On 13 November, Christie’s is set to auction an artwork that perfectly encapsulates the fascination wielded by René Magritte (1898-1967) over the twentieth century. Made in 1949, it is called “L’empire des lumières” (“The Dominion of Light”). In the painting, which is...
Douglas Gordon (born in 1966) is a Scottish artist who is hypersensitive, sentimental, receptive, and capable of creating very beautiful images as well as very trashy ones. He won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He is a truly unpredictable...
Anyone familiar with the art market will still recall with shock that day in 2007, when a media-friendly collector from Las Vegas named Steve Wynn proudly unveiled one of his treasures, a voluptuous canvas by Picasso from 1932 entitled "The Dream", only to hit his...
How do you define a good fair? A commercial event dedicated to art, which offers such diversity and quality in a single setting (hopefully a pleasant one) that it allows the collector to avoid having to do the rounds of the other next fairs. For its 2017 edition, the...
Every year in Paris from mid-October onwards, and more specifically during the FIAC, a proliferation of exhibitions is inaugurated. We have already mentioned the nasty surprise that came in the form of the Gauguin exhibition at the Grand Palais. The Picasso Museum has...
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is an artist of pleasure and pictorial sensuality. From Brittany to the Marquesas Islands, he often uses warm tones in his paintings, adopting a characteristic spectrum from yellow through to brown, punctuated by pinks, blues and greens. His...
In 2016, according to the Artprice database, Great Britain was in third place in the contemporary art market behind the United States and China. But Artprice bases these analyses solely on auction results. In fact, the London art market’s major annual event is the...
I first met the French businessman, man of letters, and famous art collector Pierre Bergé about 20 years ago at a dinner organized by Sotheby’s in Paris, where we found ourselves sitting next to one another. We spent the whole evening discussing literature, and the...
We are all familiar with the Galeries Lafayette, established in 1893, which have become synonymous with luxury consumption beneath that great cupola adorned with Art Nouveau glasswork. Less familiar for an international audience perhaps is that the French family-run...
Paris is having a New York moment. As the Fondation Louis Vuitton prepares to pull out all the stops this October with an exhibition of 200 works from Moma telling the story of the institution, and as the Grand Palais exhibits 250 artworks by Irving Penn in a...
There once was a curious character, a guru of sorts by the name of Joséphin Péladan, who succeeded in assembling around him in the Paris of the late 1880s an inspired and visionary coterie composed of painters, musicians and writers. While listening to Wagner and...
An American flag. A target. A sequence of numbers. Are these simple subjects for a simple painter? Not at all. Since the 1950s, when Jasper Johns (born in 1930) develops a unique language using familiar themes, his vision is so powerful that paintings of targets,...