The art public adores suffering artists. They live badly, they die young, they’re ill, but every now and then they produce extraordinary things. In the rankings of this type of artist the gold medal goes to Vincent Van Gogh, but just behind him there is the Italian...
They are the world’s most famous partnership in contemporary art. British artists Gilbert (born in 1943) and George (born in 1942) have been creating art together under their first names for 50 years, since 1967. Yes, they think as one. They even move as one, like...
How to give expression to that great human obsession: love? While music and literature are filled with languishing heroes and heroines who desire, kiss and embrace one another, the depiction of love in painting and sculpture is not only rarer, but also an altogether...
Azzedine Alaïa passed away on 20 november in Paris. In 2010 I interviewed the great couturier who opened up about his native Tunisia where he is now buried and about his desire to leave a mark. The couturier Azzedine Alaïa is a sculptor of the female...
He’s a genius in the recent history of the moving image, and his vision in the film“Love is the message, the message is death” (2016) leaves no viewer unscathed. The short extracts which could be available to watch online give nothing away compared to the powerful...
It will have escaped no one, thanks to the huge scale of the media shockwaves across the globe, that on 15 November Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” was sold at auction for a sum never before officially attained for an artwork: 450.3 million dollars. Let’s not...
Jacques Grange is the french superstar of interior design. He has worked for the joint heir to the cosmetics empire and prolific art collector Ronald Lauder, the businessman Leon Black who is just as famous in New York for his elitist taste in art (he is the owner of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ovEJCxnmw Western modernity has been greatly influenced by tribal art: this is nothing new. It is common to see African masks alongside cubist pieces and other modern artworks, as is the case in the excellent Derain...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjxPp2dPZIc This story begins, for me, in 2006 or early 2007 in the lobby of a London hotel. Tom Krens was head of the Guggenheim at the time, a museum he sought to transform into a global brand. He had opened branches of...
It is one of the miracles of the American art world. In the land of rapid consumption, there exists an institution that takes its time, lots of it, and takes up space, again, lots of it. It’s called the Dia Art Foundation and its exhibition space at Beacon, located in...
Magazine photographers are kind of artists on the fly. The pages are flicked through quickly and the images are often covered in writing or sliced in half. Yes, the most striking shots will stay in the mind, but what was the particular style of the photographer you...
To witness the spectacle of certain works by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is to experience a phenomenon verging on the mystical. Excluding the Mona Lisa, whose true nature is barely discernible behind the thick glass and throng of tourists, many great drawings or...