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Art Of The Day Weekly

#297 - from 4 April 2013 to 10 April 2013


Jean-Luc Martinez (c) Musée du Louvre 2013/Antoine Mongodin

IN THE AIR

A new head for the Louvre

Once it was known that Henri Loyrette would not seek to succeed himself at the Louvre, it took four months to find his successor. This period is strangely identical to that of the Cahuzac affair, and its dragging on undoubtedly pushed the executive branch not ot take any risks. Outsiders are no longer in vogue, consequently the new boss at the Louvre, Jean Luc Martinez, 49 years old, was named on 3 April 2013, and is from inside the institution. He was director of the department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities and was also known for his scientific knwoledge and his wish to bring in new publics to the museum, having the experience of teaching in poor suburbs with a cultural vaccum. Obviously the challenge to pick up after twelve years of Loyrette pesidency is no easy task. First he will have to succeed the transplant to Lens which should be easy for Jean Luc Martinez who was in charge of the first permanent exhibit, consolidate the grafted museum in Abu Dhabi where the first exhibition, Birth of a Museum, is to open on 22 April and think over the reception of the museum which has now welcomed over 10 million annual visitors. In this period of economic slowdown, the new leader will have to prove his talents as a fundraiser, which is now indispensable for the leaders of major cultural institutions, so that his museum may continue to demonstrate his number one quality, ambition.

EXHIBITIONS


Auguste Rodin, Coupe et buste. Plaster and antique ceramics, 23 x 25.7 x 18.5 cm. Coll. et © musée Rodin, Paris.

Rodin, a man of the Antiquity

He failed the entrance exam to the school of Fine Arts of Paris -Beaux Arts- three times and therefore never took the traditional training year in Italy which all the candidates to the Prize of Rome are entitled to. Yet Rodin -1840-1917 - was undoubtedly the artist of the second half of the XIXth century most attracted by antique art. The blame can be put on the Louvre. He spent endless days roaming the museum but for lack of means he was never able to do more than a few sketches on paper. This passion lived on though, and in a latter age he built an extraordinary personal collection in which tangras, ceramic bowls and busts unveiled in the diggings of his time all combined. The exhibition matches up these works for the public in a comprehensive manner in which mouldings of the Apollo of the Belvedere or of the Venus of Milo are placed side by side with authentic pieces such as the Warren head from Boston, the Diadumen from the British Museum or the Venus of Arles from the Louvre, next to works by Rodin himself. The cherry on the topping is the encounter between the Monument to Victor Hugo and the famous Laccoon. It was not conceivable to have the original from the Vatican but the impressive, three ton copy made for Louis XIV has left its gardens in Versailles to treat us.
Rodin, la lumière de l’antique at the Musée départemental Arles antique, from 6 April to 1 September 2013.

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These exhibitions also open this week...

Méliès, the man of 500 movies

BARCELONA – Five years after the retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, Georges Méliès, one of the pioneers of cinema, director and producer of 500 movies between 1896 and 1912, is a great success at the CaixaForum. From 5 April to 24 June 2013.

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The mystery of the Philippines

PARIS - Philippines, archipel des échanges, at the musée du quai Branly, is an immersion into the rich culture of a country with seven thousand islands and 100 million residents. From 9 April to 14 July 2013.

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Franco-German architectural ballet

STRASBURG – At the musée d’Art moderne et contemporain, Interférences, 1800-2000 studies the itinerary of French and German architectures along two centuries. From 30 March to 21 July 2013.

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AUCTIONS


Lot 356. Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Bécane. Poster. Ca 1894. Lithography. [595 x 810]. Estimate: €2200-2500.

Prints, a sure value during the crisis

It is not usual to have a work by Vuillard sell for €2500. In this case it does not concern some sensational discovery in someone's attic but rather a simple lithograph dedicated to Bécane a liquor much in vogue at the end of the XIXth century.The same goes for a Matisse, Jeune fille en robe fleurie et col en organdi. All depends on the place of the work of art in the artist's itinerary. For one same subject there can even be various samples. The quality of the print also matters and tis takes into account the brown spotting, the skinnings, the missing elements and the presence of margins or the type of paper. The number of copies also has an influence on the price. The auctionwill include works by Rembrandt, Callot, or Goya for a few hundred euros.For a very beautiful Gothic Arch by Piranese though, the price will be closer to €10 000. Obviously the market of prints has not experienced the inflation of contemporary art nor of historic avant-garde when they have been re-discovered, like art Deco in the 1970s. On the contrary, it attracts a motivated and knowledgable public, and is often the anti-chamber of good collections!
Estampes at Richelieu-Drouot on 5 April 2013 (Piasa)

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ARTIST OF THE WEEK

Geneviève Asse in the blue

This is a great lady of French art who is being exhibited in a great gallery … Geneviève Asse, born in 1923, is at Claude Bernard, the gallery that has been going strong since 1957 on rue des Beaux-Arts. It has hosted Giacometti, Bacon and Raymond Mason. The artist carries in her the memory of the XX century. She was an ambulance driver during Worl War II and participated in the evacuation of the concentration camp of Terezin, in Chekoslovakia. During the creative aftermath after the Liberation she knew Poliakoff, de Staël and even Samuel Beckett. It is with time that "informality" took over. For almost thirty years now she has painted practically only in blue-grey, the color of Brittany where she spends part of the year. She has an inkling for what are considered "minor" genres, or "applied", Geneviève Asse designed motifs for textile manufacturers, oil paintings on canvas, which prove her ever intensive activity.
• Geneviève Asse à la galerie Claude Bernard (7/9 rue des Beaux-Arts, 75006 Paris), from 4 April to 18 May 2103.

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• Not to be missed: one of the persons who discovered Geneviève Asse was textile industrialist Jean Bauret, who commissioned models from her in the forties. The exhibition "Ateliers Bauret / Un esprit de famille" at the galerie Baudoin-Lebon, open until 13 April 2013, shows the industrialist's artistic "descendants", especially his son Jean-François, a photographer born in 1932, who made various portraits of Geneviève Asse.

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OPENINGS OF THE WEEK

BOOKS

A Romanticism that is scary

The Romanticism that is familiar to us is rather reassuring, it shows melancolic men with their hair to the wind - like Chateaubriand by Girodet-, solitary characters in a beautiful natural setting, as with Friedrich for example. But there is another version, inhabited by frightening creatures such as ghosts or other monsters, in a natural setting that is poisonous and stiffling, where everything seems to be animated by a subterranean life. That is the version the musée d’Orsay is exploring in an exhibition that is open until 6 June 2013 and in the catalogue that accompanies it. We know its main interpreters, such as Böcklin, Füssli, Goya or Blake. But this event gives us the opportunity to (re) discover others who are not often exhibited, from the homeric fires by John Martin to the frightening processions by Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, the dead towns of Degouve de Nuncques to the vanities of Léon Frédéric. The descendants of this black, sinister Romanticism. This Romanticism, dark and Satanical, is traced all the way to Kubin, the Surrealists and even the movies between the two wars, such as the Nosferatu by Murnau and the Dracula by Tod Browning all worthy descendants!
L’ange du bizarre, le romantisme noir, collective work directed by Côme Fabre and Felix Krämer, Haje Cantz, 2013, 304 p., 45 €.

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