At Musée Picasso, there is a good surprise

parisdiaArtLeave a Comment

Picasso, Paul as Arlequin, 1917

Of course the main attraction at Musée Picasso is the presentation of the collections in a decor created by Sir Paul Smith, the fashion designer who loves color. And it is a great incentive for anyone who is dettered by Picasso’s style to see his masterworks in a calm and playful way. But the surprise for me was to discover Faith Ringgold‘s “Black is beautiful” exhibition. It increases its impact to be presented within the museum which celebrates this year the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso death on April 8. I just happened to have started a puzzle of Ringgold’s Sunflowers sent to me from Boston and was thus totally struck to find her paintings and quilts exhibited in the grand Hotel Salé. A double bill which should attract you.Read More

Rupert Shrive walks to Tours with his Balzac

parisdiaarchitecture, Happy moments, Performing artsLeave a Comment

Rupert Shrive moved his gigantic Balzac from Montmartre to Musée Balzac in the XVI th by foot in 2022

Natasha Fraser Cavassoni was celebrating her birthday near the Buttes Chaumont and I was lucky to sit next to an eccentric English artist Rupert Shrive who was born in Norfolk but settled in Paris many years ago. He was commissioned to make a large head of Balzac for the Paris Balzac museum and decided to move it from his studio in Montmartre by foot. The 3,5 m high sculpture weighs 100 kgs and now that the show in Paris is over, the Musée Balzac in Château de Saché, near Tours, will exhibit it for three years. The artist decided to walk the statue there, on the Chemin de Saint Jacques, with his friend, cinematographer Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva who already filmed the Paris episode. They left Paris on Sunday March 19 th and the opening is on April 4. Their greatest enemy is the WIND. If you have a house on the way, don’t hesitate to go and say hello…Read More

Hangar Y is Frédéric Jousset’s latest coup

parisdiaArt, flowers and gardensLeave a Comment

Ugo Rondinone, Cold Moon, 2011 with the Hangar Y and restaurant in the back

One does not often travel to Meudon, a very royal suburb of Paris, which had a direct road to Versailles in the times of Louis XIV, when minister Louvois owned it. Frédéric Jousset, a successful French financier, has invested the Hangar Y which used to be a storage fro dirigibles in teh 19 th century, and is turning it into a contemporary art center and symposium place. At the opening last Tuesday, he announced that the election of the future President of MEDEF would take place in the industrial building next May. No doubt, the members of French Enterprises will enjoy the walk around the park of sculptures which include Ugo Rondinone, Tony Cragg and Subodh Gupta… His foundation, Art Explora, is running the project with a first exhibition on airplanes curated by Marie Laure Bernadac, formerly at Centre Pompidou where Jousset’s mother has long been a curator herself. The place will be open only on week ends for the public so as to be rented out during the week. A lovely restaurant Le Perchoir on the water, will open in two weeks.

Read More

Musée Bourdelle had a serious facelift and it’s successful

parisdiaarchitecture, Art, flowers and gardensLeave a Comment

Penelope, 1909

The garden was awakening and the first pink magnolias were in bloom to celebrate the 5 million € renovation  of Musée Bourdelle, the house and studio where the turn-of-the century sculptor trained so many famous artists such as Giacometti and Germaine Richier. The architect Bertrand Naut has done an extraordinary job or consolidation of the foundations and restoration of the house located near the Montparnasse train station. Well known for his monumental “Apollo”, for “Penelope” modeled on his wife Stéphanie and his mistress Cléôpatre, “Herakles archer” and his numerous heads of Beethoven, Bourdelle is also the sculptor of Théâtre des Champs Elysées, where he painted frescoes of Leda in the atrium and for which he conceived the façade with Auguste Perret,  in June 1911. There he included Apollo and Bacchus-Dynonisus which he calls, “God of the measured fury”.Read More

A busy week ahead, and full of drawings…

parisdiaArt, AuctionLeave a Comment

Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson, Diana, 2017 © Courtesy the artist and Galerie Aline Vidal at Drawing Now

This week is going to be hot on the drawing side since there are no less than four art fairs, many more exhibitions in private galleries and a large auction by Ader at Hotel Drouot of Talabardon and Gautier‘s paintings. Le Salon du Dessin at the former Stock Exchange, place de la Bourse, Drawing Now at Carreau du Temple, the Paris Print Fair at l’Ecole de Médecine, DDessin on bd de la Tour Maubourg. Galerie Ladrière, Galerie Documents 15, Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes…Read More

1997 at Palais Galliera, with two funerals and Castelbajac dressing the Pope

parisdiaFashionLeave a Comment

Alexander McQueen’s first collection for Givenchy Couture at 27, Spring Summer 1997,

I had no idea that 1997 was such an important date in recent fashion, until I visited “Fashion Big Bang” at Palais Galliera and discovered that it is the year when Alexander McQueen presented his first show at Givenchy and John Galliano at Christian Dior. It also marks the unique moment of Jean Charles de Castelbajac designing all the clothes for Pope Jean Paul II’s Journées mondiales de la Jeunesse in Paris and Stella McCartney‘s first collection at 25. It is the year Gianni Versace died on July 15 in Miami and Princess Diana on August 31 in Paris. The exhibition is very varied with extravagant Yohji Yamamoto gowns and the G-String by Tom Ford for Gucci. The title Big Bang comes from a Paris Vogue cover and marks the preview of the XXI st century fashion.Read More

Giovanni Bellini and family at Jacquemart André

parisdiaArt1 Comment

Giovanni and Gentile Bellini in Jacopo Bellini’s studio, Birth of the Virgin, ca 1453, Musei Reali, Galleria Sabauda, Torino

Musée Jacquemart André offers an exquisite exhibition devoted to Giovanni Bellini (c. 1435-1516), his father Jacopo, brother Gentile and brother in law Andrea Mantegna, a whole generation of painters.  Considered as the father of the Venetian School, he opened the way to the art of colour and tones that came to be characteristic of the art of the sixteenth century in Venice. But his style took a different direction with the arrival of Antonello da Messina who brought the Flemish taste to Venice. The curator of the show,  Neville Rowley works at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and was impressive with his command of multiple languages. He has secured important loans from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Museo Correr, the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, the Petit Palais in Paris and the Louvre, as well as numerous loans from private collections of works some of which have never before been shown to the public.Read More

Pastels are unique at Musée d’Orsay

parisdiaArt1 Comment

Odilon Redon, Young girl with a blue bonnet, early 1890’s

Pastels are this rare kind of paintings which can disappear if not well transported, for the pigments which constitute the drawing sticks are extraordinarily fragile and sensitive to light. While there were some pastellists in the 18 th century such as Maurice Quentin de la Tour or the Swiss Jean Etienne Liotard the “resurrection” (as Charles Bazin called it in 1849) of pastel takes place in the XIX th century. New synthetic pigments and a much wider range of colors enable the artists to develop landscapes and wider scenes than just portraits. In 1885, the Société des pastellistes français is founded in Paris after New York in 1883. And Jean François Millet is one of the precursors with Odilon Redon, Edouard Vuillard and Lucien Lévy Dhurmer.  Musée d’Orsay has brought out ninety five of their five hundred pastels and is showing a new acquisition, “Procession at dusk” by André Devambez.Read More