Art Of The Day Weekly
#163 - from 25 February 2010 to 3 March 2010
Caravaggio: from a series by Simon Schama produced by the BBC
IN THE AIR
100% Caravaggio
ROME – Of course, the Nativity with saint Laurence will not be presented, as the Caravaggio's mythic painting was stolen on 17 October 1969 in Palermo. The other works all come from Nancy, Kansas City, Berlin, Dublin, Saint-Petersburg: indeed the retrospective dedicated to the master of chiaro-oscuro for the 400th anniversary of his death intends to be unique. The figures seem so poor when we compare them to the mega-exhibitions that attract the crowds today. Only twenty-four paintings! But they are all originals and Caravaggio only left sixty painted works. And the presence of some of them is for the least unexpected: the Fruit basket has never left the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milano for four centuries. This gathering is definitely a great feat and it is not going to be accessible to all: the queues are forecasted to be endless. In particular since certain paintings, as the newspaper La Repubblica underlined with assense of humor, intend to act like spoiled divas. The Rest on the flight to Egypt will leave on 22 March, the Lute player on 15 May, three Caravaggio's from Florence on 16 May, Saul's conversion on 4 June. And the Flagellation will only arrive on 12 April. Make your choice…
•Caravaggio at the Scuderie del Quirinale, from 20 February to 13 June 2010.
EXHIBITIONS
Cima da Conegliano, Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto con i santi Giovanni Battista e Lucia, Lisbona, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. Photo: Catarina Gomes Ferreira
Spring of Cima
CONEGLIANO (Italie) - Born in 1459 and died in 1517, he was exactly Leonardo da Vinci's contemporary. And yet, who realy knows Cima da Conegliano, one of the great figures of the Renaissance? Fifty years after the remarkable retrospective organized in Treviso by architect Carlo Scarpa, the painter is once again honored, and this time in his home town, at the recently restaured Palazzo Sarcinelli. The press release proudly announces «67 000 kilometres» as the total distance covered by the works that came from all over the world. The exhibit aims at being educational and exhaustive. It will be educational as the first rooms present paintings of landscapes and next to them current photographs have been placed to show how the topography has changed. It will be exhaustive as all the Virgin and Child will be there to give a helping hand, as well as the Saint Jerome. The learned translator of the Bible will be present in five versions. And to show the artist's eclecticism, his capacity to skip from religious altarpieces to small allegoric compositions, a pretty series of cassoni with mythologic motives has been brought together and presented as well.
•Cima da Conegliano at Palazzo Sarcinelli, from 26 February to 2 June 2010
Henry Moore, Shelterers in the Tube, 1941, Tate. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation
Moore, women, war
LONDON – His «fundamental obsession» will be present in large numbers: those figures of recllning women with generous shapes, sometimes accompanied by their child. Whether in wood, stone, bronze or simply drawn: a total of 150 works recompose the career of Henry Moore (1898-1986), the favorite artist of the British. The eroticism of the twenties and thirties, marked in particular by the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, is doubled by a very different aspect. Moore fought at the front during World War I, he anticipated the suffering of the Spanish Civil war and also lived the consequences of the Blitz in London in 1940. His drawings of refugees in the tunnels of the underground are true historical documents.
•Henry Moore at the Tate Britain, from 24 February to 8 August 2010
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting, Laka, 1997, (Abstraktes Bild, See), oil on canvas, 200 x 180 cm, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Photo: Albert Fritz, Baden-Baden
Abstract Monet
MADRID – The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum and the Caja Madrid foundation have launched themselves on a beautiful project, to show how the king of the Impressionists, Claude Monet, also transmuted into the pioneer of abstract painting. He was neglected after his death (1926) since at the time there was a search for art that was more structured, more built. But he was rediscovered after World War II by young American painters who did not hesitate to go on the pilgrimage to Giverny. They found in his touch, in his dissolution of the matter that marked his last period (the one of theWhite water lilies and the Japanese bridge which he constantly went back to), a lesson in avant-garde. The exhibition cleverly places his own paintings (many of them brought directly from the musée Marmottan) face to face with works by Pollock, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis or de Riopelle. His colleagues help us detect a new ingredient in abstract expressionism and also to look at eighty year-old Monet in a new light, as a revolutionary more than ever.
•Monet y la abstracción at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum and at the Caja Madrid foundation, from 23 February to 30 May 2010. The exhibition will then be presented at the musée Marmottan, in Paris, from 16 June to 26 September 2010.
Artaujourdhui also recommends
•After showing in London, the exhibition Turner and the masters, which confronts the English painter to his influences – Rembrand, Titian or Poussin - has arrived at the Grand Palais in Paris. From 24 February to 25 May 2010.
