Art Of The Day Weekly
#406 - from 12 November 2015 to 18 November 2015
Auguste Rodin, L'âge d'airain © Agence photographique du musée Rodin, photo J. Manoukian.
IN THE AIR
A new start for the Musée Rodin
PARIS – As it approaches its centennial (in 2019), the musée Rodin has given itself a facelifting. Three years of works and €16 million were needed to carry out an in-depth renovation of the Parisian museum foreign visistors prefer. Everything in the elegant Biron "hôtel particulier" - the wooden floors, the wall panels, wooden finishings, the gildings - has been restored. The white walls have been repainted in mole colour, enhancing the marble and plaster finishings. New, refined furniture has been financed by the foundation Cantor. It is one of the main collectors of Rodin's work, and had kept a great number of them at the last floor of the World Trade Center's office of Cantor Fitzgerald where 658 employees of the firm lost their life on 9/11. The building is not alone in having been transformed. New areas have been freed which allow for a greater number of drawings to be exposed, and mostly they unveil other aspects of the artist's personality. A room has been recreated to show his work environment, just like in the 1910s, and we discover his taste for antique art - with a "cabinet de curiosités" including various fragments - and his interest in his colleagues' work. Indeed he had a remarkable collection of paintings with a sheer 200 works, mostly by Renoir, Munch, Van Gogh (Le Père Tanguy, Les Moissonneurs), Monet (Belle-Ile).
• The musée Rodin reopens to the public on 12 November 2015.
EXHIBITIONS
Giorgio de Chirico, The Disquieting Muses, 1918, oil on canvas. Private Collection. © SIAE 2015.
De Chirico, a metaphysicist
FERRARA – In 1917-1918, an important season of avant-garde movements took place. Indeed, in the town of Romagna, where Giorgio Bassani - the future author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - was born, two young artists-soldiers try to cure their war neurosis at the psychiatric hospital of Villa del Seminario. They take advantage to give free rein, in a sort of dialogue - to their pictural inspiration. Empty piazze, peopled with statues and models and disquieting shadows, factory chimneys with - at moments- the identifiable mass of the castle of the Este family, and absurd familiar objects such as skittles, balls and thread and spools occupy their paintings. The first was Giorgio de Chirico, back in 1915 from his native Greece, and his brother Alberto Savinio. The other was Carlo Carrà. A few other companions joined them, such as Morandi, and the oneiric visions of those years gave birth to a particular form of modern art, metaphysical art. Nearly 70 paintings, on loan from various European museums, give life to this brief period that still holds all its strange power.
• De Chirico a Ferrara, Metafisica e avanguardia at Palazzo dei Diamanti, from 14 November 2015 to 28 February 2016.
Calder, Black Widow, 1948, wire and painted metal, 325,1x251,5 cm, Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil-Departamento de São Paulo. Photo R. Pic
Calder in movement
LONDON – Calder's name is automatically associated to the "mobile", a word invented by Duchamp. The exhibition shows that this association was not programed in advance. Indeed it was his encounter with Mondrian in the fall of 1930 that put Calder on this new track. The American artist living in Paris was completely enraptured at the time with his passion for the circus - which actually never left him- and for which he built amazing wire characters, among them Josephine Baker as an Aztec or Fernand Léger. After that, Calder turned to what would make him famous: abstract, solidary and independent, suspended, orbital and swinging forms. The exhibition, founded by major loans from the New York Calder Foundation, follows that aspect of his work until 1948, the date of the creation of his Black Widow, which until now had never left its birthplace, the Institute of Brazilian architects in São Paulo. We will also admire the Universe, a work which fascinated Einstein, who -they say- gazed at it for forty minutes. Times they are a'changing, and the installations one could manipulate, such as Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere from 1932, are now untouchable, and those which are moved by a motor are rarely put into motion. That's the price of fame.
• Alexander Calder, Performing Sculpture at the Tate Modern, from 11 November 2015 to 3 April 2016.
Andrzej Wróblewski, Blue Driver, 1948, Private Collection, Warsaw. © Courtesy Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation
Wróblewski, a shooting star
MADRID- As a consequence of the iron curtain, our knowledge of Central and Eastern European XXth century art is quite limited. There is indeed a long, dark period between the avant-garde of the twenties and conceptual art in the sixties. Certain authors pop up in exhibitions, such as the meteor Andrzew Wróblewski, considered in his native Poland as a major painter of the post-war period. His short life -1927-1957- , ended abruptly by a fall in the mountains, gave him nevertheless the time to experience the major changes of the century: the economic crisis, the war, Stalinism. He was greatly marked by the brutality of the German invasion and was later an admirer of Socialist realism, which he shied away from right before this death. Wróblewski was a great colourist, a figurative artist with tendencies towards abstract art and he produced works that echo other obsessions of the XXth century as seen in Dix, Chirico and even Hopper: suffering, solitude, lack of communication. The exhibition presents in particular paintings on both sides of the canvas that reject the idea of being hung as each side answers the other.
