GASIOROWSKI, ARTISTE POSSEDE PAR SON AMOUR DE LA PEINTURE

Revoir Gérard Gasiorowski aujourd'hui, vingt-quatre ans après sa mort brutale, un jour d'août 1986, quinze ans après sa rétrospective au Centre Pompidou, c'est redécouvrir une évidence : son oeuvre est emblématique de la peinture en France dans les années 1960 et 1970, histoire de pulsions et d'interdits. Nul n'a mieux aimé que lui d'un amour fétichiste et sacrilège cet art que l'on disait alors mort et enterré dans les musées.

Pour comprendre ce que furent cette période, ses engouements et ses dégoûts, rien ne vaut donc une rétrospective Gasiorowski. Comme celle que Frédéric Bonnet et Eric Mangion ont conçue à Nîmes est très dense, abondante en travaux méconnus et accrochée subtilement, la démonstration est impressionnante.

C'est donc d'amour qu'il s'agit : de la liaison compliquée, douloureuse et pour finir tragique entre un jeune homme et cette vieille coquette, la peinture. Gasiorowski, que l'on appelait Gasio, naît en 1930 à Paris. En 1947, il entre à l'Ecole des arts appliqués et y découvre quelques-uns des plus célèbres amants de la dame, Cézanne, Klee, Kandinsky. On imagine son émoi. Mais, en 1952, le jeune homme prend une décision singulière. Au lieu de tirer parti de son apprentissage, il entre dans une compagnie d'assurances. Plus de peinture - ou, du moins, s'il pense à elle, c'est de loin, sans y toucher.
L'abstinence dure onze ans. Et quand Gasiorowski cède à l'attraction à laquelle il a tant résisté, rien n'est simple pour autant. Il ne se précipite pas sur ses pinceaux pour transcrire sensations et émotions par de grands gestes et de fortes couleurs. Il recommence à travailler, mais avec plus de doutes que de certitudes. Deux mouvements contraires l'agitent, le désir et le scepticisme. Pourquoi ajouter encore des toiles à toutes celles accumulées au fil des siècles ? Pourquoi vers 1964, alors que photographie et cinéma dominent évidemment le monde des images ? A cette date, ils sont plusieurs à se poser la question, Raysse et Jacquet en France, Richter et Polke en Allemagne. Les premiers Gasiorowski ressemblent ainsi à des Richter : à l'acrylique sur toile, il agrandit des photos en noir et blanc, filles en maillot de bain ou sans maillot, portraits posés, instantanés. Il les reprend dans le même noir et blanc, avec minutie, comme Richer, qu'il ne connaît pas alors. Cette froideur et cette lenteur s'opposent à tout expressionnisme. C'est de la peinture tenue à distance et comme glacée. Par dérision, Gasiorowski nomme cette série "L'Approche".
Elle donne le ton. Jusqu'au début des années 1980, l'oeuvre est une suite d'approches en effet, toutes interrompues avant que le désir soit consommé. Les tactiques de la frustration sont variées et cruelles. Gasiorowsi fait ainsi l'inventaire des manières qu'il pourrait avoir de peindre : comme Picasso dans les années 1930, dans le genre de l'abstraction géométrique ou gestuelle, dans le style du minimal ou du land-art, à la Beuys ou à la Monory.
Gasiorowsi sait tout du passé ancien ou récent et de l'actualité. Il pastiche et plagie avec aisance : faire du Cézanne, du Gauguin, du Morellet, du Hantaï ou du Barré ne lui pose aucun problème. Tous les supports sont bons, cartes postales, pochettes de disques, maquettes. Il parodie les diagrammes des théoriciens et feint de fonder une Académie des beaux-arts. Il exécute des "croûtes", qu'il appelle ainsi, et inscrit "refusé" au crayon sur ses dessins et ses gouaches, s'invente un double burlesque, Kiga, l'artiste idiot et maniaque. Il joue de l'installation, de la photo, du dessin, du mot, avec une ironie masochiste sans limites. Le carrousel des déguisements et des blagues tourne sans fin.
Une première fois, en 1974, il en descend, le temps d'une suite de gouaches, La guerre, chars et stukas nazis, canons et guerriers. Son père est mort durant l'exode de 1940 et ce malheur fait irruption dans l'oeuvre. Puis, vers 1980, la ronde ralentit. De grandes toiles apparaissent. D'abord saturées de références, elles citent Lascaux, Giotto, l'art océanien - mais d'une façon plus monumentale, admirative, presque grave. En Allemagne, aux Etats-Unis, en France, une nouvelle génération d'artistes apparaît, qui veut faire de la peinture et ne tient plus compte des interdits formulés au nom du minimalisme, du conceptuel, de la dématérialisation de l'oeuvre. Gasiorowski voit-il un signe ? Kiga s'éclipse.
L'atelier d'Arcueil se remplit de toiles en ocre et grisailles, scandées par des gestes en boucles et en explosion. Au début de 1986, un ensemble prend forme, les douze toiles indissociables de la suite "Fertilité". La passion est enfin consommée, la peinture possédée - le titre est clair. Quelques semaines plus tard, Gasiorowski meurt. Il a juste eu le temps de peindre, enfin.