• The influence of the Renaissance on Burne-Jones and Rossetti is studied in I Preraffaelliti e il sogno del ‘400 italiano, presented at the Museo d’Arte in Ravena. From 28 February to 6 June 2010. And then at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 15 September to 5 December 2010.
•The relationship of Matisse with one of his favorite models, Lydia Delectorskaïa, is studied in the exhibition Lydia D. at the musée Matisse in Cateau-Cambrésis. From 28 February to 30 May 2010.
AUCTIONS
Chanel's Roaring Twenties
PARIS – Over 800 lots signed by Chanel: Cornette de Saint-Cyr will need two auctions to sell this major stock from the maison de couture from rue Cambon. A few dozens of Euros for a blouse, a black velveteen sweatsuit or calf mittens: these are black market prices for authentic articles… Bids will go up to 500 Euros for gilded metal brooches signed by Robert Goossens or for a 255 purse in padded linen. The interest of the sale is to offer a few pieces capable of attracting seasoned collectors, such as this suit in mottled tweed from 1961 (lot 160, 2000 euros), this long dress from 1935 (lot 411, 4500 euros), this group of sketches done in 1932-33 (lot 458, 1000 euros) or this 1925 evening gown (lot 505, 7000 euros).
•Chanel at Drouot-Richelieu, Cornette de Saint Cyr on 25 and 26 February 2010 at 2 PM.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Les Ambitieux #16, 2008, Lambda print, 18 x 13 cm Courtesy in situ fabienne leclerc, Paris
Auguste Dormeuil in the night
A calm sky with shining stars. That was on 25 April 1937. Another one, slightly different, black and just as deep and unfathomable. That was on 5 August 1945. The sky seems in peace. But not so the Earth. These images, symbolically very strong, from the series «The Day Before », show the starry sky on the eve of shattering events: the bombing of Guernica, the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil shows that our planetary dramas in no way affect the firmament…And that the image sometimes is both important and pathetic: in «Fin de représentation» (End of the show), he had focused on eracing any trace of the past of a living person. In «Hôtel des transmissions»(Hotel of transmissions), he drew up the illustrated catalogue of the places that would be excellent bombing targets. What do we really see? What light do our eyes see? In his next project, «Blackout», for which he was recently awarded the Meurice prize for contemporary art, he will make part of the lights of Manhattan disappear. Rendez-vous is given in the night from 4 and 5 March 2010 at the top of the tower of the New York Palace.
•Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil will be exhibited at the In Situ gallery (6, rue du Pont-de-Lodi,75006), as of 18 March 2010.
BOOKS
King Leo
He left his mark on the post World War II art market: the name of Leo Castelli cannot be separated from that of artists such as Barnett Newman, Richard Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns or Richard Serra, which he broadcast from the top of a real franchise of subsidiaries where some of the greatest current gallery owners learned their first steps, such as Larry Gagosian or Jeffrey Deitch. The main character of this biography is so fantastic the reader cannot put the book down. Castelli was a Jew from Trieste, a bad student but crazy about litterature, a beautiful athlete. He seduced Ileana Shapira, the heiress of a great family and a real beauty, during an internship at the Assicurazioni Generali in Bucharest in the thirties. She would become another icon of the international art world for over half a century, under the name of Ileana Sonnabend. Leo Castelli was a civil servant for the Bank of Italy, he signed up in the American army during the war, was a broker in works by Kandinsky, and finally opened his own gallery at the age of 50 in Manhattan, and from there he reigned like a prince of the Renaissance, seducing artists, collectors and a squadron of beautiful women, up to his death at the age of 91, in 1999. As the Americans like to say, he was «bigger than life».
•Leo Castelli par Annie Cohen-Solal, Gallimard, 2010, 560 p., 33 €
ISBN 978-2-07-077349-7
IN BRIEF
LIEGE – The 7th Biennale of photography and visual arts, BIP2010, will be held from 28 February to 25 April 2010 on the theme Out of Control.
LONDON – The State Department has announced that the new US Embassy in Britain would be designed by the firm Kieran Timberlake from Philadelphia. According to leaks in the press, two of the jurors, Lord Palumbo et Lord Rogers, have vehemently protested against the project and its "blockhaus" aesthetics.
LONDON – Culture Minister Margaret Hodge has temporarily banned the export of Saint John the Evangelist
NEW YORK - The Whitney Biennial of American art at the Whitney Museum opens on 25 February and will be held until 30 May 2010.
NEW YORK – The first issue of Action Comics (1937), in which Superman made its first appearance, was sold at auction on the website comicconnect.com for $1 million on 23 February 2010.