• Andrzej Wróblewski. Verso/Reverso at Palacio de Velázquez, from 17 November 2015 to 28 February 2016.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Lucien Clergue, Habillé de lumière, Santa Barbara, courtesy Bernheimer Fine Art.
Paris photo, coming of age
PARIS – There are 174 galleries and editors, from 34 countries (of which 27 from America and 1 from Estonia): Paris Photo, as it reaches its 18th birthday and its 19th edition, is a larger international machine than it ever was. The press kit is actually mostly written in English. Under the large dome of the Grand Palais, experts in this sector (from Greenberg to Réverbère, from Magnum to Zander) will be side by side with the usual focus on one collection, that of Italian hospital industry magnate Enea Righi, and a wide aspect will be dedicated to books, in particular with the Aperture prize. But there are also new sections, such as Prismes, which shows very large formats and longs series (for example 2000 polaroid shots by Araki), and Book Machine, which will offer the in-sity edition of 30 books by young graphic artists. A themed exhibit will be dedicated to water and photography, financed by Giorgio Armani; a section of the JP Morgan collection, the same banker who financed the large opus by Edward S. Curtis on Indians, a century ago. There is also the BMW prize. Given the competition, world fairs have to renew their offer permanently and manipulate ever growing budgets.
• Paris Photo will be held from 12 to 15 November 2015 at the Grand Palais.
NOT TO BE MISSED
The Fotofever Art Fair at the Carrousel du Louvre from 13 to 15 November 2015.
The Whats Up Photodoc exhibition at La Bellevilloise from 12 to 15 November 2015.
The Shpilman collection will be up for sale at Christie’s Paris on 13 and 14 November 2015
The "forbidden collection" of Pierre Molinier and Emmanuelle Arsan will be up for sale at Artcurial on 13 November 2015
The "Back to Black" sale at Sotheby’s Paris on 13 November 2105
The sale of photographs on the movie theme at Kapandji Morhange on 13 November 2015
The sale of photography books at Ader on 15 November 2015
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
PIA RÖNICKE - The Pages of Day and Night
12 November 2015 - PARIS - gb agency
A reflection on the Seed Bank of Alep, whose rich collections have been moved to the Seed Global of Svalbard (Norway)
BOOKS
The great exhibitionism of photography
We have a tendency to believe that photographic experiments such as collages, rayograms and overimpressions started with the Dada and Surrealist movements, that the big leaders were Man Ray, Raoul Hausman or Georges Hugnet. Actually, as this book - illustrated by ill-known and many anonymous images - shows, all types of experiences were carried out long before Breton's friends came to be. Portraits with two heads, mirrors that deform images, spectres, photomontages, fantastic post cards, photographs taken at country fairs: there was more than enough typology. Of course, the years between the two mars were a golden age, given the close mingling between photography and literature. The "photographic amusement" at the time attracted painters such as Brauner or Magritte as well as well-known professionals like Cartier-Bresson or Berenice Abbott. Today, the extreme ease with which images are manipulated and transformed seems strangely enough to have led photography into a certain phase of sterility, even if certain artists like Plonk and Replonk brilliantly maintain the practice.
• Avant l’avant-garde, by Clément Chéroux, Textuel, 2015, 288 p., €69.
IN BRIEF
BASEL – The Basel Ancien Art Fair, dedicated to ancient art, will be held from 13 to 18 November 2015.
FONTAINEBLEAU – The Chinese Museum of Empress Eugénie will reopen to the public on 14 November 2015.
ISTANBUL – The Contemporary Istanbul art fair will be held from 12 to 15 November 2015.
NAMUR – The Antica Namur ancient art fair will be held from 14 to 22 November 2015.
NEW YORK – A Reclining Nude by Modigliani, was sold for $170.4 million at Christie’s on 9 November 2015, thus becoming the second most expensive painting in the history of auctions,right behind Les Femmes d’alger by Picasso, sold for $179.4 million last May, also at Christie’s.
PARIS – The Paris Tableau fair, dedicated to ancient masters, wil be held at the Palais de la Bourse, from 11 to 15 November 2015.
PARIS - The famous movie theater La Pagode closed on 10 November 2015 for an indefinite period of time.
VERONA - The Museo degli Affreschi, which keeps one thousand painted fragments next to Juliette's tomb, will reopen to the public on 15 November 2015 following a renovation campaign.