This is 1970 and we are in Denver, Colorado. Robert Adams, a professor in American literature at Colorado College, becomes a full time photographer when his first four prints are bought by MoMA. Fondation Cartier Bresson shows for the first time in Paris his series “Our Lives and Our Children” dedicated to the nuclear danger of the Rocky flats factories near Denver. The black and white small prints seem pretty normal. They hide a huge threat which not many artists had uncovered at the time. Read More
Musée Jean-Jacques Henner rediscovered
There is a charm to the newly restored house of Jean-Jacques Henner, similar to that of Gustave Moreau on rue La Rochefoucauld. The artist is less well known and the museum serves as residence for young artists who just graduated from Les Beaux Arts. To enliven the place, the curator Claire Bessède, had the idea of inviting Eugénie Alméras to paint there for one year. Her work is exhibited in the galleries.Read More
At Chantilly, plants always reign
What I love about the Journées des Plantes de Chantilly (formerly Courson) is that authenticity and creativity always win. And for the third time a charming lady from Les Jardins d’Ecoute s’il pleut (gardens of listen if it rains!) near La Rochelle, won a prize for its very robust and yet thinly sculpted Arachniodes standishii, a very special fern. A genius potter Jamet, near Le Mans, won a prize for his watering pots which diffuse water while you are on holiday. And they are particularly pretty… And Danish artist Heinrich Braun exhibited for the first time his sculpted willows at Baugaarden. But mostly the sun never left the beautiful park of Chantilly for three days and a record 33 000 visitors attended the garden show.Read More
Galerie Templon makes a move
It was a very festive and family like evening, for the opening of Daniel Templon’s new gallery near Beaubourg. Now partners with his son Matthieu, he has given up his first name and redesigned a logo for the fabulous three floor 660 square meter building conceived by his old friend Jean Michel Wilmotte on rue du Grenier Saint Lazare. Jan Fabre was the guest artist and developed “Sexual Belgian Folklore” with statues and drawings all around the space. Crucifixes and virgins are mixed with explicit sexual images. But the atmosphere was relaxed and dinner at l’Ambassade d’Auvergne next door, very traditionally French.Read More
Proust’s Duchess in modern words!
Proust’s news have never been so intense as in the last two years and new writings are being discovered constantly on this prolific novelist. Caroline Weber, who teaches at Columbia University, has delivered an amazingly easy to read, yet erudite, research on the three ladies who inspired the Duchesse de Guermantes. Her book, “Proust’s Duchess” reads like a thriller and makes us travel through the 8 th arrondissement of Paris. I bet it will be the trendy read of the summer in the Hamptons!Read More
Nendo, a Japanese designer for Sèvres
When I visited the Sèvres workshops last year, the Sakura vase by Nendo was just being completed and its magic immediately struck me. The Japanese delicacy fitted perfectly the four century long porcelain technique and suddenly it all made sense. The modernity given to its collections by Ombeline d’Arche, the creative director, was crowned with success. On Thursday May 24, the small but precious shop of Sèvres facing the Comédie Française, will open an exhibition of the Japanese artist, don’t miss it.
Vitebsk in 1918 at Centre Pompidou
When in 1918, he was appointed commissar of Fine arts for Vitebsk the town where he was born, Marc Chagall decided to found a People’s School of art open and free for all. Opened in 1919, it closed in 1922 and revealed some of the greatest figures of the Russian avant garde with El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. Centre Pompidou shows through two hundred and fifty works the importance of this laboratory of revolutionary art in ana exhibition called “the Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk”.Read More
RadioEat, great food and classical music
Every time I step foot at Radio France, the large 1960’s building near the Eiffel Tower where public radio stations and their auditoriums are housed, I feel a slight emotion from the twenty years I spent working at France Culture with Jean Lebrun. And this was a particularly fun lunch shared with former colleague Marc Voinchet, now super successful director of France Musique, at the very trendy and pretty restaurant RadioEat facing the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. Read More