Art Of The Day Weekly
#375 - from 12 February 2015 to 18 February 2015
Gerrit von Honthorst, Supper with a Lute-Player, oil on canvas, Uffizi, Florence.
IN THE AIR
Honthorst, the poet of the night
FLORENCE – Now this is a true enigma in the history of art. Dutch artist Honthorst was a favorite of the Florentine elite. The ambassador to Rome and Duc Cosimo II of Medici himself collected his works. In spite of the in depth studies carried out on this heir of Caravaggio a native of Utrecht, who spent over ten years in Rome, no one knows if he ever stayed or even went to Florence. One can only hope that this unique exhibition of unique works by a rather rare painter – no more than 40 works listed during his Roman period – may give us new clues. Of course there will be his “Italian” works, divided between altar pieces and genre paintings, all bathed in a night luminosity that gave him the name of “Gerard of the Nights”. But there are also his first paintings from Utrecht and the ones he painted upon his return. His palette became lighter but ot so his objective, as can be seen in his Happy Violinist.
• Gherardo delle Notti, quadri bizzarrissimi e cene allegre at the Uffizzi, from 10 February to 24 May 2015.
EXHIBITIONS
Aloïse Corbaz, Où vas-tu Seigneur Dieu, ca 1958–1960. Gift of Jacqueline Porret-Forel in 2001. LaM – Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Villeneuve d’Ascq. Photo : C. Dubart. © Fondation Aloïse, 2015.
Aloise, Swiss art brut
VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ – As the governess at the age of 25 at the home of the chaplain of Germany’s Emperor William II she could have lost her soul in the imperial grandeur and the illusions of an impressive worldly life. But Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964) gave a totally different turn to her life when she plunged into the world of images, and not in a very conventional manner. Upon her return to Lausanne at the beginning of World War I, when her family noticed signs of mental confusion, they had her interned in an insane asylum. She would spend the next fifty years there, locked up and dedicated her time to writing and to painting on paper she retrieved and she created her own personal universe peopled with characters like Sissi or Napoleon, inspired by visions of David or Ingres. The Cloisonné de théâtre, one of her masterpieces, is 14 meters long. For its preservation it may only be unrolled by 3-metre sections. For this retrospective of some two hundred works, it will finally be presented in its totality.
• Aloïse Corbaz en constellations at the LaM, from 14 February to 10 May 2015.
Natalino Bentivoglio Scarpa, aka Cagnaccio di San Pietro, (Woman with a mirror, 1927, oil on canvas, 80 x 59.5 cm. Verona, collezione della Fondazione Cariverona, Italy © Collezione della Fondazione Cariverona, Italy
Wash up!
PARIS - The Gauls invented soap but the French never brush their teeth. All cliches – whether real or not – on the intimate aspect can stick forever on a people. The practices linked to washing our bodies have greatly varied over the centuries. Can one imagine what a revolution was caused throughout Europe when running water entered homes and put an end to the bathtub scenes that Degas and Bonnard fancied so? This presentation studies that approach by going all the way back to the tapestries of the Renaissance and the school of Fontainebleau, without omitting Boucher nor Toulouse-Lautrec, up to the unexpected Léger and Kupka. It has the aaudacity to close with another genre, photographs by Erwin Blumenfeld or Betttina Rheims showing model Karen Mulder in a Chanel bra, her face covered with repairing cream.
• La toilette, naissance de l’intime at the musée Marmottan Monet, from 12 February to 5 July 2015.
These exhibitions also open this week
Sargent's friends
LONDON - A mondane painter trained in Paris and sought after by all the high society of his time, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) left some unforgettable portraits of his contemporaries. Nearly 70 are presented here - actors, aristocrats as well as a gynecologist, Dr Pozzi, in a remarkable red housecoat.
• Sargent, Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery, from 12 February to 25 May 2015.
Dufy's colours
MADRID - As the good Fauve painter that he was, Dufy was also a top colourist. The exhibition, with a beautiful selection from great museums all over the world, tries nevertheless to put foward his work's intimate aspect. We will therefore admire more relaxing landscapes and a series of engravings, focused in particular on Apollinaire's Bestiaire mondain.
• Raoul Dufy at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, from 17 February to 17 May 2015.
Klimt's golds
PARIS - He is one of the most loved artists in the world. The voyage of the collection of the Viennese Belvedere Museum to Paris is a true event, including the Beethoven Frieze or Judith I, which was shown at the Biennale of Venice in 1910. But the artist is placed in the wider context of the Secession movement, which left an important mark on decorative arts.
• Au temps de Klimt, la Sécession à Vienne at the Pinacothèque, from 12 February to 21 June 2015.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Albert Bitran,
Bitran, a summer of '51
It is not common to have an uninterrupted itinerary of exhibitions since 1951. But it is the case of Albert Bitran. Born in Istanbul in 1931, he arrived in Paris to study architecture but soon turned towards painting, while maintaining his compositions of straight lines, of orthogonalitiy, which let his initial training seep through. Following his first personal exhibition at galerie Arnaud in 1951, in 1954 he entered the workshop of the goddess of abstraction, Denise René, introduced by Henri-Pierre Roché, the cultivated socialite, speaking many languages, a friend of Duchamp's and the author of Jules et Jim. Bitran worked by cycles (the Doubles, the Arcades), and remained faithful to "temperated" abstraction, having taken a certain distance in regard to his rational geometry. A lover of grey and black he also slid towards brutal eruptions in red, blue, or yellow, like little bonfires in a bland daily life.
• The Convergences gallery (2, rue des Coutures Saint-Gervais, 75003 Paris) presents oils on paper by Albert Bitran, from 5 February to 5 March 2015.
BOOKS
Loti at home
On this his centenial year,there will surely be a lot of talk around Pierre Loti (1850-1923). But not for the right reasons. Indeed the author condoned Turkey's policy after the massacre of the Armenians in 1915. Though he mentions it in the epilogue, the author would not want this mistake to cover Loti's work, and in particular his most personal, his home. A world traveler, great lover, Loti, whose real name was Julien Viaud set up in his family home at Rochefort, the perfect reflection of his adventure filled existence and his passions. What about beautiful Aziyadé, bewitched him at Salonica in 1878? She is the muse of the Oriental Fair with its materials, its rugs and even its mosque. The young woman from Nagasaki, the daughter of a temple's gardian? She orders the Japanese pagoda. And things go on in the same manner, in the Renaissance room whether with its ceiling with and its tapestries, the blue room, the Gothic dining room or even the Chinese rooom, a part of its contents sold by Loti's son at an auction back in 1928. More than the house's topography, this is a very personal walk through Loti's imagination.
• Pierre Loti à Rochefort, by Olivier Delahaye, Belin, 2014, 112 p., €12
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
IN BRIEF
BASEL - As a retrospective on Gauguin opens at the fondation Beyeler, different sources have confirmed the sale of a painting by the artist from 1892, Nafea Faa Ipoipo, shown since 1946 at the Kunstumuseum, by its owners. The buyer it seems is the Doha museum in Qatar, for an amount near $300 million.
BREMEN - The Kunsthalle presents since 7 February a retrospective of Emile Bernard. It has announced it has found inits funds, an unknown portrait of Van Gogh done by Emile Bernard. It will be presented on 31 March 2015, the Dutch painter's birthday.
LILLE - The 8th edition of Art Up!, the modern and contemporary art fair, will be held from 12 to 15 February 2015.
MONS - Following the disassembly of the structure called Arne Quinze for safety reasons, the board of administration of Mons 2015 announced a new version would be set up in the summer of 2015.