Website : Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain

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Bron/Source : Le Monde

EXHIBITION OF MASTERPIECE PRINTS BY ALBRECHT DÜRER OPENS AT LADE LEVER GALLERY IN LIVERPOOL

Masterpiece prints by Albrecht Dürer, one of the great Renaissance artists, are featured in an exhibition highlighting the influence of his work.
Dürer (1471 – 1528) was the first great artist to achieve fame through prints – he established his reputation throughout Europe while still in his 20s.
"Dürer and Italy" 28 May – 26 September 2010 has engraved classics by the Nuremberg artist alongside Italian works by Dürer’s contemporaries.
The combination illustrates a surprising cultural exchange that took place through the medium of prints from 1500 to Dürer’s death. He had a fascination with Italy from an early age and visited in 1494 and stayed there between 1505 and 1507.
Dürer promoted himself as an artist, studied art and met engravers and exponents in the art of perspective, unknown in Germany. He produced two types of prints.
Cheap woodcuts, often sold as bound sets, were aimed at the popular market while his expensive astonishingly-detailed engravings appealed to artists and collectors.
Prints and engravings are easily transported and can spread an artist’s influence over large distances. Soon Dürer’s work became known to Raphael in Rome just as Dürer knew engravings by Italian artists as a young man in Germany.
Dürer and Italy features a total of 24 prints including 11 by Dürer with his well-known images "The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve)", "The Prodigal Son" and "Melancholia". Wenceslas Hollar’s famous etching of Dürer, after the self-portrait in the Prado art gallery, Spain, is included.
Sandra Penketh, head of Lady Lever Art Gallery, says: “Dürer is the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance whose work has never been out of favour. These wonderful prints demonstrate how far his influence reached in his lifetime and beyond.”
Dürer’s most popular woodcuts were two series of the "Passion of Christ" and another of the "Life of the Virgin" (1511).
His engravings present figures and landscapes of unparalleled beauty that rapidly became highly fashionable, especially in Italy.
Raphael did not make prints himself but wished to publish his imagery so provided sketches to be engraved by artists such as Marcantonio.
Included in the exhibition are Marcantonio’s "Judgement of Paris" and "Massacre of the Innocents" which were both engraved in collaboration with Raphael. They provide a somewhat dry, classical contrast to Dürer’s vision, tinged by his roots in Gothic illustration.

Website : Lady Lever Gallery Liverpool

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Bron/Source : ArtDaily

NEDERLANDSE INSTALLATIE OPENT MAXXI IN ROME

Met de installatie The Stolen Paradise van ontwerpbureau West8 uit Rotterdam is het nieuwe Italiaanse museum voor kunst uit de 21ste eeuw, het MAXXI geopend.
Het museum in Rome beslaat bijna 30.000 vierkante meter ruimte en kostte 150 miljoen euro. Het werd ontworpen door de Brits-Iraakse architect Zaha Hadid. Het MAXXI brengt kunst en architectuur uit de 21e (XXI) eeuw samen.

Website : MAXXI

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Bron/Source : Leeuwarder Courant

EXHIBITION OF 100 MASTERPIECES FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF THE MUSEE D'ORSAY IN TOKYO

The National Art Center in Tokyo present "Post Impressionism:115 Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay", an exhibition that brings together nearly 100 masterpiece paintings from the legendary collections of the Musée d’ Orsay.
France in the late 19th century was home to a diverse array of painters whose fertile genius was shaped by the artistic innovations wrought by the Impressionists. Throughout the later 1880s and the 1890s, these painters— Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, among others —used their own modes of expression to produce imaginative works that earned them a place in history as the Post-Impressionists.
That era of Post-Impressionism serves as the focus of this exhibition. Over the years, Post-Impressionism has been portrayed as a movement that formed the antithesis to Impressionism and set the stage for the emergence of avant-garde painting in the 20th century. However, this depiction does not convey the immense diversity and prolificacy that characterized painting in the Post-Impressionist age, an era powered by crisscrossing streams of art springing forth from the cultural treasure house that was fin-de-siècle Paris.
"Post Impressionism" explores the various facets of painting from the late 19th century on into the early 20th century, beginning with the roots in Impressionism.
"Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay" explores the dramatic changes in late 19th century European art through some of the best-known and much-reproduced paintings. Indeed many of these paintings are central to the Musée d’Orsay’s high reputation, both in France and world-wide.
Post-Impressionism announces a break from Impressionism, the revolutionary movement which occurred in France in the second half of the 19th century. By the mid 1880s, artists were experimenting with even more radical ideas. Van Gogh’s intense, richly coloured surfaces communicate emotionally through the artist’s expressive manipulation of paint. Gauguin’s monumental, decorative and often exotic works stand for a new and at times brutal aesthetic directness.
Cézanne’s mastery of the genres of still-life, landscape and portraiture fulfils his own prophetic promise to ‘astonish with an apple!’ These artists encapsulate the challenges to painting and the development of a multi-faceted avant-garde at this time: Pointillism, Neo-Impressionism, Synthetism, Symbolism, School of Pont-Aven, Cloisonnism, the Nabis and Intimism.
In addition to some of the most famous painters, the exhibition includes Symbolist masterworks by artists who are now less known to a general public, but who had a profound impact on their contemporaries. Visitors will find jewel-like domestic scenes and figures, portraits of friends and family members, as well as several large decorative schemes designed for specific interiors. "Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay" reveals cross-influences between artists, and shows the flowering of the modern movements throughout Europe. These fascinating paintings forecast the development of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and led also to Abstraction in the 20th century.

