1874: Inventing impressionism In Paris until 14 July one of the most popular exhibitions is being held at the Musée d’Orsay. But “Paris 1874: Inventer l’impressionnisme” (Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism) is not what you think.(An entire...
Only in Paris. Brancusi’s ever so beautiful universe
https://youtu.be/Z4wy_oPCLcY?si=X2ESoaoV22ygyXdA The myth of the artist's studio The artist’s studio is a world of its own where they can make and unmake their great universes of visual art. From Rembrandt to Lucian Freud, many of them...
Sugimoto/Giacometti: a meeting in the land of the great spirits
https://youtu.be/l7qyp412eE8?si=WlLIiKJNgqHyevMF Here’s a little gem of an exhibition, all delicacy and spirit. Moma sculpture garden The story starts like this. There was once, in 2013, a famous Japanese artist who spent most of his time...
Nathanaëlle Herbelin at the Musée d’Orsay: a marriage of love between the young artist and the Nabis paintings
https://youtu.be/QhVRXoLlB9s?si=PLUioEweUbp4cvry True love There are practical marriages and there are love marriages. The second category includes the exhibition by the Franco-Israeli artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin, born in 1989, whose forty-odd...
Richard Serra: death of a giant of contemporary sculpture
https://youtu.be/7uMTM02GFTI?si=ra6dXYWo9XBtRPxp Brancusi's studio At a time when the Centre Pompidou is organising a retrospective of the great sculptor of the first part of the twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi, just after closing the...
New York, Paris: the collection of the man who made Picasso a millionaire
Vulgar money For a long time money had a sulphurous smell as far as art historians were concerned; a vulgar reputation that prevented them from examining the artist’s preoccupations and market. People just liked to talk about the genius...
Jeff Wall at the Beyeler Foundation: photographs as monuments
https://youtu.be/cucsu8EMJ6k?si=tOD37TZHBwCoANT2 Between painting and cinema In the 1970s, when photography had yet to be seen as a “noble” art, he invented a new kind of artwork. The Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (born in 1946)...
Lacan at the Centre Pompidou Metz: the owner of Courbet’s “Origine du monde” was also a great psychoanalytic theorist
https://youtu.be/5D4kTB8rfiA Supernatural powers of the artist We have a tendency to endow great artist with quasi-supernatural powers. The most illustrious theorists of psychoanalysis claim that certain painters and other sculptors have, in...
Lee Ufan: “Looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits makes you feel insignificant”
https://youtu.be/_utYZdQf3V0 Korean living in Japan Lee Ufan (born in 1936), the Korean artist who lives in Japan, was the subject of a major retrospective which travelled all over Japan in 2022 and 2023 (see here the report I wrote covering...
A tribute to architect of the future Richard Rogers, in one of his buildings, suspended in the air
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJroTSJock&feature=youtu.be Grand history of architects The grand history of 20th-century architects is made of cross-pollinations and collaborations. Take Norman Foster (Pritzker Prize 1999). He was the...
Albertina: In the drawings of Michelangelo even warriors become graceful
Corporeal quality There’s only a handful of artists capable of giving drawings an almost corporeal quality in their works on paper. In Ingres we don’t just see portraits in black and white, but rather figures whose eyes sparkle with life. In...
Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Titian… A great Renaissance show at the Louvre
https://youtu.be/LF_wYDcCHnw La Grande Galerie How long has it been since you walked through the permanent collections, the holy of holies at the Louvre, the Grande Galerie? Across 460 metres stretches a display of one of the grandest episodes...