Art Of The Day Weekly
#294 - from 14 March 2013 to 20 March 2013
Algaculture © Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta (Biennale internationale de design de Saint-Etienne)
IN THE AIR
Focus on tomorrow's design
SAINT-ETIENNE – The Biennale internationale du design, in its 8th edition, will last no less than three weeks and include 61 exhibitions. It shifted from November to March and in doing so has gained weight and deepens its roots in the local territory. Even though the link with the mythical company Manufacture d’armes et de cycles (Manufrance), of which each French family had a catalogue, remains tenuous… Many events – conferences, projections, itineraries through the town, a forum on Design and Innovation directed by the economist Jeremy Rifkin – accompany this event. It is federated under a rather obscure theme, “Empathy or the relation to the other”, it draws advantages from its synergy with the superior school of art and design. In the Labs, the public will be able to test innovating products (the new Krups electric coffee pots and order, at Legrand, the lighting for the home by the detection of the movement of the residents). In “Demain, c’est aujourd’hui” (Tomorrow is today), visitors will be initiated to products that are in the making while “Dream Team” details the research paths of the European schools of design.
• Biennale internationale de design in various venues, from 14 to 31 March 2013.
EXHIBITIONS
Pieter van der Werff (1665-1722), Peter I, 1697-1700, Oil on canvas, 56 х 49,5 © State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Peter the Great, the return to The Netherlands
AMSTERDAM - He saw the sea for the first time a the age of twenty, at Arkhangelsk, and yet he was the one who turned Russia into a naval power. Peter the Great (1672-1725) is considered as the tsar who opened and modernized his country. It is only logical that a large exhibition be dedicated to him in Amsterdam, the fundamental phase of his Great Embassy in 1697, his impressive trip for his studies in Europe. Peter learned to speak Dutch when he was young and the city of canals was a first inspiration for the foundation of Saint-Petersburg. He had a great number of correspondents – antique dealers (Peter owned a Rembrandt and his famous cabinet de curiosités owes a lot to his local purchases) or taxidermists (the famous naturalist Nicolas Bidloo was asked to embalm his dear dog Lisetta). In the antenna of the Hermitage that opened in 2009, paintings, clothes, different objects and his death mask retrace the sovereign’s life. He also had a dark side which is well illustrated in the torture and death of Czarevich Alexis, accused of plotting against him.
• Peter the Great at the Hermitage Amsterdam, from 9 March to 13 September 2013
These exhibitions have just opened…
Antonioni's artistic soul
FERRARA - Antonioni e le arti, at Palazzo dei Diamanti, shows the relationship the director (1912-2007) had with painting, photography and literature through personal objects, paintings and correspondence (with Barthes, Morandi or Tarkovsky). From 10 March to 9 June 2013.
Cordial understanding between London and Russia
LONDON - Treasures of the Royal Courts, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, answers the exhibition at the Hermitage Amsterdam. Based on treasures from the British Court and that of the Czars, it describes the relations between the two countries over three centuries. From 9 March to 14 July 2013.
The dark side of Romanticism
PARIS – Painting with a touch of darkness, of mystery, of the unknown. Such is the exhibition L’ange du bizarre ou le romantisme noir at the musée d’Orsay, that groups together works by artists such as Goya, Füssli or Blake. From 5 March to 9 June 2013.
AUCTIONS
Pablo Picasso, Fish dish, Terre de faïence platter, 1952, a unique variant, dated 6.6.52, partially glazed and painted white, blue, green, black and beige, with the Madoura and Empreinte Originale de Picasso stamps. Diameter: 418mm; 16 1/2 in. Courtesy Sotheby's.
Picasso, for drinking and for eating
LONDON – The only way of having the work of a great artist at an affordable price is by having a multiple, of course… For most artists, this means an engraving. With Picasso, we can aim for another register, ceramics. As of 1946, at an age when others retire –he was 65 years old-, he indeed launched himself into a new production, at the Madoura workshop in Vallauris, together with the Ramié couple. It was there as a matter of fact that he met Jacqueline Roques, who was to be his last companion. With the aim of producing a series of dishes in which one could eat, he multiplied faces, animals -owls, bulls, fish or grasshoppers - mythological figures as well, on dishes, pitchers, plates. Either in simple reliefs printed with his finger, in two tones or on the contrary, in bright colors. For a fish service dish from, of which there are 300 copies, estimates start around 1000 £ (lot 2). On the other hand, as soon as the style becomes “unique”, the price must be multiplied by twenty, like in the case of this fish dish (lot 32) from 1952, at 25 000 £.
• Important Ceramics by Pablo Picasso at Sotheby’s London, 19 March 2013.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Karl Haendel, Down Box, pencil on paper, 261,6 x 396,2 cm. Courtesy galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris.
Haendel, extra-large drawings
Here is an artist who feels that drawing is not the art of the poor, to be dug out in parallel fairs by those who have limited means… To prove it, Karl Handel, a thirty odd old artist born in 1976 in New York, presents a huge, nearly 4 meter long drawing, of American football players in full action. It took him months of work, starting with projected enlargements, to complete this Down Box. It is not a simple study: for Haendel drawing is an end to itself, the product of digesting, according to a very personal method, the large headlines of the US press for two years. How Ready Are We for Bioterrorism ? Seeing Lincoln as a C.E.O, Black Women and Fat or The Cost of Football Glory. The answer is given in graphite pencil over white paper …
• Karl Haendel is presented at the galerie Yvon Lambert (108 rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris) from 15 March to 20 April 2013.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
BOOKS
Another way of looking at hospitals
One usually needs to be forced to visit hospitals. This is a shame for they represent an extraordinary architectural and historic heritage, and this book required no less than 600 pages to give us a first glimpse! One looks with interest at the works of the 20th century, the birth of the bloc-hospital and the huge American style buildings such as the Beaujon hospital in Clichy, with its flights of metallic staircases, or the colossal hôpital Nord in Marseille. But it is the past that fascinates us: how many hôtels-Dieu, how many sick pavilions, leper houses, asylums, for the insane and other pavilions for quarantine were built! Some are true works of art from the Great Century or from the period of the Lumières, unknown to the public at large. The hôpital du Saint-Esprit in Provins, that of Notre-Dame des Fontenilles in Tonnerre, more beautiful than a cathedral, the hôpital de la Charité in Langres… The Hôpital de la Marine in Rochefort has an elegant chapel and the hôtel-Dieu in Lyon, with its façade reflected in the Rhône river, is coiffed with an unbelievable vault. A well-hidden treasure!
• L'hôpital en France, histoire et architecture, Cahiers du patrimoine, éditions LieuxDits, 2012; 592 p., €44.
IN BRIEF
LONDON – Pablo Picasso's painting, Child with a Dove, dated from 1901, one of the first works of his blue period, will leave Great Britain where it has been kept since 1928 once the exhibition it is in, "Becoming Picasso" at the Courtauld Gallery ends on 26 May. The fund raiser organized to prevent its sale to a foreign buyer did not succeed.
LONDON – An anonymous painting at the Bowes Museum has been attributed to Van Dyck following its online presentation on the website of the BBC which runs the census of all the works kept in English public collections.
MAASTRICHT – The TEFAF antiques fair will be held from 15 to 24 March 2013 and will host a section of arts of Islam for the first time.
PARIS – From 16 to 24 March 2013, the "Journées marteau" (Hammer days), at the hôtel-Drouot and in auction houses throughout France, will offer an initiation to the world of auctions.