Website : The National Art Centern Tokyo

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

BUENOS AIRES RETROUVE SON OPERA

Après bien des polémiques et des retards, la restauration du Théâtre Colon est enfin terminée.
Les artisans donnent un dernier coup de lustre au grand escalier en marbre de Vérone du foyer. Dans l'impressionnante salle à l'italienne de 75 mètres de profondeur sur 48 mètres de hauteur, les ingénieurs vérifient l'installation des 2 500 fauteuils tapissés de velours pourpre. Lundi soir, le Théâtre Colon, considéré comme l'une des meilleures salles lyriques au monde, rouvre ses portes, à la veille du bicentenaire de l'Argentine. Seule fausse note: la loge présidentielle restera vide… Cristina Kirchner a refusé à la dernière minute de partager cette soirée de gala avec son rival de droite, le maire de Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri. Ce n'est pas la première crise qui secoue le Colon. Les travaux de rénovation, commencés en 2001, ont suscité de multiples polémiques: fermé en 2006, le théâtre devait ouvrir en mai 2008 pour son centenaire mais des problèmes de financement et les changements de majorité de la ville de Buenos Aires ont paralysé le chantier.
Sa construction, à partir de 1889, avait déjà connu quelques péripéties: entre autres, elle avait été interrompue en 1904 par le meurtre de l'un des deux architectes, Vittorio Meano, assassiné par son majordome jaloux des relations qu'il entretenait avec sa femme…
La qualité acoustique en question
Près d'un siècle plus tard, il s'agit de redonner au Théâtre Colon toute sa splendeur d'origine. La peinture des murs, nettoyée de ses couches successives, a retrouvé son gris perle; le lustre monumental et la fresque de Raul Soldi qui coiffent la salle resplendissent à nouveau. La restauration - titanesque - de cet édifice de 60 000 m2 a mobilisé mille ouvriers et ingénieurs et coûté quelque cent millions de dollars, soit quatre fois le budget initial. «Outre l'amélioration du confort des artistes et des spectateurs, la modernisation de la machinerie théâtrale, dont le monte-charge manuel, il fallait absolument mettre le Colon aux normes de sécurité», explique Mateo Goretti, chargé de la coordination à la mairie.
La grande interrogation porte surtout sur le maintien de l'extraordinaire qualité acoustique que certains travaux pourraient dénaturer. Il s'agit en particulier du remplacement du rideau de scène de 1,5 tonne et des tissus, rideaux et tentures. Selon Rafael Sanchez Quintana, ingénieur acousticien, «des tests ont été pratiqués en laboratoire, dans la salle avant sa fermeture, et après la remise à neuf des sièges et des tentures».
Par ailleurs, les fauteuils ont été conservés à l'identique, afin d'éviter au maximum d'altérer la résonance de la salle. Seul le velours a été ignifugé. En revanche, il n'a pas été possible de rétablir le rideau de scène d'origine. «Il a été restauré au mieux et servira uniquement pour les grandes occasions, précise Mateo Goretti. L'acoustique sera à 99% identique à ce qu'elle était avant la fermeture du théâtre.»

