Art Of The Day Weekly

All on Baroque

NAPLES – Before retiring, Nicola Spinosa, the director of the museums of Naples, wished to produce a sort of retrospective-testament. He synthesized a quarter of a century of studies and exhibitions, and occupied six of the city’s museums on a typically local theme: Baroque art. Decorative arts also have their word to say – porcelain from Capodimonte, jewellery, wax modelling, hard stone, ivory and corral inlaid furniture. But of course the greater part of the exhibitions concerns painting: Caravaggio, Ribera and Vélasquez all came through the city and each left a long standing trace. The mission was not limited to pulling the works from the museums’ reserves, and the list of acknowledgements is there to prove it. A great number of paintings come from private collections, from religious institutions, from banks. The public will see works that have never, or so rarely, been seen before, such as portraits by Stanzione, inspiring religious flights by Solimena, still lives with fish by the Recco dynasty, panoramas of the bay by Didier Barra (Monsù Desiderio). The two catalogues (nearly 800 pages in total) can not claim to be a vade-mecum given their weight but they do draw up the aggiornato assessment of a disproportionate production.
•Ritorno al barocco, da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli until 11 April 2010 at Capodimonte and in five other museums in the city. Catalogue Electa Napoli, 80 € the two volumes.

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YSL, already two years ago

PARIS – He passed away in June 2008 and his canonization procedure seems to be going ahead smoothly … Following the historical auction of the art collection he built up with Pierre Bergé (by Christie’s, at the Grand Palais, in February 2009), Yves Saint Laurent himself has been “museumfied” (he already had been, in 1983, at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and in 1987, a the Hermitage). This retrospective brings together half a century of creation: pencilled drawings, models, among them the famous Mondrian (1965), 40 (1971) and Ballets russes (1976) collections, as well as ten models from the wardrobe of Catherine Deneuve, one of the couturier’s muses, photographs of the star, nude, by Jeanloup Sieff, and of course the logo everyone knows but almost everyone has forgotten where it came from: it was Cassandre who drew it in 1961 and it has hardly changed since.
•Yves Saint Laurent at the Petit-Palais, from 11 March to 29 August 2010

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The good Danone taste

PARIS – He was born in a modest family in Catalonia, in 1906, and he died being very wealthy, in Neuilly, in 2006. Over this very long span of time, he (re)invented the yogurt. Daniel Carasso was the driving force in the Danone Empire (the nickname his father gave him) and he used a part of his fortune to furnish himself very elegantly. In this auction we have the contents of his Parisian home, in a purposely eclectic presentation: we can admire a few Chinese statues in enamelled porcelain from the Qianlong period, Sèvres or Creil dishes, and a beautiful amphora with black figures, among other pieces. Nut the larger part of the sale is made up of French XVIIIth century furniture and modern paintings. It is a succession of flat back wing chairs, chests of drawers in rosewood, knitting end tables, pedestal tables in polished steel and a living room, inlaid table, by Roentgen (60 000 €). Then come the Renoirs, Monets, Marquets, culminating with a beautiful Autumn sun by Sisley, a Nymph with flowers from 1931 by Maillol (500 000 € each), a Still life from 1939 by Léger (700 000 €). And in the middle, as if to show the surprising price differences the art market imposes, there is a small bust by Despiau at 4 000 € and a drawing by Hélion at 5 000 €…
•Succession Daniel Carasso at Richelieu-Drouot (Piasa) on 19 March 2010

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Erik Samakh, the song of nature

Erik Samakh has in a certain way given himself the mission of making the sun rustle. He does not mean it in the allegoric, poetic sense of the word, but rather very literally, since the artist is used to climbing tall green pine trees to place photoelectric «flutes» in them that produce melodies according to the sunshine. The public was invited to hear it last year at the domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, during the garden festival. The artist has been roaming across the planet ad its most varied natural habitats for over twenty-five years now, to catch sounds, a pioneer of an environmental awareness that lately has become the most sought after political alibi. Aside from an exotic symphony, played back by complicated machines, the exhibition gives us a full report on these missions thanks to photos of the artist in situ, disguised as a wild boar or listening to the palpitations of the wild Coast.
•Erik Samakh, Mirages sonores, images bruissantes, 1974-2010 at the Michèle Chomette gallery (24 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris, tel: 01 42 78 05 62) until 7 May 2010.

Androuet du Cerceau, ink architectures

In 1886, a superb collection of 116 drawings on velum paper entered the British Museum. It was a donation from Queen Victoria, who had inherited it from her royal ancestors. At the time no one was fully aware but it is one of the summits of Renaissance culture. We are convinced of it today as we visit the exhibition at the Cité de l’architecture or when we leaf through this book that reproduces for the first time the complete collection of these drawings Jacques Androuet du Cerceau did in pen, enhancing some of them with color. As he was active during the period of the religious wars he was not able to build, or hardly. On the other hand, he did put down on paper the most beautiful castles of his time, precise to the least millimetre. He produced in particular drawings from up high – an amazing feat of the imagination for a man who lived two centuries before the first hot-air balloons. We can see to the finest detail the towers of Chambord, the walls of Amboise, the staircase of Blois, the façades of the Louvre. There are also names that had their period of glory but are only memories now, destroyed by time, wars and the Revolution: flowerbeds at the Tuileries, the sumptuous dwellings of Folembray, Montargis, Challuau, La Muette and the famous castle from Madrid that was in the woods of Boulogne and which François Ist wanted to be as luxurious as the location he was made prisoner in in Spain.
•Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, les dessins des plus excellents bâtiments de France, by Françoise Boudon et Claude Mignot, co-edition Picard/Cité de l’architecture/Le Passage, 2010, 256 p., 49 €

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ÉCOUEN -The lovers of Ovid’s Heroides have only been presented once in the decorative arts: in the extraordinary series of enamels by Léonard Limosin, enameller to the king in the middle of the XVIth century. They are not presented at the musée de la Renaissance, accompanied by drawings and illuminated manuscripts.

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