He proudly announces that he celebrated his 80th birthday on 1 April and carts around an encyclopaedia of art inside his head (1). Born in Germany, Werner Spies has always been fascinated by France where he’s lived since he was 25. The director of the Musée National...
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...
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...
Impressionist and modern sales have been moving in a strange direction of late. Adopting marketing strategies that are unusual to say the least, they respond to a market where ‘high quality items are rare and demand is stronger than ever,’ as Thomas Seydoux, the Swiss...
‘The Thinker’, ‘The Kiss’... Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is a giant of sculpture whose most famous works have almost become clichés (on this idea of Rodin as a cliché, see  the new work by Urs Fischer – a life-sized version of 'The Kiss' in Plasticine, as...
Because in this early part of the 21st century, Marcel Duchamp (born in 1887) is the patron saint of contemporary art. All artistic practices poking fun at the world take the works of this facetious artist as a springboard (and Picabia's too). Every artist who...
Who among us hasn’t felt at least once, while walking by the sea, through a forest, or in the mountains, a kind of mystical impression, a communion with the sky and the earth, a sensation of being drawn towards the sublime absolute. To relive that experience, but...
‘Asia’s Precarious Rise’ was the headline the Wall Street Journal ran across its front cover not long ago (1). In fact, the eyes of the world are turned towards the great Chinese Leviathan to see whether this boom is not in fact a mirage, none more so than the art...