Website : Teatro Colon

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Bron/Source : Le Figaro

PERA MUSEUM WELCOMES COLOMBIAN ARTIST FERNANDE BOTERO'S FIRST ENCOUBTER WITH ISTANBUL

Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum welcomed one of the most exceptional artists of the 21st century, Fernando Botero in İstanbul for the very first time with an exhibition comprising a selection of 64 works.
Botero’s art is not exclusively a narration or a representation, but brings with it the force of an inner vision, of his knocking on life’s door. Protecting his Latin and Colombian identity, Botero has succeeded forming his own style nourished not only by folkloric elements but also by the works of grand masters, and has poured his rich inner world into his works with a sophisticated, humorous and wise approach.
Botero has brought a new interpretation to the aesthetics of our times, and the exhibition depicts this interpretation in six sections – the circus, the bullfight, Latin American people, Latin American life, still lifes and versions from past masters of the history of art. The works of the artist contain many references to his own culture and life, and in a unique style they question the concept of beauty in our century.
From acrobats to matadors, dancing people to naked lovers, cardinals to sad clowns and to musicians, the exhibition invites us to discover Botero’s lyricism and his enchanting world.
Still Life
Still-life paintings play a crucial role in Botero’s work. By the end of the 60s they were regularly nourishing the seduction of an image that went beyond the simple composition of fruits or objects arranged on a table, often revealing a fully fledged world – a world rich and diversified, governed by well-entrenched rules.
“When I paint an apple or an orange, I know that it will be possible to recognize them as mine and that it is I who painted them, because I seek to give to every painted element, even the simplest, a personality that comes from a profound conviction.” Thus, for Botero the overriding issue is to confer an authentic image even to inanimate objects, to still-lifes.
In principle, the elements that make them up are enclosed in a restricted space, made even tighter by the presence of heavy tables that flaunt their rounded volumes and sizes as in Still Life with Lobster, and in the elegant Still Life with Fruits , where Cézanne’s influence is discernible in the studied complexity of the layout and in the abundant drapery that acts as a biding agent for the composition.
The claustrophobic sense of this “scenic cube” is often overcome by the inclusion, within the painting, of a reflecting mirror, or an opening that allows the gaze to look outwards. This is very clear in Still Life with Watermelon where Botero utilizes the reflections of the objects and the presence of a door on the background to lighten the architecture of the painting and to give it depth, and to create, not only chromatic balances (the blue of the jug with the blue of the sky) but also structural ones by focusing on the contemporary presence of horizontal elements on the foreground set against the verticality of the room.
It is but rarely that in Botero still-life paintings correspond to open air compositions such as in Picnic , which offers to the observer the possibility to admire landscapes, which are, indeed, very unusual for the artist.
Versions
One of the elements that best characterize Botero’s paintings is his ability to combine his original Latin-American culture, as nourished by the penchant for the hyperbolic and the fantastic, with the European one in an outstanding manner. Europe is obviously referred to through the much loved painting tradition of the likes of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Mantegna, Velázquez, Goya, key reference points during his travels in Italy and Spain in the early 60s. It is the works of these masters that he will learn to admire in the halls of the Prado and the Louvre. These were successively flanked by Dürer and Rubens, Manet and Cézanne, as a testimony of the intellectual curiosity of Botero and his willingness to establish an ideal relationship with the great European art of the past and of the modern age, whose masterpieces have acted as beacons in the development of his art right from the outset. It is significant, in this light, his seeking inspiration, as early as in 1959, from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
The history of art is a broad and practically unlimited hoard of images to be ransacked but not imitated. Botero does not imitate: he recreates in his own way, producing images that demand their own autonomy.
His approach is surely not the imitation of the works of the masters or the mechanical replica of a model. What we have are full reinterpretations in which Botero wishes to pay homage, also by applying a dose of benevolent irony, to very famous paintings such as La Fornarina by Raffaello or The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck, or Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. He thus recreates their spirit after many centuries by presenting them in contemporary terms and by aligning them to his original idea in terms of volume, space, sign and color.
Bullfight
“I dared painting the corrida (bullfight) because I was very much familiar with the theme. It is impossible to paint if there doesn’t exist a strong relation between the subject and one’s soul. This relationship is absolutely necessary inasmuch as it gives you a sort of moral authority. That authority I had for the theme, flowed out from the sangre (‘blood’) and from my own life.”
The bullfight was a theme that couldn’t be neglected in Botero’s work – a fascinating and highly suggestive theme that is deeply engrained in the tradition of his people.
