Art Of The Day Weekly
#365 - from 20 November 2014 to 26 November 2014
Cité Miroir, Liège © Dominique Houcmant - Goldo
IN THE AIR
Letter from Liège: welcome to the swimming-pool
LIÈGE - A superb Art Deco pool was transformed into a museum in Roubaix, intelligently keeping its name (La Piscine), therefore its history. Here is a second one to add to the list, in Liège (Belgium). It is from a slightly later period and symbolizes that spirit of resistance of Liège, for which the French in 1914, in recognition for the local heroism that slowed down the Kaiser’s troops, renamed the famous “Viennese coffee” the “café liégeois”. The pool was imagined in 1936 by municipal councillor Georges Truffaut (1901-1942) , who was to be a hero in the war. The pool was inaugurated in 1939 (with a bomb shelter), and welcomed millions of users among which native son Simenon. It was decommissioned in 2000 and threatened with being destroyed. An association, Les Territoires de la Mémoire, with a petition signed by 200,000 persons, the equivalent of the town’s population, saved it. It has been restored in a sober manner for a budget of €20 million. After being inaugurated in January 2014, its first exhibition (see here-under) cheekily concerns a bleak episode of the year 1939.
• The former Bains et Thermes de la Sauvenière, by architect Georges Dedoyard, were renamed La Cité Miroir.
EXHIBITIONS
Paul Gauguin, Le sorcier d'Hiva Oa or Le Marquisien à la cape rouge, 1902 © © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège (Bal) © Ville de Liège.
When Hitler sold degenerate art
LIÈGE – Art historian Jean-Patrick Duchesne carried out an investigation for over a decade to reconstruct a unique auction that took place at the Grand Hôtel de Lucerne, in Switzerland, on 30 June 1939. There was nothing innocent about it. The Nazi leaders, after emptying their museums from all “degenerate” art and lighting a huge fire in the Fire station of Berlin, in March 1939, wanted to explore a new path. Couldn’t this despised art bring in some money and finance the war effort? The 125 works selected, all from museums and not from spoliations, presented a wide array of refused works, something of an art history. Gauguin, Van Gogh, Chagall, Ensor, Marie Laurencin, Picasso, Kokoschka. Jews, mentally disabled, homosexuals, decadent, reckless and feminist artists. A local learned man, Jules Bosmant, the future director of the museum of Beaux-Arts, got wind of the auction, and moved heaven and earth to gather 5 million Belgian Francs. This allowed the city to buy nine masterpieces, though the most sought after, a Van Gogh, was bought under their nose by the Fogg Art Museum from Harvard. The nine masterpieces are presented in a sort of chiaro-oscuro lighting, (among them The Soler Family by Picasso) and are accompanied by 17 other paintings and sculptures that were sold at the same auction and then scattered in other collections through the world.
• L’art dégénéré selon Hitler, la vente de Lucerne, 1939 at the Cité Miroir, from 17 October 2014 to 29 March 2015.
• The catalogue (Collections historiques de l’Université de Liège, 232 p.) lists the 125 works of the auction and their respective destinies.
Paul Signac, Le Château de Comblat, BAL Collection © Ville de Liège.
Paris in the summer
LIÈGE – The buyers at the auction in Lucerne, concerned not to favour speculation, which would have been good for the Reich’s matters and legitimized its policy, made a tacit decision not to up the ante. At the end of the day, the delegation from Liège, already lucky to hold nine major works, still had a much better treasure: they had only spent less than 20% of the 5 million they had! A part of the money was spent during a visit by the municipal councillors Buisseret, Gilbart and Ochs to Paris galleries and artists. They came back with nine other valuable paintings, among which a Nu by Signac, a Violoniste by Kees van Dongen and Coquillages by Ensor. And there was still money to be spent! But it was August 1st, 1939. A month later, Hitler would invade Poland.
• Les achats de Paris at the musée des Beaux-Arts of Liège, from 17 October 2014 to 29 March 2015.
Figurehead, 19th c., wood, mother-parl, 20 x 8,7 x 12,2 cm. © Musée du quai Branly, photo Claude Germain.
