Art Of The Day Weekly
#520 - from 21 June 2018 to 27 June 2018
Institut Giacometti, Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, Photo Marc Domage, © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris + Adagp, Paris).
IN THE AIR
A home for Giacometti
PARIS – Actually, not really: the site where the Fondation Giacometti will be set up, in the XIVth arrondissement in this city, is a true jewel of a Art nouveau house, designed between 1912 and 1914 by Paul Follot, an interior decorator (which means he spoke about the house in small doses). Aside from rebuilding the studio from rue Hippolyte-Maindron, with its various elements that were kept for a long time in a warehouse, and a graphic art cabinet, the foundation will offer very targeted exhibitions. In this intimate space, which has kept its decorations, its stained windows, its mosaics, the first exhibition will be dedicated to the relationships between Giacometti and Jean Genet, one of his best interpreters, in particular in his unforgettable text, L’atelier de Giacometti. It will be showing in particular a series of sculptures on the theme of prostitutes and the cover tests for Le Balcon by Genet, with a story that takes place in a brothel.
• L’Institut Giacometti will open to the public on 26 June 2018. Reservations over Internet. Further reading: the biography of Giacometti written by the director of the institution, Catherine Grenier (Flammarion).
EXHIBITIONS
© Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole - photograph Steve GAVARD.
Picasso in 14 phases
MONTPELLIER – The exhibitions dedicated to Picasso are a dime a dozen throughout Europe right now, in the framework of a Mediterranean season that studies the various facets of his work. One sticks out from the pack, the one at the Fabre museum, which ahs chosen to be generalist and to summarize the itinerary of the superman of the 20th century and a series of key moments – 14 exactly – from 1895, when he was a teenager, to 1972, a year before his death. Certain periods cover one single year (1901, 1906, 1937 around Guernica), other s are longer, like his neo-classic period (1917-23). While the musée Picasso Paris is the main contributor (half of of the one hundred works exhibited), we can admire some beautiful loans from the Metropolitan of New York, the Berggruen Museum in Berlin or from private collections (in particular those from the Nahmad). The staging of the works, leaving a few theatrical openings between the sections, creating rows, allows the viewer to cover decades and to see the permanent game of the Picasso pendulum between revolutions and returns to the past.
• Picasso. Donner à voir at the musée Fabre, from 15 June to 23 September 2018.
Sabine Weiss, Foggy Morning, Lyon, France, 1950, silver print, 30,5 x 24,1 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/ Dist. RMN-GP © Sabine Weiss
Sabine Weiss, a female humanist
PARIS – She is 93 years old, and has a strong health, but her honorable age has allowed her to know other realities. She was, for example, one of the photographers allowed to immortalize the workshop of Alberto Giacometti, whom we spoke about just a little earlier. She is labeled with reason a humanist photographer, and she constantly took snapshots of her fellow humans with empathy, humor, curiosity – early n the morning, in the fog, lost souls walking along the sidewalk, children games skipping over puddles. A native Swiss woman, she took up the French nationality at the age of 71, and of course knew Moscow, New York or Madrid but her real town is Paris. Her work has been published since 1945, and at the age of 30, en 1954, a personal retrospective was dedicated to her at the Art Institute of Chicago. These were her major years, the ones which the exhibition is dedicated to, the period between 1945-1960, when the street was still for us the extension of our won homes, with playgrounds, contacts and fine words, and not an anonymous space of walkers isolated by their rush and their helmets. The Financial Times last weekend dedicated a whole page to her, convinced she is one of the last survivors of a certain way of looking at the world.
• Sabine Weiss. Les villes, la rue, l’autre at the Centre Pompidou, from 20 June to 15 October 2018.
Yves Klein, Saut dans le vide, 1960, silver print © Succession Yves Klein c/o Adagp, Paris. © Photo Collaboration Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
The maison rouge is in limbo
PARIS – It is never easy to launch an artistic site, and even more difficult to close one. And yet that is what is happening to the maison rouge, opened fifteen years ago by Antoine de Galbert. Something like Zidane who is bowing out just as he is the summit of his career at the Real Madrid, the maison rouge us closing just when it seemed to be indispensable – “a must”, as people would say today – in the Parisian landscape. But, as if to show that a re-dimensioning does not mean an end (the foundation will continue to intervene in other ways), its swan’s song is something of a contradiction. This last exhibition of works of all types and of all periods is called the Envol (the Flight). Incredible mechanisms by Tatline, Panamarenko or Gustav Mesmer (Vélo-hélicoptère in 1978), as well as photographs of divers and acrobats by Clergue, Lartigue or Borodulin, or internal ecstasies by Frédéric Pardo or Brassaï. Certain suggestions are even more conceptual, such as walking in an installation by Fabio Mauri who mimes the moon (Luna) or lies in the position of the famous Saut dans le vide by Klein. One needs a strong back to slip into this Opus incertum by Didier Faustino… But one can pick oneself up again by listening to concrete music by Pierre Henry: L’Envol, one of her last compositions, in 2013.
• L’Envol ou le rêve de voler at the maison rouge, from 16 June to 28 October 2018.
BOOKS
Boudinet, color from the 70s
The name of this photographer has long been forgotten, for he died very young in 1990, at the age of 45. An exhibition at the Jeu de paume in Tours and this catalogue now pay tribute to him. This native of Chamonix married reports for the art press and decoration (L’Objet d’art, Décoration internationale) with special links with exceptional persons such as art critic Bernard Lamarche-Vadel or Roland Barthes, who commented some of his photographs in his seminar. While is photos in black and white play subtle games of shadows, as mentioned in the introduction, his colored photographs (the subject of this study) on the contrary is very contrasted, saturated. We can then see him in his subjects on Italy (the garden of Bomarzo or Brion’s tomb, designed by Carlo Scarpa) and in his Parisian interiors. One of the great series of Boudinet’s focuses on nocturnal urban atmospheres, something like an ideal illustration of the book by Richard Bohringer, whcoh also came out in the 1980s, C’est beau une ville la nuit…
• Daniel Boudinet. Le temps de la couleur, published by Liénart, 192 p., €35.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
VINCENT GICQUEL
23 June 2018 - RENNES - La Criée
The new hot sensation among French contemporary artists