Displaying items by tag: aurelie filippetti

The French President, François Hollande, yesterday, 26 August, named Fleur Pellerin as the new minister of culture in France’s reshuffled cabinet. She succeeds Aurélie Filippetti, who published an open letter of resignation in the newspaper Le Monde on Monday after a dramatic split in the French cabinet that emerged this weekend. Pellerin was the minister of foreign trade and tourism in the first government under Prime Minister Manuel Valls from April this year.

A rising political star, Pellerin previously served as the delegate for small and medium enterprises, innovation and the digital economy at the finance ministry.

France’s outgoing culture minister Aurélie Filipetti has joined Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg in blasting President François Hollande’s economic policy and declaring that she will not be part of the reshuffled government to be announced Tuesday. Ex-education minister Benoît Hamon is also among the rebels.

The director of the Pompidou-Metz Laurent Le Bon has been appointed president of the Musée Picasso in Paris, which is due to reopen at the end of September after a five-year refurbishment. Le Bon succeeds to Anne Baldassari, who was dismissed last month due to her much-criticized management style.

Picasso Museum chair Anne Baldassari has been removed from her post by Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti in response to complaints about the poor condition of the facility, which is slated to reopen in September, the French Culture Ministry said Tuesday.

Filippetti had asked the Inspector General's Office for Cultural Affairs, or ICAG, to prepare a report on the museum, which has been plagued by delays in its remodeling and complaints from the Picasso heirs that France does not value the painter.

On Tuesday, January 21, France’s Minister of Culture and Communication, Aurélie Filippetti, announced that the country would return three artworks that were looted during World War II to their rightful owners. The works include a 17th century landscape by the Flemish painter Joos de Momper, an 18th century portrait, and an oil on wood Madonna.

The works are among over 2,000 objects that have been held in temporary custody by French museums since the end of World War II. Some critics have spoken out against France, claiming that the country has not been proactive enough in terms of restitution efforts.

Since the end of World War II, France has returned around 80 looted artworks.

During the French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1799, French troops took Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577-1640) The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus from the Tournai cathedral in Belgium. The work was whisked away to Paris and in 1801 it was sent to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France.

The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus is one half of a diptych that was commissioned for the cathedral by the bishop of Tournai in 1635. Napoleon’s army stole both The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus and its accompanying work, The Freeing of the Souls from Purgatory, which was returned to the cathedral in 1818.

Tournai officials are adamant about having the Rubens painting returned to the cathedral. Ruby Demotte, president of the French Community of Belgium, has penned a letter to French president Francois Hollande as well as to the French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti asking that the work be sent back to Belgium. Demotte made the same attempt last year but never received a response from the French government.

Tournai recently completed a major renovation of its cathedral and are hoping to finally reunite the two Rubens paintings.