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Art Of The Day Weekly

#359 - from 9 October 2014 to 15 October 2014

IN THE AIR

Truffaut, a truly human artist

PARIS – François Truffaut was a school dunce saved by his passion, a relentless columnist of love, the creator of a fresco of the Sixties, French style. He was all of these at the same time but it is his human aspect that most transcends from this retrospective dedicated to him at the French Cinémathèque. From the beginning, with the tender gesture with which he replaces the beautiful face of Jacqueline Bisset, the tone is set. His schoolboy notebooks in which he wrote down all the plays he saw, the photo of his gang of friends who organized the festival of the damned film in Biarritz in 1949, the shy letter of Jean-Pierre Léaud asking him to give him the opportunity of an audition, a touching telegram from Hitchcock. The exhibition comes to life through these documents taken from archives more than due to the movie excerpts. All this testimonials casually remind us that Truffaut was also an actor, in particular in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a unique movie critic – his Hitchcock remains a world reference.
François Truffaut at the French Cinémathèque, from 8 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. Catalogue Flammarion (with a great number of testimonies from persons close to him, never published before), 240 p., €35.

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EXHIBITIONS


Saint Louis. Normandy or Île-de-France, circa 1305- 1310. stone, H. 1.57; l. 0.443; Depth 0.36 m. Mainneville, église Saint-Pierre. © RMN-Grand Palais (Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du patrimoine/Jean Gourbeix.

Saint Louis, return to a myth

PARIS – He is the only French King to have been canonized. But the influence of Saint Louis is not limited to religion and to his two crusades (he died during the second one in Tunis in 1270). He centralized the country, was an able administrator and rendered justice, he was also a builder: we owe him in particular the Sainte-Chapelle to house the crown of thorns he had bougt from Baudouin II of Constantinople, as well as the abbey of Royaumont and the city of Aigues-Mortes. To celebrate the eighth centenial of the birth of this king of justice the Conciergerie has brought together stained glass windows, manuscript- among them the one of Summa contra Gentiles by saint Thomas Aquinas), relics, sculptures, and the whole outfit of the myth, in particular the troubadour paintings from the more recent centuries.
Saint Louis at the Conciergerie, from 8 October 2014 to 11 January 2015.

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Edgar Degas, La classe de ballet, circa 1880, oil on canvas, 82.2 x 76.8 cm, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art © Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Durand-Ruel, the N°1 impressionist

PARIS – As we recently reminded you in the column dedicated to his memories, he was the emblematic dealer of the impressionists. But Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was more than an art dealer. The paintings gathered here, most of them on loan from American museums or from private collections – masterpieces by Monet, Pissarro, Manet, Degas – are a true museum on their own (just like during the famous retrospective at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905, where he lent one third of the 300 paintings). What surprises as much as the quality of the works is the authentic passion Durand-Ruel demonstrated. Renoir's Jeune Fille endormie? Manet's Danseuse? Rousseau's Vue du Mont-Blanc? He bought back all of these works he had previously sold, even late and at a high price, for his personal collection.
• i>Paul Durand-Ruel, le pari de l’impressionnisme at the musée du Luxembourg, from 9 October 2014 to 8 February 2015.

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Ana Rajcevic, Animal - The Other Side of Evolution, 2012. Photo: Woland.

The fashion of tomorrow

ROTTERDAM – Among the fashion designers exposed, Iris van Herpen is probably the one that best symbolises the fashion of the future with her recourse to a great variety of materials, which allow her to create true sculptures one can carry. A real armada of international talents is brought together, including Europeans (Polish Olek, Serbian Ana Rajcevic), Asians (the Chinese of Digest Design) or Latin American artists (Peruvian Lucia Cuba) to draw up an inventory. New technologies, footpaths traced between the arts, commercial and political questions: fashion leads to everything.
The Future of Fashion is Now at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, from 11 October 2014 to 18 January 2015.

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AUCTIONS


Lot 120: A rare ivory okimono of four skeletons playing dominoes. Signed on an ivory tablet shutaro and sealed, Meiji Period (late 19th century). Estimate : £20,000-30,000.

Japan, the asobi

LONDON – The Japanese are known for being serious people. But they have a mischievous aspect as well. This is shown by the themed auction at Christie’s that bridges the gap in time, covering more than two millenia through ordinary and extraordinary objects They are all linked by a light-hearted spirit we could assimilate to the French "esprit" of the 18th century. The ceramic horse from the 7th century and the articulated, steel dragon from the 18th century, these lacquer boxes and tea boxes, the silk paintings up to the production of gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga, who in 1955 fought in white pants against a pile of mud. They all belong to the same asobi vision of the world. The estimates are as varied as the lots: l’asobi always has the same value, but the price changes.
Asobi at Christie’s South Kensington, 15 October 2014.

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ARTISTS OF THE WEEK


Mary Reid Kelley's hat. Photo RP.

My museum in a hat

PARIS - In 1962, Robert Filliou asked his artist friends to imagine a Galerie légitime, a legitimate gallery or sort of portable museum that could fit in a bowler hat. Half a century later, curator Raphaël Cuir suggested the same exercise to artists from the world over. A few stars have been called in, such as Yoko Ono, Orlan and Ben, who plays the role of a living memory as he was already part of the founding experiment. But the exhibit rests in particular on young creators already known, such as Frank Scurti or Jeanne Susplugas, or to be discovered like American artist Tracey Snelling, who recreated the Route 66 atmosphere with a motel and neon lights, or Yasmin Jahan Nupur, from Bangladesh, who turned to traditional embroidery to talk of globalization. This allegory of nomadism had to be mobile: architects Jakob+MacFarlane created for the scenography a dismountable building game based on pyramids, that lends itself to wanderings.
Chapeaux, un hommage à Robert Filliou at la Vitrine, from 3 October to 21 November 2014.

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OPENINGS OF THE WEEK

BOOKS

In the eyes of Michel Serres

Michel Serres (born in 1930) has an eclectic and encyclopedic mind. This member of the Académie française loves, above everything else, to shake given ideas out of people's heads. Following the astounding success of Petite Poucette with over 220,000 copies (his thoughts on the young generations and new technologies), in his last book he attacks images. Based on an unexpected iconography – combining an anamorphosis by Jules Romain, a photo of the monolith from Ayers Rock in Australia or place de la Concorde seen from the perspective of a falcon – the work asks a question which we should ask ourselves more often: what does seing mean? With the collaboration of Dassault Systèmes, the author demonstrates the extraordinary progress of virtual technologies (for example to explore the grotto of Lascaux without going there). In an aside, during the conference comparing the academic "performances" of the blind and the deaf-mute, Michel Serres reached a disquieting conclusion for our hyper-visual world: as attractive as it may be, an image seems to vehiculate less information than sound.
Yeux, by Michel Serres, éditions du Pommier, 2014, 216 p., €39.

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