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...
Hélène Leloup is a legend of the African art market
2 kind of dealers You could say there are two kinds of art dealers. There are the ones who are obsessed with business, and with generating income to support their activities. Generally, they aren’t able to keep their best objects. And then...
The big wave of Picasso bashing
https://youtu.be/3KxxqAGvRkA Celebrations The museums of the world are vibrating in unison to the tune of Pablo Picasso. Sprawling celebrations are being staged to mark fifty years since the Spanish master’s death. In New York alone the art...
Van Gogh two months before his suicide
https://youtu.be/x199M1lHuRA The two very last month There is not only the Vermeer exhibition to see in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh Museum is also presenting an exceptional exhibition featuring 48 paintings and 25 drawings exclusively dedicated...
Degas/Manet: two competing geniuses in Paris then New York
https://youtu.be/FDkRczRWVl0 More questions than answers The Musée d’Orsay has a particular fondness for Edgar Degas (1834-1917). We can understand why. He is one of the geniuses of modernity. However the last exhibition on him, “Degas à...