Displaying items by tag: Paris

The first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to the extraordinary range of nudes by Edgar Degas—tracing their evolution from the artist’s early years, through the private and public images of brothels and bathers in the 1870s and 1880s, to the post-Impressionist nudes of the end of his career—will be presented by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Degas and the Nude, on view October 9, 2011, through February 5, 2012, at the MFA, will offer a groundbreaking examination of Degas’s concept of the human body during the course of 50 years by showing his work within the broader context of his forebears, contemporaries, and followers in 19th-century France, among them Ingres, Delacroix, Cassatt, Caillebotte, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and Picasso. Assembled from the collections of more than 50 lenders from around the world are approximately 165 works—145 by Degas—including paintings, pastels, drawings, monotypes, etchings, lithographs, and sculptures, many of which have never been on view in the United States. After its debut in the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Gallery—its only US venue—Degas and the Nude will be shown at the Musée d’Orsay from March 12–July 1, 2012. Presentation of the exhibition in Boston is made possible by Bank of America. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The 19th-century French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917), a founding member of the Impressionist group who gravitated toward realism, is acclaimed for his mastery of a wide range of genres, which he executed in all media using a variety of techniques. In addition to his famous depictions of ballet dancers or racing subjects, Degas’s work also included history paintings, portraits, landscapes, and scenes of urban leisure. This exhibition, however, will focus entirely on his nudes, illustrating the transformation of Degas’s treatment of the human form throughout half a century—from early life drawings in the 1850s, to overtly sexual imagery, to gritty realist nudes, and beyond to the lyrical and dynamic bodies of the last decade of his working life when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media.

“Degas and the Nude will be a revelation for our visitors. It will offer a number of surprises—for instance, we’ll reunite several of Degas’s black-and-white monotypes with the corresponding pastel ‘twins’ for the first time since they left the artist’s studio,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “Visitors will see the progression of his nudes and the very heart of Degas’s fascination with the body and its range of emotion and movement. He pursued that fascination in portraits, and above all in images of dancers, but in the nude we see the body in its purest form…through Degas’s eye and imagination.”

Degas and the Nude draws from some of the finest collections in the world. In addition to the MFA and Musée d’Orsay—the single largest lender, with more than 60 works—these include the National Gallery and Courtauld Gallery, London; the Musée Andre Malraux, Le Havre; museums and private collections in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland; as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many other museums and private collections in North America. The exhibition will feature such masterpieces as Young Spartans Exercising (1860-62, National Gallery, London) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863–65, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), two of Degas’s greatest history paintings; and The Tub (about 1886, Musée d’Orsay), a pastel completed at the height of his career and presented at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. It will also offer context to this exploration of the artist’s nudes by juxtaposing his works with those created by major artists who influenced—or were influenced by—Degas, including Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero (1819-39, National Gallery, London), Caillebotte’s Man at his Bath (1884, Private Collection), and Picasso’s Nude on a Red Background (1906, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris).

More than three years in the making, Degas and the Nude was conceived by George T.M. Shackelford, Chair, Art of Europe and Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the MFA, who co-organized the exhibition with Xavier Rey, Curator of Paintings, Musée d'Orsay. “Our project explores how Degas exploited all of the body’s expressive possibilities,” Shackelford said. “It shows how his personal vision of the nude informed his notion of modernity, and how he abandoned the classical or historical form in favor of a figure seen in her own time and setting, whether engaged in shockingly carnal acts or just stepping out of an ordinary bath.”

“The first works by Degas to enter the collections of the French State were pastels of nudes bequeathed to the nation by Gustave Caillebotte in 1894,” said Xavier Rey, exhibition co-curator. “In the ensuing century, the Musée d’Orsay has become The Tub, 1886, Edgar Degas the world’s greatest repository of Degas’s depictions of the nude—in paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculpture. We take pride in co-organizing this major international project, which will be one of the important exhibitions in Paris in 2012.”