Obviously, what truly mattered for Botero is not only the combat between man and bull but all that takes place around this laic ritual: from the ‘taking of the habit’ on the part of the protagonists celebrated in the splendid elegance of their costumes and seen as modern-day heroes, to the entry on horseback of the matadors and picadors into the arena with the crowd that throng the stands applauding their idols – everything seems to be part of an extraordinary popular pageant where the violence that is inherent in the bullfight itself appears to be alien or experienced in a natural way even when at its goriest as in Dying Bull (p.??). The attention of the artist is focused on the spectacular choreography rather than on the tension of the moment, on the blood that is poured on the arena.
As is his wont, Botero in these works relies on that felicitous process of contamination involving color and light, pictorial surface and substance itself of that kind of painting that underlie many of his painting, identifying himself with the theme to such an extent as to immortalize himself as a torero in the Self Portrait.
Circus
Botero fell in love with the circus in Mexico, where he often spent the winter months. It was there that he became enthralled by the characters that crowd the circus, loving the colors, the movement, the life and the stories that are the stuff of the circus show – a show both archaic and new that has been immortalized by artists of the calibre of Picasso, Léger, Chagall and many more.
“A truly beautiful and timeless subject,” Botero has often said. He stages, narrates and illustrates circus life to its fullest, highlighting the work of the circus hands as they get the show ready as in Circus, or focusing on those moments when everyone is taking a break before or after the show, when the members of the large circus family rest for a while and share a moment of relax and conviviality as in Circus People with Elephants . Botero, though, offers us, above all, a gallery of very beautiful portraits, from Pierrot to Harlequin, from the equestrienne intent on her show to the acrobat-cum-contortionist, from the lion and tiger tamer to the clowns on their highly improbable stilts, from the elephant to the horses and camels… Botero offers us a gaily-colored and kaleidoscopic universe. The characters are captured during their performance, with maximum concentration showing on their faces, while the scenes evoke the distillation of the moment as mirth blends and alternates with melancholy, which are both inherent to the circus show.
Botero, in fact, passes no judgment but simply describes in great detail without showing any indulgence or cruelty, and does not mock or ridicule. His images apparently amusing, funny and ironic reveal – for all those who are willing to go beyond a first cursory glance – meaning, and his circus suddenly becomes the great metaphor of life.
Latin American
Life In the works focusing on this subject matter, Botero insists on the vitality of man that cannot be extinguished even in the direst conditions of misery, in shantytowns, in places where life has no apparent reason… In Botero’s paintings there is a “people’s” background, a loyalty to his own Latin-American culture, a vivid memory of his childhood fancy.
No matter how much his style has been perfected and enriched through the contact with Europe, the characters of civic and private drama, the daily grind, the whorehouses, the dancing fetes, the priests and cardinals are and continue to be tenaciously present in his work.
Botero freezes on the canvas scenes from the daily life of Colombians – scenes often dramatic as in Street, where a runaway is being chased by the policeman amidst total indifference, or as in Suicide, where a desperate man plunges to his death from a window. While Botero also paints scenes of working life, such as the outstanding Sewing Workshop where each character is deeply intent on carrying out his or her task in an atmosphere of intense commitment, he also focuses his gaze on an instance of ironic meditation, as in The Seminary where five young priests are captured together as if posing for a rather unusual family portrait.
And, of course, there are moments of entertainment as in Dancing, where couples dance away in a dancing hall, or in the crowded and more problematic End of the Party where in the pink confetto atmosphere, life passes against a backdrop of sexual intercourse, music and cigarettes and where the much flaunted existential promiscuity is but a way to stress the inner solitude of the individual.
Latin American People
“You can find in my painting a world I got to know during my youth. It is a sort of nostalgia, which I have turned into the central theme of my work. I lived fifteen years in New York and a long time in Europe, but this has changed nothing in my Latin American approach, nature and spirit. The communion with my country is total.”
The points of reference for the young Botero were inevitably the multicolored boards and sculptures of colonial art, the direct and essential language of popular art and, with regards to the pureness of form, pre-Colombian art. These elements continue to be present in his paintings. They are the traits of a poetics that has refined over the years but which contain a cultural heritage that continues to be as spontaneous as ever, generating the same narrative force and impeccable finish.
A recurrent feature in this group of works is the single individual, mostly female figures, such as the stern Standing Woman, or the monumental girl of Woman in Bathroom. The posture of the women is memorable and so are their clothes and gazes. Through them, Botero is able to forcefully show their personality and to tell us something about their lives, thoughts and desires. These are flanked by paintings featuring couples, such as Man and Woman, respectable middle-class persons who meet on the street almost as if it were a still from an early 20th century film, or Lovers , a man and woman who, naked, passionately embrace each other in a seedy hotel room.
Also impressive are the group subjects that reveal the sheer existential variety of a community: from the joyous mirth of At the Park, where the background provides a glimpse of sheer beauty, to Three Women Drinking which is dominated by sadness, and The Sisters, an outstanding work featuring five women of varying ages whose poses reveal their personalities as well as the lives they have led in what is a disenchanted portrait of an age.

