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

Pwo Mask, Tshokwe, collected y G. Le Paige, jesuit missionary before 1948, musée Royal de l’Afrique centrale Tervuren

The African Museum of Tervuren in Brussels has a remarkable collection of Congo art due to the long colonisation of the country by Belgium and we are lucky at the moment to have 160 works rarely shown before, exhibited at Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac and curated by Julien Volper. “La part de l’Ombre” (Out of the Shadows) includes statues, masks and everyday objects from Southwest Congo made between 1875 and 1950 in the land of twelve different people with 28 million inhabitants, where Kinshasa is located. Masks were used by sculptors to compete artistically and were worn only by men for dances and ceremonies. A section is devoted to the mukanda initiation rite of young boys entering adulthood.Read More

Guercino, Venus nursing Cupid, 1610-1620, is one of the 5000 drawings of Foundation Cini, © Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Hôtel de Caumont, in Aix en Provence, is a beautiful small XVIII th century hôtel particulier in the center of town, near place des Quatre Dauphins and cour Mirabeau and, since 2015, it houses exquisite exhibitions: “Treasures of Venice, the Cini collection” is on until March 27. It is always a joy to visit the town off season, when the crowds of the Opera festival are not invading the space. And I was mesmerized by the quality of the Vittorio Cini collection, lent this winter to celebrate the 70 years of the Cini Foundation in Venice and created by the Ferrara born entrepreneur, in memory of his son, Giorgio, who died in a plane crash. It is a rare collection of 4 000 Renaissance paintings, books, sculptures and drawings which you can see in Venice at the Palazzo in Dorsoduro and on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore where the research center is based.Read More

Jan Fabre, “Holy Dung Beetle with Laurel Tree”, 2017, MusVerre, acquired in 2021

You might remember that two years ago, I was ecstatic  about a glass museum, MusVerre, located in Sars Poteries, near Maubeuge, a few miles from the Belgian border. It is hard (3hrs from Paris) to get to other than by car, but once you are there, the pleasure is immense. I returned last week for the opening of the new exhibition , “Cabinet de Curiosités”, and I discovered many International glass artists and a British star, Elliot Walker, the glassblower winner of the Netflix Blown Away series, who made a glass hat before our eyes in an hour and a half. He was literally dancing in the workshop where large ovens function all year round. For, as well as being one of the foremost glass museum in the world, MusVerre has a strong activity of artists in residence and internships. And in the hallway, Claire Deleurme shows a thousand glass sewing dens on a large wall which she has made during her seventy day residency. Her installation “Histoire de Famille”, which tells the secret language of daily objects, is spectacular. Read More

“The greedy cat piercing the canvas to eat the herrings”, ca 1800-1805, Collection Farida et Henri Seydoux, Paris, © Guillaume Benoît

For her last exhibition at Musée Cognacq-Jay before moving on to Le Petit Palais, Annick Lemoine, offers us a sweet show with 130 works full of humor depicting the streets of Paris on the long period covering the French Revolution, Napoléon, and Louis Philippe. Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) was born in the north of France and moved to Paris at 24. He liked to watch people on the streets and depicted various sceneries full of life as well as more intimate ones like two girls kissing in a bedroom. He also invented the quick portrait which he did in two hours and sold for a modest sum to Parisians and visitors. They were all framed the same way and some of the five thousands he made, feature on a wall of the museum. He also made a number of self-portraits and introduced his face in many paintings. The curators were kind enough to signal every time he appears with a red frame on the cartels which are often at child’s height.Read More

“Family Romance”, 1993 at Centre Pompidou with “Hinoki”, cypress wood (in the back), 2007

I first started with the Charles Ray show at Centre Pompidou which occupies a large part of the 6 th floor gallery and walked down to the Pinault Collection at Bourse du Commerce to see more of this Chicago born Californian artist who has suddenly taken over the Paris contemporary art scene. It is quite a lovely way to go through the gardens of Saint Eustache and the fifteen minute walk gives you the time to digest the first sculptures and wonder “Do I really like this artist”? At first I thought this would be another gimmicky event Jeff Koons style but when I started reading his thoughts, I understood a bit more of what he is all about. One thing seems sure,  collector Pinault is the impulse for this exhibition at Musée National d’Art Moderne. Are French museums becoming the puppets of private collectors?Read More