The Salomon Islands, so far
PARIS – When a Spanish navigator from the 16th century, Alvaro de Mendaña, was dazzled by the reflection of huge gold nuggets, he was convinced he had reached the kingdom of Salomon. They were only pyrite but this far-away archipelago in Oceania had found its definite name. Even though this group of islands has a certain importance in the French collective imagination since La Pérouse disappeared there in 1785, the land with eighty languages is badly known. How does the spirit of the elders, the ancestors, the vehicle of power or the “mana”, embody the ritual objects such as reliquaries or breastplates? How is a currency exchanged (complex objects in feathers and tortoise shell)? How important is the sea that gives birth to canoes and finely sculpted figures on the bow of boats? A few international loans and above all, the museum’s rich collection (a donation from Roland Bonaparte, the objects from the famous Korrigane expedition in 1934-36, etc.) allow the museum to answer these questions.
• L’éclat des ombres, l’art en noir et blanc des îles Salomon at the musée du quai Branly, from 18 November 2014 to 1 February 2015.
AUCTIONS
Lot n° 81, Restif de la Bretonne, La Découverte australe Par un Homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français Nouvelle très-philosophique: Suivie de la Lettre d'un Singe, &ca. Leipzig, Et se trouve à Paris, s.d. [1781]. Estimate :€ 800-1000.
Carrière's passion
PARIS - Jean-Claude Carrière (born in 1931) was a script writer for some of Buñuel’s unforgettable movies (Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie), Schlöndorff’s (The Drum ), Deray (La Piscine); he is a writer and a great traveler. Does his personal library reflect his tastes? Record-breaking auctions are not always as interesting as those that reflect the secret garden of a cultivated person. The 307 lots, all rather accessible (except for a 1888 edition of Illuminations by Rimbaud, estimated at €6000) underscore his widely spanned curiosity. Next to the burlesque lampoons on Mazarin in 1649, this inventive poetry at the time of la Fronde (€600), or a 1792 edition of Libertin de qualité by Mirabeau, are the Tragiques by Agrippa d’Aubigné, the Eserciti spirituali by Ignace de Loyola (in Italian), works by Quevedo (in Spanish) and beautiful editions of Alfred Jarry. A very practical guide on how to build a library with a real personality.
• Bibliothèque Jean-Claude Carrière on 21 November 2014 at hôtel Drouot (SVV Binoche Giquello).
BOOKS
The world according to Spies
He went through the last half of the 20th century meeting an unfanthomal number of people. He knew Picasso and drew up the catalogue raisonné of his sculpture. He knew Max Ernst ans was one of the specialists of his art. These were the most important. But Werner Spies, who was the director of the National Museum of modern Art of the Centre Pompidou, and who we can thank for the famous exhibition Paris - Berlin in 1978, holds many other surprises. He tells us about them in his large volume of his Mémoires. But not only in the field of art. This native from Tübingen (born in 1937) also befriended Audiberti and Samuel Beckett as well as Jérôme Lindon (from the Editions de Minuit), Rossellini or Peter Handke. One reads this like a "Who's Who", very emblematic of a time when Europe was open and cosmopolitan, which the return of nationalisms could hinder.
• Les chances de ma vie. Mémoires par Werner Spies, Gallimard, 2014, 624 p. €25.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
IN BRIEF
BASEL - The Basel Ancient Art Fair is being held from 21 to 26 November 2014
BERLIN – The German government confirmed on 14 November 2014 the construction of a new Museum of Modern Art, to open in 2021.
CAMBRIDGE (USA) - The three Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Arthur M. Sackler and Busch-Reisinger Museums), united under a new glass and steel roof by architect Renzo Piano, reopened on 17 November 2014.
PARIS – The French architectural prize L’Equerre d’Argent has been awarded on 17 November 2014 to the Cité des métiers Hermès in Pantin, designed by RDAI architects.
PARIS – The musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, suspected of fraud, was searched on 18 November 2014 by the Financial Fraud squad.