Magazine photographers are kind of artists on the fly. The pages are flicked through quickly and the images are often covered in writing or sliced in half. Yes, the most striking shots will stay in the mind, but what was the particular style of the photographer you...
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is an artist of pleasure and pictorial sensuality. From Brittany to the Marquesas Islands, he often uses warm tones in his paintings, adopting a characteristic spectrum from yellow through to brown, punctuated by pinks, blues and greens. His...
An American flag. A target. A sequence of numbers. Are these simple subjects for a simple painter? Not at all. Since the 1950s, when Jasper Johns (born in 1930) develops a unique language using familiar themes, his vision is so powerful that paintings of targets,...
Chantilly is the name given to a sublime variety of whipped cream, for which France is envied the world over. But it shares its name with another French speciality: a Renaissance château, home to a long forgotten art history treasure trove. The Château de Chantilly...
One of the most spectacular exhibitions in Paris right now is at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The grandiose set design by architect Nathalie Crinière provides the backdrop for what are mainly gowns, since this is a retrospective of fashion designer Christian Dior...
This summer in Venice the Biennale is stealing all the attention. Which is why contemporary art lovers might miss an exceptional Philip Guston (1913-1980) exhibition at Gallerie dell’Accademia. Guston, an American painter with a distinctive verve, is known for having...
There’s no denying it: the new map of wealthy nations is directly influencing the art market. In the field of modern art, even if Europe with Picasso at the helm (the record price for his work is $179 million, set in 2015) has represented the inner circle of...
DOCUMENTA It attracts serious attention in contemporary art circles but there isn’t an awful lot of love for it. Documenta, the legendary mega-exhibition, happens every five years in the sad, small German town of Kassel. The show has always been intellectual and...
If there is one unmissable modern art exhibition this summer it has to be Portraits by Cézanne (1839-1906) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GWacaEf4I0 In 60 paintings it proves many things, first of all the museum’s pulling...
Overlooked during her lifetime, Carol Rama is enjoying a spectacular success two years after she died at the age of 97. Currently the Palazzo Ca’Nova in Venice and the New Museum in New York are both showing the artist’s work. Hailing from Turin, Carol Rama produced a...
The tragedy of great artists is their far-sightedness means they’re often misunderstood. Take the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the very big names in world photography, someone who in the 1930s was throwing himself into a new genre we refer to...
Magisterial, beautiful and comprehensively documented. ' Primitive Picasso' at the Musée du Quai Branly is pieced together like a police investigation and questions commonly held assumptions about the greatest painter of the 20th century,Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Or...