Degas and the Nude is organized into six sections, which will explore:

• Degas’s earliest nudes, from about 1855 to 1862
• The artist’s early masterwork, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, and the studies that preceded it
• Brothel monotypes Degas executed in the latter half of the 1870s
• Transformation of Degas’s brothel imagery to scenes of daily life
• Select works from the artist’s key years of 1884–86
• Degas’s last years as an artist, from about 1890 to 1905

The exhibition will begin with a selection of the artist’s first nudes, including Study of Michelangelo’s Bound Slave (1855–60, Private Collection), one of Degas’s many studies of works by Renaissance artists that he made in Paris or in Italy, where he drew from live models at Rome’s French Academy. Many life studies and paintings created as part of this early academic training will be on display, as well as drawings made for early figural compositions, culminating in the painting Young Spartans Exercising (1860–62, National Gallery, London), a depiction of girls beckoning or taunting a group of boys, with the landscape of ancient Sparta as a background.

One of Degas’s most notable works incorporating nudes, the history painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, will be the focal point of the second section of the exhibition. The often overlooked masterpiece was the first work Degas exhibited at the  official Salon in 1865. It will offer an early view of some of the many poses the artist would repeat throughout his career. Complementing it will be more than a dozen of the studies that preceded it, as well as works by other artists who exerted an influence on Degas in the conception and elaboration of the painting, such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), whose Angelica Saved by Ruggiero will be displayed along with a masterwork by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863): The Death of Sardanapalus (1844, Philadelphia Museum of Art). These two French masters, as well as artists such as Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), provided inspiration for the young Degas. Two paintings by Degas from the later 1860s also will be shown: Interior (The Rape) (1868–69, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Peasant Girls Bathing in the Sea at Dusk (about 1869, revised later, Private Collection).

The exhibition’s third section will be devoted to the brothel monotypes that Degas executed in the latter half of the 1870s— images that are at times caricature-like, ironic, pornographic, or even unexpectedly tender. These often sexually explicit scenes depict women in brothels: waiting for clients, as in The Reluctant Client (1876-77, National Gallery of Canada), and engaging in sexual acts, as in Two Women (1876–77, MFA). Most of these works are relatively small in scale, made as drawings using brush and greasy ink on metal plates, which were then printed to yield one proof (“mono-type”); sometimes a second, fainter, impression was taken. The monotypes were occasionally touched with pastel; some—more often the second impressions—were completely covered with color to become small pictures, ready for sale or gift.

The evolution of Degas’s nudes will continue in a following section, shifting from overtly sexual imagery to the everyday, “naturalist” nudes, as seen in the artist’s spontaneous views of ordinary, seemingly unposed women at various stages of undress or performing “la toilette”—bathing, drying, or grooming themselves. These monotypes will highlight the emergence of the bather as a central theme in Degas’s art—one that he would explore from the middle of the 1880s until the end of his career. Many of these later monotypes were made in a way that differed from the first ones, showing the artist’s interest in exploring a variety of techniques and materials. Rather than painting his image with a brush, Degas inked the entire plate and “pulled” the image out of the ink with selective wiping and scraping. In this section, some monotypes will be united with their corresponding pastels for what is believed to be the first time. These include the monotype Woman in a Bathtub (about 1850–85, Private Collection), and the pastel over monotype Woman in Her Bath, Sponging her Leg (1883–84, Musée d’Orsay). Other pastels and oil paintings will be featured here, as well as comparisons to the work of Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926), Woman Bathing (1890–91, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), La Toilette (Rousse) (1889, Musée d’Orsay). The section will culminate in a group of large-scale oil paintings by Degas and his friends Gustave Caillbotte (1848–1894) and Henri Gervex (1852–1929), made between the years 1878 and about 1884.