Website : Pera Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONNISM : MASTERPIECES FROM THE MUSEE D'ORSAY OPENS AT THE DE YOUNG MUSEUM

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco welcomes the United States debut of Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay on view at the de Young Museum May 22 to September 6, 2010. The exhibition includes approximately 100 paintings from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection and highlights the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, among others. The Musée d’Orsay is lending their most beloved paintings while it undergoes a partial closure for refurbishment and reinstallation in anticipation of the museum’s 25th anniversary in 2011. Birth of Impressionism will be followed in the fall of 2010 by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Beyond: Post–Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The de Young will be the only museum in the world to host both exhibitions.
“Each of these two shows brings together masterpieces that, once they return to the Musée d’Orsay, will never again be loaned out for exhibition as a group,” says Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic. “I hope they will excite the interest of the American public in order to strengthen further the links between our two countries.”
“These two exhibitions present a rare and unique opportunity for Americans to see the evolution and incubation of the Impressionist style from the collection of the most important repository of French 19th- and early 20th-century art––the Musée d’Orsay,” says John E. Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “These exhibitions give us the chance to share with visitors some of the most seminal works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art that they would only be able to see in Paris or in an art history book.”
Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay presents works by the famous masters who called France their home during the mid- to late-19th century and from whose midst arose one of the most original and recognizable of all artistic styles, Impressionism. The exhibition begins with paintings by the great academic artist Bouguereau and the arch-Realist Courbet, and includes American expatriate Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black, known to many as “Whistler’s Mother.” Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley are showcased with works dating from the 1860s through 1880s, along with a selection of Degas’ paintings that depict images of the ballet, the racetrack, and life in the Belle Époque.
“Does Impressionism still have something to teach us about its sources, its beginnings, its transformations, and its links with the period of its first flowering?” Musée d’Orsay curator Stéphane Guégan asks. “This is the challenge taken up by this exhibition which attempts to decompartmentalize the movement by comparing it with art in the 1870s in general.” Notable works in this exhibition include:
• The Fife Player by Edouard Manet (1866)
• Racehorses Before the Stands by Edgar Degas (1866–1868)
• Family Reunion by Frédéric Bazille (1867)
• The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868)
• The Cradle by Berthe Morisot (1872)
• The Dancing Lesson by Edgar Degas (1873–1876)
• The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte (1875)
• The Swing by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)
• Red Roofs, Corner of the Village, Winter Effect by Camille Pissarro (1877)
• Saint-Lazare Station by Claude Monet (1877)
• Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878 by Claude Monet (1878)
• Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley (1878)
• L’Estaque by Paul Cézanne (1878–1879)
• Portraits at the Stock Exchange by Edgar Degas (1878–1879)
• The Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879)

Website : de Young

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION CELEBRATES LATE PAINTER KENNETH NOLAND

In honor of the late Kenneth Noland (b. April 10, 1924, Asheville, N.C.; d. January 5, 2010, Port Clyde, Maine), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Kenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute, on view in the level 4 Thannhauser Gallery from May 21 to June 20. One of the great American abstract painters of the second half of the twentieth century, Noland had his first major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1977. Throughout a career that spanned six decades, Noland explored the essential qualities of color and surface in canvases that came to exemplify Color Field painting, a signature of postwar abstraction in the 1960s.
About the tribute exhibition, Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, said: “The Guggenheim Museum, with its founding history rooted in the support of nonobjective painting, is honored to again share with the public Kenneth Noland’s contributions to the course of abstraction.”
Kenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute brings together an intimate group of four of Noland’s seminal works, from the Guggenheim Museum’s holdings and those of private collections, that represent the most distinctive hallmarks of his visual language: circles, chevrons, stripes, and shaped canvases. And Half (1959) is from Noland’s series of concentric-circle paintings, which were begun in the mid-1950s and are generally considered his first mature works. Trans Shift (1964) is an example of Noland’s hard-edged chevron forms, and The Time (1967) features a horizontally linear construction in which the contrasting colors saturate the surface of the canvas entirely—a composition typical of his works from the late 1960s and after. Later, Noland’s exploration of hard edges in his paintings led to his development of shaped canvases, of which Strand (1981) is an example.
Noland was born on April 10, 1924, in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended the nearby Black Mountain College on the GI Bill from 1946 to 1948 before leaving for Paris, where he studied with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine and was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse. During his studies at Black Mountain in the late 1940s and again in the summer of 1950, Noland was affected by the teachings of former Bauhaus master Josef Albers, who was the driving force at the school and who had brought with him from Germany an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century European art. However, Noland’s commitment to pure abstraction derived primarily from his studies with painter Ilya Bolotowsky.
In the 1950s, Noland met critic Clement Greenberg, sculptor David Smith, and painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, all of whom influenced his subsequent artistic development. Liberated from the constraints of European modernism and challenged by the groundbreaking work of the Abstract Expressionists, Noland experimented with Frankenthaler’s stain technique of applying thinned acrylic paint to unprimed canvas, fusing color and material. Starting in the early 1950s, Noland began producing a number of works that have been termed “Post Painterly Abstraction” or “Color Field painting” for their large expanses of color with emphases on clarity and control instead of the emotive gesture favored by the Abstract Expressionists.
Kenneth Noland and the Guggenheim Museum
In 1977, the Guggenheim Museum organized Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, the first major exhibition of the artist’s work. It traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, both in Washington, D.C., and to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with an essay by then–Guggenheim curator Diane Waldman. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collection includes four major works by Noland.

