Art Of The Day Weekly
#1048 - from 25 January 2018 to 31 January 2018
Our homeopage on 15 March 2012 (issue 250): Artemisia Gentileschi, Danaë, c.1612 Oil on copper, 41,3 x 52,7 cm. Saint Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum © Saint Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum (exhibition at Musée Maillol, Paris).
NEXT ISSUE WILL BE 500
12 years and still going strong..
The first issue of this newsletter came out on the 27th of April 2006. On the eve of our 500th issue, nearly 12 years later, we feel we can take a step sideways, away from the headlines. A little retrospective can do a world of good. Our ambition is not to draw a summary of this last decade, but simply to take a few events that are not so far away, and yet have been forgotten. Obsolescence doesn’t only affect cell phones and washing machines! When immersed by an avalanche of exhibitions, our memory is put through a hard test and often turns to the most simple tactic, that of giving preference to the latest one. So let us slip into the years 2006-2017, so near, and yet already so far!
Issue 399 - 24 September 2015
Lola Alvarez-Bravo, Frida Kahlo, s.d. Collection Fondation Televisa, Mexico © Center for Creative Photography (CCP), University of Arizona, Tucson.
When Lola exhibited Frida
PARIS – Her family name is famous, her surname not so. Lola Alvarez-Bravo (1903-1993) was a photographer like her husband Manuel, who really was well known. They separated early on in their lives, right after their son was born, and as she had started her career with that name she decided to keep it. She inherited Tina Modotti’s camera when the latter was forced to flee Mexico, and she used it to create a social fresco of her country: street vendors, ordinary women, fishermen, mill workers or prostitutes, but without ever fantasizing or dipping into Surrealism – except through collages. She was a friend of Cartier-Bresson, of Rivera, of María Izquierdo - Antonin Artaud’s mistress- as well as of the poet Xavier Villaurutia, and she made many portraits of them and others, including her best friend of course, Frida Kahlo. In an interview on Mexican television station Televisa she unveiled other talents. Indeed she was the one who organized in 1953 the first retrospective of Frida in her own gallery in Mexico. The artist was exhausted by her suffering and by a recent bone marrow transplant. Yet the one who was to become a world icon went to it any way. “She was probably the only artist to come to her own exhibition on a stretcher”. This sensitivity, this empathy with her subjects make Alvarez-Bravo a very touching photographer and a perfect representative of the humanist school.
• Lola Alvarez-Bravo was shown at the Maison de l’Amérique latine, from 23 September to 12 December 2015.
Issue 299 - 18 April 2013
Ron Mueck, Mask II, 2001, mixed materials, 77x118x85 cm. Anthony d’Offay, London © Ron Mueck. Photo courtesy Anthony d’Offay, Londres (exhibiition Ron Mueck, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris).
Ron Mueck, a special kind of reality
This is the second retrospective the Fondation Cartier dedicates to the artist. This honor could be due to his capacity to attract the crowds - his exhibition in 200 is to date the foundation's most popular one. Or to his unusual art. Ron Mueck, born in 1958 is Australian and resides in London, where he conceives sculptures of everyday women and men in extremely banal poses - such as in bed or on the beach under a parasol, or standing with a plastic bag in their hand. One automatically thinks of the hyperrealism of Duane Hanson but Mueck's characters are out of proportion – either tiny or, especially gigantic -, that they become monsters. Their extremely realistic finish, from their wrinkled skin to the iris of the eye, from the little blood vessels to the bristles of the unshaven beard turn it into a field of study. The public turns around them, fascinated or disgusted, like the indiscrete Google Earth camera: man, a universe all to himself…
• Ron Mueck was shown at the Fondation Cartier, from 16 April to 29 September 2013.
Issue 199 - 13 January 2011
A new road to Saint Jacques
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA - Delays, budgets that have been multiplied more than once, a truncated program, a sponsor (Manuel Fraga) who was one of Franco’s ministers facing a rather progressive architect (New-Yorker Peter Eisenman), who saw a part of the project pulled out of his hands … A book could be written about the genesis on the City of Culture that has just been inaugurated in Galicia. In spite of all these obstacles, observers are rather unanimous in believing this work will mark contemporary architecture. An area of nearly 150 000 m2, «deconstructed» volumes, a rather surprising profile … and a future that is difficult to figure out. Construction continues, since only two of the six buildings planned, the Library and the Archives of Galicia, have been opened; while costs, estimated at 100 million Euros in the call for bids, could be multiplied by five by the end of the works. Architecture has a weakness for white elephants …
Issue 99 - 4 September 2008
Marlène Mocquet, L'arc-en-ciel humain, 2008. Mixed media, 150 x 150 cm, Courtesy galerie Alain Gutharc.
Marlène Mocquet finds the spots
It is possible that a young woman artist practice figurative art, draw and paint. But it is not really very trendy… At 29, Marlène Mocquet has most of all been seen in collective exhibitions, in rather respectable company. At «Antidote», the contemporary art event organized by the galeries Lafayette, at the musée Réattu this summer in the large exhibition designed by Christian Lacroix, or in Shanghai in an expedition mounted by the director of the museum of Lyon, Thierry Raspail. The game that consists in giving a human face to spots or uncertain runoffs is certainly very Surrealist: Marlène Mocquet's characters and animals are made of bursts of color, from paste that seems to be smeared directly from the tube, of streaks that are somewhat reminiscent of Tanguy and Ernst. After New York (at Freight & Volume), she enjoys a personal exhibition in Paris.
• Marlène Mocquet was exhibited at the galerie Alain Gutharc (7, rue Saint-Claude, 75003) from 6 September to 11 October 2008
Issue 1 - 26 April 2006
Tamara, icon of Art Deco
She was the symbol of the free and beautiful woman of the 1920s, capable of flying by with her helmet and glasses at the wheel of her convertible or of slipping into shiny evenings gowns. Ever since the exhibition that Alain Blondel dedicated to her in 1972, then the book by Franco Maria Ricci, we constantly rediscover Tamara de Lempicka and her aesthetically cold, metallic portraits. When she died in 1980 at the age of 82, the Polish artist, the eternal vagabond who went from Warsaw to Saint-Petersburg, from Paris to New York, up the slopes of the Popocatepetl volcano during her last residency in Mexico, hardly had the time to enjoy this new fame. Following the retrospective at the Royal Academy, an exhibition is held at the museum of the 30s, in Boulogne-Billancourt. The catalogue offers a very easy way to access her work.
• Tamara de Lempicka, collective work, Flammarion, 2006, 144 pages, (French only) 35€.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
ALIX, L'ART DE JACQUES MARTIN
25 January 2018 - ANGOULÊME - Cité internationale de la BD
One of the main exponents of the "ligne claire" in the Franco-Belgian comics