Works from a pivotal time in Degas’s career, 1884–86, will be examined in section five of the exhibition. Two examples, The Tub (1885–86, Musée d’Orsay) and Woman Dressing Herself (1885–86, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) were included in the last Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in the spring of 1886. In addition, comparative paintings by Pierre- Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Woman Combing Her Hair (1882–83, Private Collection), and Puvis de Chavannes, Young Woman at Her Toilette (1883, Musée d’Orsay), will be displayed, as well as works from the late 1880s that expand upon those created a few years earlier. Also included will be the sculpture The Tub (Musée d’Orsay, 1889 modeled, cast 1920–21), cast in bronze after the artist’s death.

Degas and the Nude will conclude with an exploration of Degas’s last years as an artist, from about 1890 to 1905. “During this period, Degas is focused almost exclusively on the bather, with the exception of a few great drawings and sculptures depicting dancers. His color sense grows bolder, and as he nears the end of the 1890s, his painting and drawing technique become more experimental and, likewise, more bold,” explained Shackelford. “Influences of such artists as Gauguin and Rodin are felt in his painted compositions and sculpture. Sinuous lines, sensual hatchings, delicate blending and shading, and large scale mark his later charcoal drawings of bathers, among the most accomplished sheets in his career, and a radical departure from the carefully rendered nudes of 1855–1865.” Featured here will be the largest single grouping in the exhibition, which will showcase Degas’s masterpieces, After the Bath (about 1896, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and After the Bath (1895-1900, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). In addition, to illustrate Degas’s influence on the next generation of great artists, paintings by Degas will be juxtaposed with those by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Henry Matisse (1889–1954), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In the context of Degas’s great nudes of the 1890s, Bonnard’s Indolence (1899, Musée d’Orsay), Matisse’s Carmelina (1903, MFA), and Picasso’s Nude on a Red Background (1906, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris) take on new meaning, as masterworks by the youthful standard-bearers of Degas’s post-Impressionist style in a new century.

It’s the ultimate phallic symbol.

When Siegmund (in Act I of Wagner’s opera “Die Walkure”) pulls the sword from the tree and ecstatically embraces his twin sister we know that incest is just around the corner.

“The Sword -- Uses, Myths and Symbols,” a show at the Musee de Cluny in Paris, includes the weapon that allegedly belonged to Jeanne d’Arc. It’s the exception that confirms the rule: The sword was emblematic of an all-male universe.

The 120 or so exhibits trace its history throughout the Middle Ages with digressions into more recent times.

It was the Vikings who, in the sixth century, gave the sword its definitive form, characterized by four components -- the pommel, the grip, the hilt and the blade. The Vikings were also the first to forge the blade from carbonized iron.

Before guns made them obsolete, swords were an essential part of a knight’s equipment. The higher his rank, the more he insisted on decoration and elegant shape.

There are some remarkable specimens in the show, such as the hunting rapier of Rene d’Anjou, King of Naples (1409-80), or the sword of Philip the Fair (1478-1506), the first Habsburg king of Castile and father of Charles V.

The symbolic use is even more telling. In the rituals of European monarchies, the sword played an essential role. The most important piece in the exhibition is “Joyeuse,” also called “Charlemagne’s Sword,” which was used during the coronation of French kings up to the 19th century.

Florence, 24 June (AKI) - Italy has launched a campaign to convince the Louvre Museum in Paris to lend the Mona Lisa painting to Florence's Uffizi Gallery in 2013 to mark the 100th anniversary of its recovery following one of history's most famous art thefts.

The Italian Culture Ministry and the Province of Florence have jointly launched an appeal to the French to lend them what may be the world's most famous masterpieces, but the prestigious French museum said the painting is not in the condition to withstand the trip south.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was briefly displayed in the Uffizi in 1913 after being recovered in a Florence hotel two years after its theft from the Louvre.

That was the last time it appeared in Italy and only one of three times the work was displayed outside of the Louvre, according to a statement posted on Thursday on the Province of Florence website.

Starting with Italian politicians, the initiative aims to collect at least 100,000 signatures to be sent to France in around six months, the statement said.

