The question of autorship The problem with exhibitions devoted to the old masters is that you never really know what you’re looking at. Works from this era are constantly being contested and the field itself is rife with subtle disputes over the authorship of...
Unmissable It’s an exhibition the likes of which are seen perhaps once in a decade. An assemblage of artworks, some of which are intensely emotive. The Louvre is currently staging an exceptional exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci. 9 paintings Featuring 9...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv1Nvn4Gc34 Everything must change “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” This now-legendary line, uttered by the dashing Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s film The Leopard, could actually be reclaimed by...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGflH-iHA_Y 9 reconstructed spaces A great woman. A great exhibition. Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) is the subject of an exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton comprising no less than nine reconstructed spaces, which give...
Free spirit The free-spirited and prolific Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), a great painter, was the subject of a retrospective at Moma in New York and at the Tate in London in 2014. Palazzo Grassi His work was also exhibited in 2016 at the Pinault Foundation’s Palazzo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL7tm-4pfMc Artists are seekers It’s always helpful to classify an artist in terms of a school, to put them in a box. But good artists can’t be pigeonholed. They’re seekers, and in the words of Picasso in fact they don’t seek,...
Crucial days There are crucial days that can change your life forever. Take the British painter Francis Bacon. On 26 October 1971 he was the subject of a major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Not only was it a marked success for him in Europe, accompanied by...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBa2p4_YCxA The great German photographer who lived in Paris, Peter Lindbergh, died on 3 September. I met him last January. At the Giacometti Institute he was exhibiting his dark images dedicated to the Swiss sculptor, inspired...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV6v3d0hX0A A pilgrimage destination Because New York has long been the global centre for art, and because New York is in all likelihood still to this day the global centre for collecting contemporary art and the art...
Multifaceted and ever-changing reality Besides the heat that extinguishes all possibility of articulated thought, today’s world is animated by extreme and evolving forces that make it very difficult to read phenomena and produce relevant creation. Incisive...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuFG2ey17o Maja Sacher In the art world she is known as a powerful collector. In this area the inspiration most likely comes from her grandmother, Maja Sacher from Basel, who became a serious collector of Picasso, Max Ernst,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYJmPfmdNY The weeping woman As far as art history is concerned, Dora Maar (1907-1997) will always be the “weeping woman” as named by her portrait, painted so many times by Picasso as a kind of fury with tears streaming down her...