Home > ArtoftheDay Weekly > #303 - from 16 May 2013 to 22 May 2013

Art Of The Day Weekly

#303 - from 16 May 2013 to 22 May 2013


Paris Bordon, Venus, Flora, Mars and Cupid (Allegory). Oil on canvas, 108x129 cm, 1550s (exhibition Houghton Revisited). Courtesy The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

IN THE AIR

From Saint Petesburg with love

HOUGHTON HALL (Norfolk) –Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745) is seen as the creator of the modern function of Prime Minister. The leader of the Whigs, architect of English politics up to the unlucky war against Spain known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, he built a considerable fortune and a no-less famous collection of paintings. His son, writer Horace Walpole, kept it up but is grandson squandered it. Catherine the Great bought the most beautiful pieces, in a series of sales that have remained famous, and set them up in the Hermitage. More than two centuries after the hemorrhage, some sixty paintings, from Van Dyck to Rembrandt, are once again set up where they used to be at the end of the XVIIIth century at Houghton Hall, in Norfolk. The castle is still inhabited by a descendant of Robert Walpole, the Marquess of Cholmondeley.
Houghton Revisited – Masterpieces from the Hermitage at Houghton Hall, from 17 May to 29 September 2013.

Know more

EXHIBITIONS

Pretty font types

BERLIN – The beginning of the XXth century was a golden age for typography. The Bauhaus Archiv explores the German representatives of this universe the public at large knows little about.
On Type at Bauhaus Archiv, from 8 May to 5 August 2013.

Know more

What is it like in China?

KIEV – Presentations of Chinese contemporary art are held all over the world. The Pinchuk Art Centre presents its own, based on eleven artists from different generations, from Ai Weiwei to Zhao Zhao.
China China at the Pinchuk Art Centre, from 18 May to 6 October 2013

Know more


Peter Paul Rubens, Ann of Austria, Queen of France, oil on canvas, ca. 1622 © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Rubens, a European champion

LENS – Was Europe already a global society back in the XVIIth century? The popularity of an artist such as Rubens (1577-1640), whom all the courts of the continent fought over, seems to prove it. Some 170 works by the master, by his contemporaries and of those who influenced him – from a Roman Centaur ridden by Eros to the Great Cameo of France) decrypt the myth of a multi-disciplinary genius, a painter, diplomat and leader of a workshop with the dimensions of an industrial plant.
L’Europe de Rubens at the Louvre Lens, from 22 May to 23 September 2013.

Know more


Richard Wilson (1714-1782), The River Dee near Eaton Hall, London, probably exhibited 1760. Oil on canvas. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.

Treasures from the Barber Institute

LONDON – The Barber Institute is a major institution, founded in Birmingham in 1932 but it is hardly known beyond the English borders. The founders were a couple who made a fortune at the time in real estate, and they assembled an important art collection, including in particular works by Poussin, Manet and Turner. A selection is shown at the National Gallery and at the Wallace Collection, two museums it drew its inspiration from.

Treasures from the Barber Institute at the Wallace Collection, from 22 May to 1 September 2013

Know more

Birth of a collection at the National Gallery, from 22 May to 1 September 2013

Know more

The new look of transhumance

MARSEILLE – For centuries transhumance was at the heart of the European agriculture economy. The European cultural year pays homage to it in its own manner by organizing a modern version that brings together theatre, circus and street art.
Transhumance, from 17 May to 7 June 2013.

Know more


Margaret Bourke-White working on top of the Chrysler Building, New York, New York, 1935. © Photo : Oscar Graubner / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images

Vertigo way up high

METZ – How can we see the Earth from the sky? Artists did not wait for the successful campaign made by photographer Arthus-Bertrand to ask them selves the question. The members of the De Stijl movement wondered where to place the vanishing point. Contemporary artists use images from military drones in their videos. From Nadar to the recent low-angle images of North Korean parades by Andreas Gursky, including Delaunay diving on the Eiffel Tower or the aeropittura of the Italian Futurists, the exhibition shows how this thirst for a general vision marked the history of art.
Vues d’en haut at the Centre Pompidou Metz, from 17 May to 7 October 2013.

Know more

Hantaï, pleats please

PARIS – He was defined –and lconfined- as the king of the folded and wrinkled canvas. But Simon Hantaï -1922-2008-, a native from the German community in Hungary, was a lot more than that. He now enjoys, nearly forty years after the most recent one, an ambitious retrospective that covers his whole career, from his first years in Paris to the decade of the 1990.
Simon Hantaï at the Centre Pompidou, from 22 May to 2 September 2013

Know more

Paris, as seen by Cortazar

PARIS – He is one of the cult figures of South-American literature. Julio Cortazar, 1914-1984, lived for a long time in Paris and mostly made it the scene of his famous novel Marelle. The exhibition follows the foot prints of his stay in the capital.
Cortázar at the Institut Cervantes, from 14 May to 12 July 2013.

Know more

After Arte Povera

TORINO - The capital of the Piemonte region was once the crib of the Arte Povera movement. Will the young generations leave such a strong imprint on the landscape of contemporary art?
Greater Torino at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, from 8 May to 15 September 2013.

Know more

BOOKS

Music as played by Jacques Demy

Who recalls that he practically discovered Harrison Ford? Back in 1967 Jacques Demy, 1931-1990, had chosen him as his main actor for Model Shop, his only American film. Columbia Studios did not agree and imposed Gary Lockwood… This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the Cinémathèque française, nearly half a century after his Palme d’or in Cannes in 1964 for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. It is an impressionist portrait of a sensitive movie maker, who invented a new genre of musical comedy, both intellectual and nostalgic, from Demoiselles de Rochefort to Trois places pour le 26. It rolls out the thread of friendships and loyalties, including Agnès Varda, Costa-Gavras, Truffaut, Michel Legrand; it retraces his itinerary, from Nantes where he was born in a modest family with his father as a garage attendant and his mother as a hairdresser. Then Christian-Jaque noticed him, he went off to start his career and it was prematurely ended, at the age of 59 before he could finish his last project, Anouchka, the adaptation of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenine. We are interested in seeing the photographs and paintings Demy made - an aspect of his creativity few know about - in a style inspired by Ed Ruscha. But we can only regret not finding appended his detailed filmography that hardly includes some fifteen long feature films.
Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy, Skira Flammarion, 2013, 256 p., €45

Buy that book from Amazon

IN BRIEF

ATHENS - The Art Athina contemporary art fair will be held from 16 to 19 May 2013.

Know more

EUROPE - The night of museums, with various activities and museums opened until late, will be held throughout Europe on 18 May 2013.

Know more

MÂCON - The 3rd Biennale of naif art will be held from 15 May to 2 June 2013.

MONTROUGE - The 58th Salon d'art contemporain de Montrouge is being held from 16 May to 12 June 2013.

Know more

NEW YORK - The Cloisters, the mediéval section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, celebrates its 75th anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to the theme of the unicorn, starting on 15 May 2013.

Know more

OPENINGS OF THE WEEK