The annual summer art tour is finally over. It was bookended by the Venice Biennale and the mega-fair Art Basel and included a few stops in between. Basel was packed with collectors and dealers and was very successful, with art changing hands at the fastest pace we’ve seen since ’07. If the art market isn’t 90 percent back to the good old days it’s damn close.

But I don’t obsess over art fairs; instead I go to museums where there’s nothing to buy but plenty to learn.

In Basel, the Beyeler Foundation is always my first stop. Director Sam Keller followed up last year’s Basquiat blockbuster show with a tag team extravaganza: “Constantin Brancusi-Richard Serra.” The show included so many rarely seen works that it wowed everyone … everyone except me.

Brancusi defined the abstraction of form that announced the beginning of modern sculpture, and the show presented multiple versions of signature works like Bird in Space and The Kiss. My favorite was the five-foot-high wood sculpture Adam and Eve, in which two abstracted gaping mouths over a phallic form sit on top of a zigzag pedestal that combines Coptic architecture with influences from African Lega sculpture. Unlike some classic works that are overexposed, Brancusi’s sculptures never look kitsch, not because they defined history, but because their sober reduction of form gives them a powerful religious aura. Mr. Serra, too, is an artist I grudgingly love. Although his work is somewhat repetitive, it succeeds in being at once heavy and light even though his scale is monumental: he makes you feel like his art is designed to last forever, and it probably will—the beautiful Corten steel it’s made of weighs tons.

Despite being shoved into the Beyeler’s low-ceilinged galleries, the amazing Serra works looked good, but the pairing of these two great artists didn’t work for me. I see the benefit of refreshing century-old works by mixing them with those of a living master, but with these two I don’t understand what was achieved. I asked several dealers this question and read the exhibition catalogue but the only affinities I could find were the medium—sculpture—and the fact that both artists’ sculptures involve precarious balance: Brancusi’s Bird in Space looks like it’s just on the verge of tipping over and Mr. Serra’s huge, twisting, steel slabs appear like they are just about to topple over, like giant dominos.

On the whole, the pairing reminded me of last year’s failed blockbuster The Tourist, a film starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in Venice: both stars were hot, but they had no chemistry. If a fresh dialogue was the point of the show, I think a Brancusi-Carl Andre match would have worked better. Mr. Andre’s still the dark and unsung hero of American minimalism. He was tried and acquitted of murdering his artist wife, Ana Mendieta, in 1988 and most museums won’t touch him, but his works are sober and powerful, the wooden railroad ties he uses are no doubt directly inspired by Brancusi, and his metal floor pieces wouldn’t tower over Brancusi’s more delicate scale. Apparently Mr. Andre even knew Brancusi in the 1950’s. Mr. Andre’s moment in the spotlight will have to wait until 2013, when the Dia Foundation gives the 76-year-old his first American retrospective in 40 years.

Paris is my favorite city, so everything there looks better to me. This was sadly not the case with “l’Art de l’Automobile” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an exhibition dubbed “masterpieces from the Ralph Lauren car collection.” I’m a vintage car lover and I’ve owned some pretty nice Italian and French pre- and postwar rust boxes, though nothing as good as what Mr. Lauren has. I drive mine every weekend, and his look like they haven’t been started in a decade: the collection is probably the most overrestored and underdriven group of blue-chip collector status symbols in the world.

Unlike their European counterparts, American collectors are known to buy only perfect examples of just about everything. They won’t buy an African sculpture with a broken arm or a Khmer torso if it’s headless. They don’t want imperfections or aging in their Art Deco, or a Mondrian painting with its original cracks and patina. And so, when selling to the Americans, dealers restore the arms and fill in the paint on the Mondrians. Like them, Mr. Lauren has overrestored his cars, with chrome shinier and leather more supple than any car offered in the past century, including those of the great Ettore Bugatti. The fact that American collectors have favored the overrestored stuff for decades says something about our American culture: we refuse to accept things, as the French say, “dans son jus”; instead we clean them up and present them devoid of aging and wrinkles (think face lift).

