There's one thing that both wine and art have in common. In countries with long wine growing traditions like France, the wines considered the best have a ‘long finish’. In other words the flavour lingers, it takes time to fully appreciate. On the other hand American...
I sometimes wonder if those men dressed head to toe in leather, chains strapped across their bodies, showing off those muscular bodies achieved through hours spent in the gym, their look finished off with peaked cap, and who instantly bring to mind police or army...
France is a nation of great wealth, at least when it comes to art. And one of the most beautiful modern collections outside Paris is in Villeneuve d’Ascq, on the outskirts of Lille, in a museum called Lille Art Moderne or LAM. From Picasso (25 paintings) to Leger (20...
(take your time to watch it!) We expect our artists to be visionaries. But when they happen to naturally fit that mould we misunderstand them since they’re too far ahead of their times. It’s been a very long while that Alfredo Jaar (born in 1956) has been...
It’s a well-known fact, something that heralds a true revolution in the art market: contemporary art is nowadays in the ascendancy while modern and impressionist art, dealing with times gone by, is experiencing softer demand. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that...
In the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, there’s something different about the scenery. From the distance, it’s a bundle of colours criss-crossing in strange patterns that you first notice. Up close, the colossal object is breathtaking. The roof of the Frank Gehry-designed...
There’s a joke we like to tell in France, one you could imagine inspiring one of his 'Joke painting' by American artist Richard Prince. A man driven to suicide jumps off the top of a skyscraper. On the way down, he says the same thing each floor he passes: ‘So far,...
Since in New York there are modern and contemporary auctions every day this week featuring emotion, why not go along and see some genuine masterpieces that are not for sale. The curatorial world is shaped, in varying degrees, by its trends. The most recent trend,...
Every May and November, Sotheby’s and Christie’s modern and contemporary art auctions in New York have become, rightly or wrongly, a shop window for the global art business and a bellwether for the market in the eyes of the general public. In a few lots, everything is...
Every two years at the Grand Palais in Paris, Monumenta is an act of creative bravura and a truly colossal show in the international contemporary art calendar. It’s a battle of the titans, in which an artist has to struggle to assert himself inside and against a...
Imagine someone who grasped as early as 1910 the monumental importance of Picasso and Matisse on the history of art. Imagine a man who anticipated the role Cezanne’s painting would have in the dawning of cubism. A man who since Marcel Duchamp stopped painting in...
The American artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945) is important. He’s important because he pokes fun at all those defenders of good taste in art. Paul McCarthy is important because he upsets people. Paul McCarthy is important because he projects the image of an America...