https://youtu.be/-_9MYKJa9XM?si=uNFHeFS-xmGDFuM9 Paris: creative effervescence A nest teeming with artists: Paris was, for nearly a century up until the Second World War, the global epicenter of an unusually creative effervescence. From Camille...
Alvin Ailey at the Whitney Museum in New York: A Manifesto of “Blood Memories”
https://youtu.be/jTWVZ1gDQsI Human obsession Dance is a human obsession that social media has taken up in extraordinary ways: It’s one of the more heartening trends that spread on the new platforms. Young and old, professional and...
Max Hollein and the Transformations Shaking Up the Metropolitan Museum
Immense ambitions It is a cultural beacon in the United States. It is also the torchbearer of encyclopedic museums worldwide, in competition with the Louvre for the title of world’s greatest museum. This institution housing over 2 million works...
Hilma af Klint in Bilbao: The Gehry Effect that Turns a Museum into a Temple
Klimt or Klint? There are two kinds of modern art enthusiasts. Those who, upon hearing the name Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), assume it to be a typo for a relative of Gustav Klimt, the famous Austrian painter. And the others, fewer in number, who...
New York Modern and Contemporary Auctions: The Best and Worst Surprises
Cattelan from the 2010s There are vogues in Contemporary art, and one might have thought that the New York-based Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (born in 1960) was purely a product of the 2010s. After all, it was in 2016 that this ace of...
Monet at the Courtauld Gallery: It was in the London fog that the last water lilies were born
https://youtu.be/GdhpcQyKQSQ?si=yGQ_hc1rmrktMve8 Lightbulb moments In the lives of artists there are major creative lightbulb moments, the fruit of their diligent research which, from one day to the next, opens up new horizons. In the...
Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York: from Duchamp to Cattelan, Monet to Magritte
https://youtube.com/shorts/sxNNq8lCSXk?si=0RW92w_x3qnCm0Jy Marcel Duchamp In 1964 Marcel Duchamp decided to reissue, in partnership with the Milanese dealer Arturo Schwartz, four “readymades” created in the 1910s. He was the one who invented...
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima”. How the Atom Changed Art, an exhibition in Paris
https://youtu.be/E8nWpzFloYY?si=tIyaq1PSIWQhwz04 Humanity’s greatest catastrophes In 1959, Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras released Hiroshima mon amour, a film punctuated like a refrain by the words of the Japanese hero who tells his French...
Paris-Photo: All the Shades of Man Ray at the Grand Palais
What is a collection? “The collection is a work of art that is offered up for viewing. At first, we advance as though in a forest, not knowing where we are, with no points of reference. But we meet people along the way with whom we enter into...
All the sublime lights of Matisse are in Basel at Fondation Beyeler
https://youtu.be/G3Dq9D7vIK0 Restless spirit When Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the son of a grain merchant, presented himself at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1892, the man who would go on to become one of the greatest painters of the 20th...
Jean Fautrier: Bargain prices at a Paris auction for one of the modern geniuses of French painting
Profession of silent things The genius of artists lies in their ability to give form to the unspeakable. In this regard, the famous 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin found the right expression when he said, "I, who make a profession of...
Caillebotte, “the man who loved men” in Paris before Chicago and Los Angeles
https://youtu.be/nrAm83D8B-E Hot topics Museums and art historians, despite their classical appearance, nowadays tend to focus on “hot topics”, in other words, art that expresses current concerns in an effort to address past injustices . Often...