Art Of The Day Weekly
#384 - from 16 April 2015 to 22 April 2015
Wim Wenders, Wyeth Landscape, 2000, C-Print, 124 x 228 cm, © Wim Wenders / Courtesy Blain | Southern
IN THE AIR
The world according to Wim Wenders
DUSSELDORF – Movie makers are now exhibited in museums! Following Antonioni last week, we now have Wim Wenders as the subject of a major exhibition. Thanks to his latest work currently on the screens Sel de la terre (The Salt of the Earth), his biography of Sebastião Salgado, we know he loves to travel and to feel disconnected from his reality. Everyone remembers Paris Texas and his very personal vision of Lisbon? He waited though until he turned 70 years old to unveil his life-long passion –photography – in his native city of Dusseldorf. After been rejected from the Fine Arts studies he aimed for in 1967, this lover of painting turned as a last resource to the new movie school in Munich. The rest is history. But throughout those years of movie making the director never renounced to his first love. Throughout his movie wanderings between Palermo, Armenia, the large American Plains or the outskirts of Berlin, he never ceased to take photographs (first in black and white, the in color) of landscapes. They all exude a silent, timeless atmosphere, a sort of disquieting strangeness.
• Wim Wenders. Landscapes. Photographs at the Kunstpalast, from 18 April to 16 August 2015.
EXHIBITIONS
Lyonel FEININGER (1871-1956), Cathedral [large painting] (Kathedrale [grosser Stock]), 1919, engraved wood, 30.8 x 19.1 cm. Frontispice of the programme at the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919. Private collection. © Maurice Aeschimann — © ADAGP, Paris, 2015
Feininger, the cosmopolitan avant-garde
LE HAVRE – He is probably less known in France than his son, photographer Andreas. Yet, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) is one of the great names of modern art and his longevity, his travels, his friendships allowed him to take part in the main avant-gardes. A caricaturist at the end of the XIXth century, close to the Fauvist and then the Secession, Die Brücke, he was then one of the pillars of the Bauhaus. A man of two cultures –German and American – he went back to his native country when Nazism started to point its ugly nose, and there too succeeded. This exhibition, based on on single collection, shows in particular his talent as a drawer and engraver with his recurrent motifs: the city (and his High Houses ), the sail boats and ports, and his very specific sense of geometric synthesis.
• Lyonel Feininger, l’arpenteur du monde at the musée d’Art moderne André-Malraux, from 18 April to 31 August 2015.
Adolfo Wildt, Carattere fiero–Anima gentile, 1912, partially gilded marble, 38x57x37 cm. Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro 2015 © Photo Archive – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
The Wildt mystery
PARIS – He was celebrated three years ago in a beautiful exhibition in Forli, Mussolini’s town. The relationship he entertained with the Duce (of whom he made a famous bust) weighed on his reputation. Adolfo Wildt (1868-1931) was quite forgotten in Italy, and even more so in France. By recently buying one of his works, the bronze sculpture Vir temporis acti, and by prepring this retrospective at the Orangerie museum, the musée d’Orsay sheds light on this strange, susceptible and solitary artist, who carries out a fusion between the virtuosity of the Renaissance (he actually had a German sponsor for nearly a quarter of a century, who was as faithful as those of Michelangelo or Raphael), Symbolism and Expressionism. His tortured characters with exaggerated muscles stand halfway between the Apollo of the Belvedere and the grinning busts of Messerschmitt.
• Adolfo Wildt, le dernier symboliste at the musée de l’Orangerie, from 15 April to 13 July 2015.
Asia on stage
PARIS –Everyone knows the Mahabharata since the historical performance by Peter Brook at the Bouffes du Nord theatre. But Asian theatre is a lot more than an Indian epic in which armies of monkeys follow in the steps of Vishnu. It is also the minimalism of the Japanese nô theatre or, on the contrary, the Baroque flamboyance of the Opera of Beijing, which Mao’s Cultural Revolution tried in vain to erase all traces of. The ambitious aim of this exhibition is to cover two thousand years of Asian theatre, from the shadow theatre to animated movies with, - on the side, the unclassifiable figure of Mata Hari, a bayadere and a spy who –should you have forgotten – disclosed her identity in the library of the musée Guimet, during a famous evening back in 1905.
• Du Nô à Mata-Hari, 2000 ans de théâtre en Asie at the musée Guimet, from 15 April to 31 August 2015.
Raysse is back
VENICE – As the opening of the Biennale -9 May- approaches, the Laguna is increasingly active. Palazzo Grassi is giving a second chance to those who may have missed this exhibition at the Centre Pompidou of Raysse, one of the best known and among the last survivors of the new Realists. Sculptures, self-portraits, installations are presented in an inverted chronological perspective.
• Martial Raysse at Palazzo Grassi, from 12 April to 30 November
AUCTIONS
Lot 43, four paper souvenirs, 1st half of 20th century. Estimate: €100-200.
The life of things
PARIS –Our popular objects of the past are at times as mysterious and strange to us as those of foreign civilizations. We see this once again in this sale. Among the most important lots it presents an articulated model that is the counterpart of the subject of the current exhibition at the musée Bourdelle. It measures 1.70 m, dates back to the beginning of the XIXth century and according to a legend transmitted by the generations of owners, and therefore impossible to check, it belonged to Delacroix (lot 24, estimated at €1500). The main lot (136, estimated €7000) is a pair of pewter vases of holy oils which in the XVIIth century belonged to the bishop Roquette d’Autun. Impressive tobacco graters in engraved boxwood, which are totally out of use, should go for more than €1000 each. For much less one can walk away with a child’s tricycle from the beginning of the XXth century, pine baskets, nut-crackers, mortars, seals for blessed bread, mud clogs, red cotton thread alphabet books and even a key in the shape of a gun …
• Collection Maigne, art populaire et curiosités on 17 April 2015 at the hôtel Drouot (Ferri SVV).
BOOKS
The Leiris galaxy
He went through the whole century, and not as a simple onlooker. Michel Leiris was born in 1901, and died in 1990, and had the time to live a remarkable ethnographic career (rhythmed by his famous Afrique fantôme) while he rubbed elbows with an impressive “who’s who” of the art world of his time. He was close to Breton, Bataille and Jouhandeau (with whom he had an affair), a friend of creators as different as Miró, Masson, Giacometti or Bacon, he wrote, collected and sold (he was married to Louise Godon, Kahnweiler’s sister in law). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz is one of the exhibitions dedicated to the hidden figures of XXth century art (Charles Ratton, Nancy Cunard, Kenneth Clark, etc.). The catalogue, arranged by decade, gives us the opportunity to see the extraordinary combination of genres of this brilliant jack-of-all-trades, who speaks as easily of the Dogons as of jazz, of Boris Vian or Voodoo. Thsi reader has one single regret when reading a book of reference with so many names: it has no index.
• Leiris & Co., directed by Denis Hollier, Agnès de La Beaumelle, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Gallimard, 2015, 400 p., €49.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
ENTRELACS
16 April 2015 - PARIS - L'Atelier des ateliers d'art de France
Ultra contemporary creations in an age-old technique - wicker basketwork (Photo: Estelle Meunier)
IN BRIEF
COLOGNE - The modern and contemporary art fair Art Cologne will be held from 16 to 19 April 2015.
NEW YORK - The AIPAD photography fair, with nearly 80 galleries, will be held from 16 to 19 April 2015.
VERSAILLES - The former royal hospital, that dates back to the XVIIth century, will be inaugurated on 16 April 2015 following a renovation, in its new role (housing, cultural area, public gardens).