A very personal and subjective view of Paris life for all of you who are curious of what's going on in France

Unittled, 1960 is reminiscent of the sunset

René Laubiès was an ascetic. He spent winters in India where he lived in total simplicity and painted on paper. When he came back to France in the spring, he glued (maroufler) his papers on wood and they became magical paintings. Alain Margaron is a patient dealer. He collected Laubiès’ works for years in his lifetime and the artist gave him a number of paintings from his studio,  just before he died in Mangalore in complete solitude in 2006. The show in the Marais is soothing, luminous and very exciting. Read More

Paul Mascart, Mounts Koghis, 1933. While he was custom officer in Noumea he painted many sceneries

The “colonies” are exhibited front stage at Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac in the show “Peintures des Lointains” (paintings of faraway countries), a group of two hundred works from its collections. Explorers, French civil servants turned painters, members of the minister of colonies, museum curators, take us through their adventures and let us discover Tahiti, Madagascar, Africa and Indochina with their stories and their drawings. They are not politically correct but they deliver images of a vanished world, painted between 1830 and 1930. Strangely enough, there are few photographs.

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Anton Mauve, Morning ride on the beach, 1876, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

After the huge success of Swedish painter Anders Zorn‘s exhibition last fall, Petit Palais is astonishing us with a new show of “Dutch painters in Paris from 1789 to 1914”. From Frederik Kaemmerer to Piet Mondrian, we discover that Ary Scheffer was born in the Netherlands and we follow the artists in Barbizon (Jacob Maris), in Montmartre (Kees Van Dongen) and all around Paris. The show is superb with a great variety of themes and styles and an attractive scenography which unites the French and the Dutch painters. Do not miss it!

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Maxime Le Boucher, Visit of Louis XV th to Madame Louise de France, his daughter

You are going to think I have become a bigot and can only write about churches and nuns but my discovery of the week is the museum of Art and history  in Saint Denis, set in an old Carmel where Louis XVth’ seventh daughter and last child (Madame Dernière) became a nun in 1770. It was only a 20 minute metro ride from the 8 th arrondissement and it is a good excuse to visit the Royal Basilica where all the kings and queens of France are buried, ten minutes away.Read More

Georges Michel, Montmartre en hiver (Montmartre in winter), Munich, gallery Arnoldi-Livie

He was called the “Ruisdael of Montmartre” and worked at the Louvre with Vivant Denon on restoring the collections of Dutch paintings. He has made more than a thousand paintings with cloudy skies and rainy countrysides. Georges Michel, (1763-1843) a French painter who hardly ever left Paris, is the topic of an exhibition “Le paysage sublime” at Fondation Custodia, which specializes in drawings and Dutch works. Read More