We want the old stuff to look shiny and new, even if it’s a lie.

Ralph Lauren clothes, which are so successful you can find them from Europe to Asia, have a similar point of view: they are smart and beautifully made selections of other people’s design. Whether British or American classics, they are always high-quality copies. But copies and overrestoration are not for me; I like cars and paintings with patina. When something is old but doesn’t show its age, I’m suspicious. Sources tell me that Mr. Lauren’s fabulous Ferrari 250 GTO is actually a rebodied car with period chassis and motor, and that his fabulous Bugatti Atlantic is reupholstered in leathers that are not period options, meaning the chrome and paint job are not what Bugatti offered back in the day. I was also disappointed not to see a fabulous Ferrari Spyder California, or a Jaguar C-type, or some eccentric choices in the display. Then again, maybe I’m just too jealous of his Jaguar D-type and gorgeous XKSS to think straight.

In the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris is an interesting Richard Prince show through June 26 titled “American Prayer,” which combines his extensive book collection from what he calls the “Beat-Hippie-Punk” generation with some of his newer book-related art works. It includes important dedicated editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well as amazing hand-written letters from Jimmy Hendrix to his father, ones in which he complains about not getting paid or not even getting a gig.

The complex and nuanced lifestyle of the elite in Paris during the fifty-year reign of King Louis XV (reigned 1723-1774) is re-imagined through art and material culture in Paris: Life & Luxury, organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Paintings, sculpture, applied arts, drawings, metalwork, furniture, architectural fittings, lighting and hearth fixtures, scientific and musical instruments, clocks and watches, textiles and dress, books, and maps embody the visual aesthetics of the era while also revealing the social values of the enormously influential sector of society responsible for making Paris the fashion and cultural epicenter of Europe.

A group of allegorical paintings, The Four Times of Day, by Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), lays out the organizing principle of the exhibition, in which objects are grouped together according to a sequence of daily activities. The subjects of Lancret's scenes are rising and dressing in Morning (Fig. 1), setting pocket watches in Midday, playing a game of trictrac in Afternoon, and bathing in Evening. The images provide a plethora of details about the everyday elite life in mid-eighteenth-century France, a lifestyle now difficult to grasp because the extant objects are dispersed physically, across museum collections, and intellectually, across academic disciplines.

n the 1870s, an emperor and a baron undertook the remaking of Paris: Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann's urban renewal project converted clusters of medieval warrens into the Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards and rows of handsome buildings. Impressionist painters showed that new Paris on their canvases — but one of them had a very different perspective.

Gustave Caillebotte's best-known work, Paris Street: Rainy Day (above), painted in 1877, shows a vast cobblestone street, stretching out in front of looming, wedge-shaped buildings. The street is dotted with dark umbrellas that shelter top-hatted men, and women in long skirts — all looking vague and a little disoriented. That was a major subject of Caillebotte's: What the modernization of Paris was doing to its people.

"They seem to be quite alone," says Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, curator of the Jacquemart-Andre Museum. "Every person is lost in a very wide world."

The Jacquemart-Andre Museum, which is featuring an exhibition of Caillebotte's work, is located on Boulevard Haussmann — a broad and busy thoroughfare where, in the 1870s, wealthy Parisians built their mansions. (The museum was once the home of banker Edouard Andre and his wife, Nelie Jacquemart.) Caillebotte lived just down the street, and painted what was happening to Paris when Baron Haussmann was remaking it.

In Caillebotte's paintings, men leaning on new bridges seem engulfed by steel girders. Others stand on balconies, looking down at the Boulevard Haussmann — above, yet somehow dwarfed by, the street.

"Modern life doesn't create close relations between human beings," Garnot says. "You are [in] complete loneliness in these new buildings, new avenues, new boulevards. There's something quite sad about that."

Caillebotte's contemporaries — Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissaro — also put this "modern" Paris in their paintings. But theirs is a Paris peopled by happy dancers, or sociable boaters, or busy shoppers, or flag-waving parade marchers.