Website : Guggenheim NY

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

KANDINSKY TREKT 150.000 BEZOEKERS NAAR DEN HAAG

Het Gemeentemuseum Den Haag heeft de 150.000ste bezoeker van de tentoonstelling Kandinsky en Der Blaue Reiter begroet. Dat liet het museum weten.

De expositie met schilderwerken van kunstenaars als Kandinksy en Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky en Marianne von Werefkin krijgt wegens het succes een verlenging tot en met 13 juni. De tentoonstelling kwam tot stand in nauwe samenwerking met de Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in München.
De expositie is onderdeel van Holland Art Cities. Dat is een tweejarig project van tien musea in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag en Utrecht om onder meer de Nederlandse kunst en cultuur onder de aandacht te brengen in het buitenland. Het project begon vorig jaar.

Website : Gemeentemuseum

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Bron/Source : De Pers.nl

WURTH SHOW CELEBRATES DOUBLE ANNIVERSARY

The German collector and industrialist Reinhold Würth will celebrate a double anniversary with a show at the Museum Würth in the town of Künzelsau-Gaisbach. “The Collector, the Company and Its Collection”, 25 April-9 January 2011, will mark Würth's 75th birthday and 65 years since the founding of the family business. Seventy-five paintings have been chosen from his 12,500-strong collection, one for each year of his life. “When, after the death of my father in 1954, I had to take over the firm at the age of 19, I would never have dreamt that within only 60 years it would turn into one of the world’s leading wholesale screw business with over 58,000 employees”, he said. (See The Art Newspaper, January 2009, p34.)
The exhibition will compare the development of the firm with developments in art since 1935, the year Reinhold Würth was born. It was also the year Emil Nolde painted Wolkenspiegelung in der Marsch (Cloud Reflections in the Marsh), the first painting Reinhold Würth bought.

The show also includes work by Josef Albers, Hans Arp, Georg Baselitz, Marc Chagall, Christo (who wrapped up the Künzelsau office buildings in 1995), Max Ernst, Barry Flanagan, Henry Moore, Asger Jorn, David Hockney, Picasso and Gerhard Richter, amongst many others. Among the latest acquisitions on display will be works by Alex Katz—who has a solo show in the Kunsthalle Würth Schwäbisch Hall from October 2010 to February 2011, Niki de Saint Phalle and Katsura Funakoshi.

Website : Museum Würth

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Bron/Source : The Art Newspaper

SCHILDERIJEN VAN GOGH OPNIEUW NAAR JAPAN

Schilderijen van Vincent van Gogh zijn komend najaar opnieuw te zien in Japan. Het Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam en het Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo organiseren er voor de tweede keer een tentoonstelling met werken van de beroemde kunstschilder.
In 2005 hielden beide musea ook een Van Gogh-tentoonstelling in Japan. De expositie was toen een enorme hit: er kwamen liefst 1,3 miljoen bezoekers op af.
De tentoonstelling 'Van Gogh: The adventure of becoming an artist' is van 1 oktober tot en met 10 april te zien in musea in achtereenvolgens Tokio, Fukuoka en Nagoya. Dit keer worden ongeveer 1 miljoen bezoekers verwacht, lieten de organiserende musea donderdag weten.

Website : Vincent van Gogh via Wikipedia

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Bron/Source : De Pers.nl

TOP DESIGNERS AND GLASSMAKERS PRESENT GLASS DESIGN PERFORMANCES ON THE VITRA CAMPUS DURING ART BASEL 2010

The Corning Museum of Glass will bring GlassLab to the Vitra Design Museum during Art Basel 2010, pairing international designers with Corning Museum glassmakers for a series of collaborative “design performances.” GlassLab design sessions will take place on the newly expanded Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, from June 14 to June 20, 2010. Participating designers will include Kiki van Eijk, Atelier Oi, Wendell Castle, Tomas Libertiny and Jeff Zimmerman, among others.
The designers will bring their sketchbooks and concepts and work side-by-side with glassmakers in a unique mobile hotshop developed by The Corning Museum of Glass. The teams will rapidly prototype their design ideas in live sessions, allowing audiences to observe this dynamic interplay and watch the evolution of the designs as they are created.
GlassLab has been featured at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and at Design Miami/Art Basel Miami. The hot glass design performance program was inspired by glass design workshops presented by the Corning Museum at Domaine de Boisbuchet, a design retreat center that is a cooperative effort of the Vitra Design Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, C.I.R.E.C.A. (Centre International de Recherche et d’Education Culturelle et Agricole) in the Charente region of Southwest France.
“GlassLab provides designers rare access to hot glassmaking processes and enables them to experience first hand the full potential of glass as a material for design,” said Rob Cassetti, creative director of The Corning Museum of Glass. “We value the partnership we’ve had in the Vitra Design Museum in presenting GlassLab and are excited to share for the first time this creative exchange with the public at Art Basel.”
GlassLab attendees will also be able to explore the Vitra Campus featuring the Vitra Design Museum and a collection of buildings by nine contemporary architects, including the new VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron. The Essence of Things. Design and the Art of Reduction—an exhibition investigating the motifs and motivations of reduction in design—will be on view at the Vitra Design Museum.

