Art Of The Day Weekly
#304 - from 23 May 2013 to 29 May 2013
James Turrell, End Around: Ganzfeld, 2006, neon and fluorescent light (2007 installation at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the estate of Isabel B. Wilson in memory of Peter C. Marzio. © James Turrell / Photography © Florian Holzherr (exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).
IN THE AIR
Turrell, the light man
In Europe he is known for a few beautiful installations, during the Nuit blanche in Paris, at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London, or during the Biennale of Venice in 2011. The time has come for James Turrell to be consecrated. The California artist, who just turned 70, is the subject of three important retrospectives. All three will open less than a month after the previous one, in Los Angeles, New York and Jerusalem. It is not easy to exhibit this artist, for he has made light his main material, as it is inseparable from space. As the good Quaker that he is, faith, contemplation, rigor and silence are complementary virtues. His great masterpiece is still in the making, in the cone of the extinct Roden volcano, in Arizona, where spirals, tunnels and an observatory will reflect the natural light and the artificial light. While waiting for it to be finished, the pore fortunate may spend some time at the Estancia Colomé, near Salta, in Argentina. Founded by billionaire Donald Hess, it holds the only museum completely dedicated to Turrell’s work.
James Turrell: a Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), from 26 May 2013 to 6 April 2014.
• James Turrell: The Light Inside au Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), du 9 juin au 22 septembre 2013.
• James Turrell au Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), du 21 juin au 25 septembre 2013.
• The Roden Crater, in Arizona
• La Bodega Colomé in Argentina
THE OTHER ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Scultura da passeggio, performance à Londres en juin 2009. Courtesy Tate Modern, Londres.
Pistoletto, the wealth of poor art
He is pas the age of 80, and yet he is everywhere! Michelangelo Pistoletto, once the pope of Arte povera with Jannis Kounellis and Luciano Fabro, has just inaugurated an installation at the Louvre, symbolizing the new links the museum has with contemporary art. He who became famous with his mirrors and his stacks of rags and paper has also reedited a famous performance, Sculpture de promenade, the first one having been almost half a century earlier. Under the pouring rain during the Nuit des musées on 18 May, he had his mobile sculpture fly from the Monnaie building to the pyramid of the Louvre. Pistoletto has never been as active as he is these last few years, designing coffee cups for Illy, wine bottle labels, drawing up theories with his concept of a third Renaissance or as a cultural facilitator at the Cittadellarte, at home back in Biella, in the Piedmont region, Pistoletto seems more active than ever. At the height of a “youth crisis”, it seems the older generation is at the top of everything!
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Année 1, le paradis sur terre at the musée du Louvre until 2 September 2013.
THE EXHIBITIONS THAT OPEN
Pasolini Roma
BARCELONA - Pasolini spent exactly 25 years in Rome, from his arrival in 1950 until his death when he was murdered in the eternal city in November 1975 on the beach of Ostia. He was extremely productive during that quarter of a century, with movies -Accattone, Medea, the gospel according to Matthew, etc-, novels, among which Ragazzi di vit. And not only: he wrote articles with violent criticism of the consumer society. A friend of Moravia, of Elsa Morante, Anna Magnani and Maria Callas, he was one of the pillars of the Roman post-war intellectual life. This exhibition brings him back to life through documents, works and testimonials of his time.
• Pasolini Roma au CCCB, from 22 May to 15 September 2013.
Max Ernst, L’ange du foyer ou Le Triomphe du surréalisme, 1937, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm. Private collection © 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich
Max is back!
BASEL - Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of the giants of modern art. A dynamic artist, he has gone through all the avant-gardes of the XXth century, and has expressed himself with sand as well as with tree imprints, drawings and sculptures. Some 180 works, with a strong representation of his Dadaist period, offer a complete retrospective of this unique creator one cannot classify, who also appeared in the gossip columns with his ‘ménage à trois’ with Paul Eluard and Gala, who later went to Dali’s arms …
• Max Ernst at the fondation Beyeler, from 26 May to 8 September 2013.
Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, oil on canvas, 1884-85, 70x92 cm, The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
In the Kennedy suite
DALLAS - Art historian Olivier Meslay presents a very original and moving exhibition fifty years after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas. He has brought together the collection of works that had been put together in suite 850 of the Texas Hotel at Fort Worth, where the presidential couple spent their last night before the drama. The loans from local collectors included works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Eakins, Henry Moore, etc.
• Hotel Texas at the Dallas Museum of Art, from 26 May to 5 September 2013.
AUCTIONS
Atlan, a century later
PARIS– He was one of the accursed artists of the fifties, poor, free and who died very young as tradition should dictate … Many great and varied celebrities admired him, such as Clara Malraux, who drew up an admirable portrait of him in her Mémoires. Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) was close to the Cobra movement and classified in the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris even though he refused to be put into a category (‘when the grasshoppers arrive, it is best to go pitch your tent elsewhere. And fashion in painting does more harm than grasshoppers’ he wrote in 1959). His works were done on vulgar supports such as hardboard or jute cloth, but they include allusions to the Jewish Cabala, reminiscences of African art or stained glass artists. Many consider them abstract, others as figurative (‘signs’), Littele by little they acquired a reputation which the artist, often reduced to the greatest poverty, was never able to enjoy during his life. Twenty-two paintings, from his sister’s collection, are up for sale and could contribute to “confirm his rating” (Calypso II is estimated between €200 000 and €300 000). A materialistic proof of his consecration which he would most probably have hated …
• Atlan at the hôtel-Drouot le 27 May 2013 (SVV Rieunier & Associés)
BOOKS
Velickovic, three shades of black
He is from that generation of artists from former Yugoslavia who went through the Resistance and then the horrors of the war, Tito’s era, a new bloody conflict, the dismembering of the federation and its almost unavoidable corollary, voluntary exile. Velickovic was born in Belgrade in 1935, settled in Paris since 1966, and like his ex-compatriots Dado or Lauba, he fed his work with that heritage of violence, of nostalgia and of the loss of his roots. The large, 5 kg work shows his itinerary since 1954 and the repetition of certain themes, mutilated heads, decapitated men, rats, Hitchcock style crows, mounts of members, all in tones of black and red. This is not simple “Balkan cruelty” as says the author Alin Avila, but rather a plunge into the most disrupting and putrid aspect of man’s condition, in line with the work of Soutine, Bacon or Rustin.
• Vladimir Velickovic, texts by Bernard Noël and Alin Avila, Gourcuff-Gradenigo publishing home and galerie Samantha Sellem, 2013, €120
IN BRIEF
ANGLET - The 5th Biennale of contemporary art of Anglet (5é Biennale d'art contemporain) will be held from 24 May to 1 September 2013.
CHAUMONT-EN-CHAMPAGNE - The 25th edition of the International poster and graphic art poster (Festival international de l'affiche et du graphisme) will be held from 25 May to 9 June 2013.
HONG KONG - The new fair of modern and contemporary art Art Basel Hong Kong will be held from 23 to 26 May 2013.
NEW YORK - The Metropolitan Museum's New European painting galleries (1250-1800) open on 23 May 2013.
NEW YORK - Christie's has set a new record by selling $495 Million worth of works of art during one sole auction of contemporary art on 15 May 2013.
PARIS - Some 65 galleries in the district will take part in the 2013-14 edition of Aer Saint-Germain-des-Près by presenting simultaneous exhibitions on the theme 'Regards du collectionneur' (The eye of the collector).
PARIS - The event Hospitalités, including the venues of contemporay art in the Ile de France region, will be held from 25 May to 6 July 2013 and offers a new mapping of contemporary creation to be discovered during 'déplacements à vivre ou à imaginer' (mobility to experience or imagine).
TOULOUSE - The Festival international d'art of Toulouse (former 'Printemps de Toulouse' -The Toulouse spring-) will be held from 24 May to 23 June 2013 with a multi-disciplinary program.
