Art Of The Day Weekly
#392 - from 11 June 2015 to 17 June 2015
IN THE AIR
Villa Cavrois, how to save a jewel of the 1930s
CROIX (Nord) – Over the last 12 years, and at a total cost of €23 million, 270 qualified workers took part in this project. All these figures testify of the ambition of the refurbishment of Villa Cavrois, which is finally over. The building has a second life. This modernist manifesto done by Mallet-Stevens, inaugurated in 1932 for Paul Cavrois a textile industrialist, suffered less from the German occupation than from the vandalism which followed its abandonment in the middle of the 1980s. The Willot brothers, the former owners of Boussac and Dior, put it aside and abandoned it, as they were furious not to have been able to carry out the real estate operation they had planned. The State bought in back in 2001, and today Villa Cavrois appears to us as it was in the beginning, with the profile of a cruise ship, its undecorated rooms painted in strong colors, its floor in iroko wood, its green marble from Sweden, its kitchen more hygienic than a hospital, its terrace roof and its swimming pool.
• Villa Cavrois (Centre des monuments nationaux) will reopen to the public on 13 June 2015.
EXHIBITIONS
A painter named Man Ray
COPENHAGEN – We all know the photographer, the spearhead of the Surrealist revolution, and master of ceremonies at Montparnasse in the period between the two wars. But the lover of Lee Miller and Kiki, the author of a famous Violon d’Ingres done with the body of the latter, had more than one feather to his cap. This exhibition brought straight in from the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. reminds us of just that. When in Hollywood in 1940, where he fled the atrocities of the European battle field but where he missed the Parisian effervescence, he plunged himself into pure sciences. He worked on some of his own photographs, taken in 1934 at the Institut Henri Poincaré: mathematical models made in plaster, wood and rope, used to teach geometry and which fascinated André Breton. They are transfigured by his way of looking at them and the use of his paint brush, and become strange abstractions with right angles and ideal curves.
• Man Ray, Human Equations at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, from 6 June to 20 September 2015.
Johan Christian Dahl, View from Bastei, 1819, oil on canvas, 86x101cm © Drammens Museum, Drammen (Norway)
The world in a panoramic vision
GENEVA – They were a sensation in the XIXth century and a Parisian passage still bears the name: the panoramas were the cinemascope at that time. Very few still exist from the heroic times (among them those of Waterloo, in Belgium, and of Wroclaw in Poland, which describes Kosciuszko’s victory over the Czar’s armies) even if the city of Rouen recently tried to launch the fashion again with its Panorama XXL. The exhibition shows how the idea of the panorama, from its birth in England in 1787 (a device in a rotunda), developed, attracted contemporary artists such as Jeff Wall, Olafur Eliasson, etc. and continued to nourish our idea of the landscape. The title of the exhibition is a tribute of sorts to the movie Le Caire, nid d’espions (Cairo, a nest of spies), in which Jean Dujardin pronounces this formula, which today is obvious: Who hates panoramas?
• J’aime les panoramas at the musée Rath, from 12 June to 27 September 2015.
Osman Bozkurt, Marks of Democracy / Portraits of the Voters, 2002. C-Print, 10 works, 40x60 cm each. Collection Deutsche Bank, photo: Martin Url, Francfort. © Osman Bozkurt.
A new idea, Europe?
ZURICH – In 1826, Heine exclaimed: “Today in Europe, there are no longer any nations, there are only parties”. Is history going to prove him wrong? Following the construction of a community which allowed it to eradicate the wars that had so often befell it. Europe is now the prey of divergent forces. What idea do we have of the continent? How was it formed? How did modern and contemporary artists contribute to define it? Some sixty creators, driven by a squadron of historians and sociologists, mix major masters like Albers and Böcklin to young artists and give an answer in the form of an encyclopedia.
• Europe : l’avenir de l’histoire at the Kunsthaus, from 12 June to 6 September 2015.
• Not to be missed: some one hundred of these objects are shown at the library of the Institut Henri Poincaré (11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris).
AS WELL AS...
Roni Horn, If 2, 2011.
Roni Horn…
ARLES - For its second exhibition, the Fondation Van Gogh, inaugurated in April 2014, focuses obviously on Van Gogh (a selection of drawings and motives that inspired them) as well as contemporary artist Roni Horn, who presents large format drawings and glass sculptures. From 12 June to 20 September 2015.
Shoes...
LONDON - Shoes to walk in, but not only. Shoes to charm, to impress, to seduce with. In Shoes, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, retraces over two thousand years of the history of shoes, from the Pharaoh's sandals up to Roger Vivier or Vivienne Westwood. From 13 June 2015 to 31 January 2016.
Kapoor...
VERSAILLES - Seven years and five years after the open invitations made to Jeff Koons and Murakami respectively, the Château of Louis XIV is holding a new, highly debatable intervention, this time by Anish Kapoor. His installations are often very explicitely sexual which has of course brought on a reaction from various associations. From 9 June to 1 November 2015
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
CONFLUENCES
13 June 2015 - VERSAILLES - Musée Lambinet
A road into the mind of artists suffering from psychic affections
BOOKS
Djerba tag
We rarely associate Djerba to contemporary creation. But now it is a fact in a grim tourism atmosphere. Following the highly mediatized experience of the building in the XIIIth arrondissement in Paris, entrusted to street artists prior to its programed demolition, Mehdi Ben Cheikh led a different project. He brought together a group of major names in the discipline and gave them carte blanche –with the approval of the residents - in Erriadh, a town partly abandoned by the departure of its Jewish population. Bombed (pacifically) by Add Fuel, Arraiano, M. City or Roa, the abandoned buildings have gotten some color back in their cheeks, the streets that are still inhabited are covered with happy frescoes. Trees and fruits, historical characters such as Mahmoud Darwich and Samuel Beckett or people on the street like children, shop keepers, youngsters on scooters, fantastic and over-proportioned animals have grown like visions of a mirage. This series of works done in September 2014 by over 80 artists, obviously deserves to be continued.
• Djerbahood by Mehdi Ben Cheikh, Albin Michel, 2015, 288 p., €49.
IN BRIEF
BASEL - According to Les Nouvelles calédoniennes, the sale of Kanak art organized by the auction house Aguttes on 17 June 2015 should include objects that were stolen or illegally taken out of the island in 1974-75. The government of New-Caledonia is looking into the posibility of going to court.
LA GACILLY – The "Peuples et Nature" photo festival will be held from 5 June to 30 September 2015.
MOSCOW – Garage, the museum of contemporary art, inaugurates its new venues on 12 June 2015 with various exhibitions. Among them is a 800m² installation by Katharina Grosse.
PARIS – The Art Shopping fair ("accesible contemporary art") will be held at the Carrousel du Louvre on 13 and 14 June 2015.
VICHY – The "Portrait(s)" photo festival will be held from 12 June to 6 September 2015.
VIENNA – The Biennale (art, design, architecture) will be held from 11 June to 4 October 2015 on the theme "Ideas for change".