Art Of The Day Weekly

Vermeer leads the way

The Louvre museum opens the year grandly with two major simultaneous exhibits, both running from 22 February to 22 May. The one the media have most focused on is probably the one dedicated to Vermeer, the painter of 36 paintings, the one who was adored by Proust -as well as Goering- and who gave way to the most absurd series of forgeries by Van Meegeren. The nearly 12 works shown, which would be considered a sample if they were by any other artist, represent a true feat. But amateurs are just as excited by the other exhibit, that of Valentin de Boulogne, the French artist - with Georges de La Tour - most influenced by Caravaggio. The latter took all the glory. The two artists of the XVIIth century were hardly forty years old when they died, as was Sinibaldo Scorza, one of the members of the rich baroque school of Genoa, who excelled in mythological scenes and colorful animals (Palazzo Meridiana in Genoa, from 10 February to 4 June 2017).

In the steps of Monet

We all recall the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, that opened 24/7 during the last weeks and attracted over 900 000 persons during the winter of 2010-2011. The Fondation Beyeler in Basel should also be completely booked from 22 January to 28 May 2017 with the retrospective it has prepared on Monet to celebrate its 20 years of activity: it will present 63 works by the Impressionist painter who Ernst Beyeler, as a gallery owner, dealt with regularly. One of the artist’s close friends, Pissarro, will be hosted at the musée Marmottan in Paris from 23 February to 2 July 2017 for a similarly rich gathering. Other stars will have less glorious events in their honor, like Picasso –quite unusual- shown from the bias of his first wife, Olga Picasso at Musée Picasso in Paris, from 21 March to 3 September).

The shadow of the Nazis

Artworks that were robbed continue to be sought, and the destiny of collections acquired illegally under the Third Reich continues to be a cause for debates. While we wait for the phenomenal Gurlitt collection to be shown at the museum of Bern, which will put a temporary end to the long legal soap opera, we will all relive that period with 21, rue La Boétie, in which the Musée Maillol in Paris shows from 2 March to 23 July 2017 the destiny of the collection that belonged to art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Among the artists who were persecuted, there is one of the great Expressionists, with the many colors, and the trademark of dark rings under the eyes that are close to xylography: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The Kunsthaus Zurich will show from 10 February to 7 May 2017 his Berlin period during WWI when he sketched the night owls, the excesses and satirical side of the big city. In Cologne, the Ludwig museum will look into the work of Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), who paid a big price to the Nazi rage. After living for along time in France, he was deported and died in the camp of Majdanek while a large part of his work was burnt by the Nazis, among them his famous “primitive” head, which was on the cover of the leaflet on the exhibition in 1937 on “degenerate art” (from 18 February to 14 May 2017).

From Surrealism to Revolution

Collectors of the world, unite! This is the message put out by the exhibition Mad About Surrealism at the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, from 11 February to 28 May 2017. It studies the beginnings of Surrealism through four rarely shown, award-winning collections, among them the one of Roland Penrose, Lee Miller’s husband and the biographer of Picasso, and Edward James, the patron of the arts who had an amazing house-garden built for himself in Mexico. Art déco in Italiathe San Domenico Museums in Forlì, from 11 February to 18 June 2017 sheds light on the iconic style of the twenties and thirties in its elegant and sophisticated Italian version. Another exhibition on a collective movement, Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy in London, from 11 February to 17 April 2017 will analyze fifteen major years between WWII and the Moscow trials, with artists as varied as Deineka, Malevitch, Chagall.

Three strong personalities

He had the name of a singer of the sixties, but he died much before the society of consumerism appeared. Like his European contemporaries Braque, Léger, Boccioni, Dix or Frans Marc, Rik Wouters –born in Malines, in Belgium- experienced the horrors of the war. It did not kill him but cancer did during the horrific decade around 1916, when he was only 34 years old. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels tell the brief life of this Fauve artist, close to Ensor. From 10 March to 2 July 2017. Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), ten years younger, survived the two world conflicts and experienced the excitement of Futurism before going through a sort of purgatory. He was a real one-man-band, capable of practicing all forms of art, from tapestry to advertising posters, from fashion to the theater. He is the host of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, near Parma, from 18 March to 2 July 2017. In Paris, the Jeu de paume presents from 14 February to 28 May 2017 a photographer who is impossible to classify. Of Romanian origin, Eli Lotar (1905-1969) was as unleashed and cosmopolitan as his compatriots Ionesco, Brassaï or Tzara, worked with Luis Buñuel, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. The series on the slaughterhouses at la Villette remain surprisingly powerful, but the artist’s creativity was expressed in many other directions as well.

A little more segregation?

When the exhibition Color Line was programmed at the museum on quai Branly, it did not necessarily reflect current events, if we excluded the repeated police brutality towards African-Americans. Following the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of “White Supremacists” and the perspective of an ultra-conservative attorney general from Alabama (Jeff Sessions), it takes on a visionary dimension: History has taught us that it loves to repeat itself. The catalogue explains in detail what this Color Line is, the line of segregation, and how it came to be following a somewhat encouraging event (the victory of the North in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery). The sinister embodiment of “Separate But Equal”, the long struggle of WEB Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr, the anonymous or publicized heroes (Rosa Parks) nourished the inspiration of ostracized artists for over a century, artists who over the last decades have met an accelerated recognition in terms of visibility as well as the unavoidable market value. The Ku Klux Klan and the groups of Alt-Right have once again taken on a conquering attitude: the exhibition was aimed to be a retrospective, let us hope it does not become premonitory.
• Color Line, directed by Daniel Soutif, Flammarion/Musée du quai Branly, 2016, 400 p., €49.

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