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...
This exhibition is the first of its kind. It doesn't just tell the history of an art dealer but also the history of art, the history of a family and plain History with a capital H, filled with the blood and tears of the Second World War. ‘21 rue La Boétie’ is the...
True connoisseurs of Picasso will already know it well. In the village of Gisors, an hour outside Paris, the Boisgeloup studio is whispered about in hushed tones and is central to the work of the Spanish artist. It’s where he created a collection of exceptional...
Edgar Degas (1834-1917), a major artist from the dawn of modernism, both as a painter and a sculptor, died exactly 100 years ago this year. A hundred years is how long it took for a forgotten box containing 55 unseen drawings by this exceptional artist to appear on...
The greatest artists present us with endless opportunities to discover new sides to their work. A perfect example is at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, where 62 paintings by Claude Monet are currently on display. The thematic hanging and the choice of...
In the pantheon of poets, the most prized names are those collectively known as the maudits – the cursed ones. Literature, like art, has been partial to its martyrs, the ones who died too soon, or who were marginalised by society and who appear to have died at the...