"They just wanted to show pleasant persons or fun activities," Garnot says, "not the kind of loneliness that you find [in Caillebotte.]"

It's Caillebotte's perspectives — his wide-angled, panoramic views — that shade the paintings with sadness. The zooming angles and thrusting spaces are daring, compelling, dramatic and totally original.

Not himself an Impressionist, Caillebotte loved what those painters and others were doing. He befriended them — Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro and Cezanne — at local cafes. Garnot says Manet had the habit of receiving friends at the Cafe Guerbois. Caillebotte decided to do the same thing — hosting the artists once a week.

Caillebotte didn't just wine and dine his artist friends — he loaned them money (in fact, he paid the rent on Monet's studio for a while.) And most importantly, he bought their paintings for top dollar. Caillebotte was very wealthy; his father had made a fortune supplying Napoleon's army with uniforms, bedding and other materials. Gustave inherited that fortune at age 26.

Don't be alarmed! This strange blob in the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysees is not some alien creature from the Paris sewers mulching everything in its path.

The sci-fi looking monster which seems to appear from round the corner to fill the cavernous expanse is part of the current Monumenta exhibition.
It is the work of British artist Anish Kapoor and the first time he has shown a work in the French capital for 30 years.

Leviathan is 35 metres high and comprised of tautly-stretched PVC over a giant metal frame and is the highlight of the exhibition which opens tomorrow and runs until June 23.People can walk around it and inside it.

Kapoor said: 'My ambition is to create a space within a space, responding to the great height and light of the nave of the Grand Palais.
'People will be invited to enter the artwor to immerse themselves in its colour and it will be I hope a contemplative, poetic experience.'

The sale of a 20th-century design collection, described as the world’s finest, has ended with furniture maker Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann the best-selling name.

The Christie’s International three-day sale in Paris of the contents of the Chateau de Gourdon museum accumulated by Laurent Negro raised 42.4 million euros ($60 million) with fees. Demand was selective. The total at hammer prices was lower than the estimated 40 million euros to 60 million euros, and less than the 59.2 million euros for 150 lots of modern decorative art sold on Feb. 24, 2009, on behalf of the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge.

Provenance is important in design auctions, and dealers were comparing this sale with the Saint Laurent event at which an Eileen Gray chair made a record 21.9 million euros. Gray’s works sold for smaller sums this time and she was eclipsed by the French Art Deco designer Ruhlmann, whose 35 pieces raised more than 13 million euros.

“The Chateau de Gourdon is the greatest collection of 20th-century design that has come up for auction,” the London- based dealer Sean Berg said. “When the biggest collector becomes the seller, this creates problems, though. It’s like having a Premier League of buyers without Manchester United.”

Negro, 39, was clearing out the entire contents of his medieval castle, near Grasse, Provence, to make more living space. The centerpiece of the Palais de Tokyo sale was 500 examples of Art Deco, Art Nouveau and modernist design that he’d bought within the last 15 years, often for big-ticket prices.

Father’s Armor

Christie’s found buyers for 84 percent of the 860 lots in total, which also included Old Masters and antique armor that had been collected by Negro’s father, who had started temporary employment company Bis SA.

The March 29 evening auction raised 24.3 million euros, with Ruhlmann works capturing four out of the five top prices.

An adjustable chaise longue “Aux Skis” sold for a record 2.9 million euros and a black-lacquer “Tardieu” desk for 2.3 million euros. Both pieces dated from 1929 and had high estimates of 3 million euros.

The chaise longue -- one of two pieces in the sale designated a “national treasure” by the French government -- sold to a European collector, while the desk went to the Paris dealer Cheska Vallois, who won Gray’s “dragons” armchair at the YSL sale.

An Asian collector paid 1.8 million euros for a 1925 ebony “Lassalle” commode by Ruhlmann. The price was more than three times the low estimate.