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

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eve, ca 1815, Montauban, Musée Ingres Bourdelle

It all happened when Jean-Hubert Martin, who lives part of the year near Montauban, discovered a book of photographs of Ingres’ drawings in the library of the museum. He realized that many of Francis Picabia‘s drawings and paintings were directly inspired by Ingres and that the iconoclast artist had obvioulsy seen the book by Jacques Edouard Gatteaux of 120 drawings and paintings published in 1873 and again in 1921. In 1976, Martin had initiated the exhibition on Picabia at Musée National d’art moderne and writes in the catalog that there have been many discoveries since. The show is cocurated with Florence Viguier-Dutheil the dynamic director of Musée Ingres-Bourdelle in Montauban.Read More

Portrait of Doctor Thomas Penrose, 1798, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund © Photo Minneapolis Institute of Art

I was not able to travel to Montpellier to see this exhibition yet, but since you might be in the area for the summer, I wanted to point it out to you because Louis Gauffier, who is fairly unknown to the general public because he died at 39, has brought all the sun of Italy to Provence. The Musée Fabre, founded by his dear friend François-Xavier whom he spent time with in Florence, owns thirty paintings and more drawings and this is how we are able to see these luminous canvases today in a very large retrospective of his works, the first ever “Louis Gauffier, The Voyage in Italy” (until September 7).Read More

Inside the Sixtine Chapel, ca 1875-1880, Paris Musée d’Orsay

Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) is a forgotten painter who was a star in his lifetime, an official portraitist who trained many students when he was director of Ecole des Beaux Arts and helped all Basque artists to come to the capital. He was born in Bayonne, lived for seven years in his teens in Madrid, where he studied with José and Federico de Madrazo, and travelled to Italy at 25. He then settled in Paris and became a praised painter of historical and religious scenes. Many of the portraits exhibited here testify to his aristocratic and rich Jewish models, a clientele he largely developed in the late 1870’s and 1880’s. The show, curated by Sabine Cazenave and Benjamin Couilleaux, is the first since he died in 1922. It is definitely the event of the Côte Basque this summer.Read More

Thundi, Big River, 2010

It is completely fascinating to think that an aboriginal woman painter, who has hardly ever left two islands in the North of Australia, should become the center of attention at Fondation Cartier in Paris! Born on Bentick Island, in the gulf of Carpentaria, in 1924, Sally Gabori was forced in 1948 with 63 other inhabitants, to settle on Mornington island at a Presbyterian mission, after a cyclone and tidal wave flooded their 20 km by 12 km birth place. Soon the children were separated from their families, sent to school in English and forbidden to speak Kaiadilt, their tribe’s language. She remained one of the only elders to speak it and was only allowed to return for short stays to her native island. At 81, while living in a retirement home, she discovered paint at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre. Fondation Cartier  is showing thirty of her monumental paintings, until November 6, in the first exhibition of her works outside Australia.Read More