Like many provincial French cities, Lille has a fabulous Arts Museum where Goya rivals with Rubens on the first floor. But what attracted us this week is the reopening of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries down below, which are brilliantly settled in the arched brick … Read More
Germany in the Twenties, and August Sander at Centre Pompidou
The exhibition at Centre Pompidou of “Germany 1920’s, New Objectivity, August Sander” is so wide that one could have split it in two to make it more digestible with its 900 pictures. It presents overlapping narratives of post WWI years and has fantastic art and photographs. It is worth going, with a lot time at hand and a calm mood… … Read More
Martin Basdevant’s pastels at Documents 15
As you know I have a weakness for the charming Documents 15 gallery which always shows interesting and often lesser known print artists. This week Martin Basdevant concentrates on multicolor mountains from Queyras in the Alps, where he spent his childhood and interiors in La Villette where he resides. Trained as an architect and formerly a garden designer, he uses pastel … Read More
Lausanne is worth a visit this summer…
I have not yet been to Lausanne to discover the new Museum quarter designed by the Portuguese firm Aires Mateus, Plateforme 10, near the train station, but from my visit last year, I know what an attractive group of buildings it is. Tatyana Franck, who used to run Photo Elysée, the superb photography museum, is gone to New York where … Read More
“Vegetal” and Chaumet at the Beaux Arts, Exceptional!
This week, at every dinner party, only one word was been mentioned “Vegetal” (botanical): the title of the new fantastic exhibition based on plants’ designs in Chaumet’s jewelry, where one almost regrets that there is not more jewelry. Contemporary artists and classical painters have been united by curator and botanist Marc Jeanson to fill two floors of celebration of nature at Ecole … Read More
Gulbenkian meets Al Thani and Vermeulen enters Studio Harcourt
There are some wonderful artists/artisans around and Maison Parisienne specializes in original creators. One of them, the plumassier (feather magician) Julien Vermeulen, works with feathers and started in fashion before becoming a full time artist. He is being shown at Studio Harcourt, the very pretty studio and gallery of black and white photography in the 16 th arrondissement, from June 23 … Read More
At Musée du Quai Branly, clubs are true sculptures
This new exhibition “Power and Prestige, the Art of clubs in the Pacific ” comes from one man, Steven Hooper, a Cambridge graduate, who since 1977, is a specialist of Oceanian arts and catalogued his grandfather’s James Hooper‘s collection of clubs (massues in French) in the 1970’s. Unlike his grandfather who collected but never travelled, he spent extensive lengths of … Read More
At Christie’s and at Galerie Kugel, Hubert de Givenchy’s taste is revived.
It took a whole year for the French and International teams of Christie’s to organize this “house” sale of Hubert de Givenchy‘s two properties: his apartment in the Hôtel inhabited by the Bemberg on rue de Grenelle, and his country house of Manoir du Jonchet. Bedrooms, gardens, a few salons have been reinvented on avenue Matignon and the privileged visitors … Read More