Sotheby's.
PARIS – The treasure of Pouilly-sur-Meuse (Renaissance silver work), bought by the French state in November 2009 at Sotheby’s for 1.4 million euros, was officially presented by the minister of Culture on 16 February. It will soon be deposited at the Musée lorrain in Nancy
PARIS – An installation by Chinese artist Ko Siu Lan, consisting in banners with the words Make More Work Less, a parody of a speech of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, was censured on 11 February 2010 by the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts before being reauthorized by the French minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand.
PESARO – On 11 February 2010 a court condemned the Getty Museum to return to Italy the famous bronze of the Victorious Athlete , attributed to Lysippe, for having been bought illegally in 1977.