France filters In his introduction to the history of French art, the historian André Chastel writes: “France filters. It receives and it sifts.” The best demonstration of this is one of the most talented Spaniards of the 20th century, who the...
Al Thani collection: a new little museum in Paris housing an exceptional cabinet of curiosities
Place de la Concorde To travel through time all you have to do is go to Paris to the Place de la Concorde. You will first arrive in the 18th century, visiting the building designed by the King’s architect, Gabriel, sumptuously restored by...
Botticelli: the serial production of grace shown in Paris
Autorship Not a year goes by without some controversy over the authorship of such and such an old master, as in the case of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Salvator Mundi (See here and here the last reports about the Salvator Mundi and here about...
The Albers, an ultra-modern couple united by abstraction. An exhibition in Paris and a testimony from Sheila Hicks
To think as a couple There are artists – and they are in the majority – who think as an individual, and there are others who think as a couple. This is the case, for example, of Christo and Jeanne Claude who created and authored their huge...
Morozov Collection: the mega-exhibition of modern art from Russia at the Fondation Vuitton, episode 2
Modern Treasures For a long time Russia jealously guarded its modern art treasures, its breathtaking Matisses, the climactic sensations of its Monets, its radically cubist Picassos, the lost paradise of its Gauguins, without determining...
Damien Hirst: a new series of works which are photogenic but devoid of meaning
https://youtu.be/hbhprpFeE_0 Large scale and large number It must be the sensation of the season in Paris. At the Fondation Cartier, Damien Hirst (born in 1965), the superstar from the 1990s and former leader of the Young British Artists, is...
An homage to Christian Boltanski
14 July 2021 All his life Christian Boltanski was obsessed by death. At his final large-scale exhibition, a retrospective conceived as a single artwork in 2019 at the Centre Pompidou, with its premonitory title “Faire son temps” (“Life in the making”), he spoke...
In Venice at the Prada Foundation, Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grimani: the three most beautiful exhibitions on show
https://youtu.be/6MAhlc0J7Uc Not the architecture Biennale No, it wasn’t the architecture biennale that made me rush to Venice. I initially found it intellectually stimulating, with all the societal and ecological questions it...
Les Lalanne in Versailles and Williamstown. The prodigious rise of their ostriches, cabbages and sheep at auction
Stephan Zweig “It was a doll’s house, this Little Trianon (…) This ‘Anglo-Chinese garden’ was to represent, not merely nature, but the whole of nature. In the microcosm of a few square kilometers, there was to be a quasi-microscopic...
Kunsthaus Zurich: The great landscape of Gerhard Richter’s extraordinary landscapes
https://youtu.be/B4sqjQECVgk Great painter It’s generally taken as a given that Gerhard Richter is one of the great painters from the latter half of the 20th century. But for anyone who may still have doubts on the subject, it’s worth...
Francis Bacon and Peter Beard: an unlikely friendship that takes the form of an exhibition in London
https://youtu.be/ELj2brIz4OA An Irishman and an American dandy Take an American dandy who liked women, wild animals and photography. Then take another dandy, an Irishman who loved men and made paintings depicting torment and suffering with...
Our brain is a battlefield: the theory behind the exhibition of the future. By Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar
https://youtu.be/-pI4A56LDfI Neologism Messenger RNA, mutated virus, comorbidity, NFTs, blockchain, quantum theory, big data... The world in 2021 is filled – along with our heads – with an assortment of new words which, prior to the public...