Website : Corning Museum of Glass
Website : Art Basel 16.06 - 20.06.2010
Website : Vitra Design Museum

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Bron/Souce : Artdaily

A LA GLOIRE DES TRAVAILLEURS

C’est de la photographie de studio à l’état pur : quand en 1950/51, Irving Penn décide à Paris, puis à Londres et à New York, de photographier les petits métiers pittoresques, typiques ou en voie de disparition, il n’arpente pas les rues avec son appareil à la main, il ne va pas saisir le réel sur le vif. Non, portraitiste dans l’âme, il utilise des rabatteurs (à Paris, rien moins que l’impécunieux Doisneau et Edmonde Charles-Roux, directrice de Vogue, avec Robert Giraud, “l’homme de Penn“) qui traquent, trouvent, identifient et convainquent les sujets potentiels de venir au studio du maître, avec leurs outils de travail, pour y être portraiturés, prélevés du réel et transplantés dans l’image, comme ces deux garçons bouchers parisiens, couteau à la main, la blouse tachée de sang. Là où Sander, aux visées encyclopédiques, photographiait ses types dans leur jus, Penn les extrait du monde, les prélève et reconstruit leur pittoresque vivant dans la froideur mortuaire de son studio, même éclairage impersonnel, même mur neutre. C’est peu de dire qu’ils posent, de manière fière mais assez empruntée, prêtant leurs personnes à l’histoire, au dessein du maître : c’est comme un retour aux débuts de la photographie populaire de studio, aux rapports entre photographe et sujet de la fin du XIXème siècle ou du début du XXème, quand mon grand-père en uniforme allait se faire tirer le portrait (avant de mourir pour la Patrie). La juxtaposition des trois pompiers, parisien, londonais et new-yorkais, ne fait pas une série pour autant.

Rien d’encyclopédique, plutôt le hasard des rencontres, un intérêt marqué pour les cultures qui vont disparaître (qu’il montrera aussi dans d’autres travaux, au Pérou par exemple), pour les métiers du passé, rétameurs, rémouleurs, rempailleurs, que l’industrie moderne tue, mais aussi un attrait pour les tenues théâtrales des garçons de café parisiens. Alors que les publications de son travail dans les éditions française (’Visages et métiers de Paris’) et anglaise (’Small Trades’) de Vogue mettent plutôt l’accent sur la dimension reportage (alors que ce n’en est pas vraiment un), l’édition américaine, elle, en juillet 1951 (aux prémisses de la guerre froide), le replace dans un contexte moins pittoresque, mais plus social et historique : titrer l’article ‘A Gallery of the Unarmed Forces” est une glorification du travailleur, non pas du prolétaire exploité, mais de l’artisan indépendant, de l’ouvrier pré-capitaliste.

C’est à la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson jusqu’au 25 juillet.

Website : FHCB

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Bron/Source : Amateur d'Art par Lunettes Rouges

FOTOGRAFIE ALS BINDMIDDEL IN AMSTERDAMSE WIJK

Fotografiemuseum Foam opent 19 mei 2010 een dependance in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, die drie jaar open zal blijven. Dat kondigde het Amsterdamse museum donderdag aan.
De vestiging aan het Confuciusplein zal dienen als een ontmoetingspunt waar bezoekers kunnen leren over fotografie, elkaar en de buurt. Het doel is om de samenhang in de buurt te verstevigen.
Het project met de naam West Side Stories - Foto's en verhalen uit Amsterdam Nieuw-West is mede mogelijk gemaakt door de woningcorporaties Ymere en Far West.
Daarnaast haalt het fotomuseum professionele fotografen naar de Amsterdamse wijk. In het nieuwe pand worden resultaten van door hen gegeven workshops tentoongesteld.

Website :FOAM

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Bron/Source : DePers.nl

KUNSTMUSEUM LICHTENSTEIN PRESENTS THE HISTORIC YEARS OF THE ARTE POVERA

“What is to be done?” asks the large scale Arte povera exhibition which the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein has realized for its 10 year anniversary.
The exhibition focuses on the time between 1967 and 1972 and includes works by all principal artists of the Arte povera movement.
The artists of the Arte povera movement sought to bridge the gap between art and life, expanding consciousness by reducing the distance between the artwork and the spectator. The familiar, ordinary things that we tend to regard as worthless were to be rediscovered as new, art-worthy materials; previously neglected everyday items were to be transformed into meaningful works of art. The new art was to be more simple and more modest in its means, and more authentic in its materials.
In this way, Arte povera was to open up a poetic and sensual window on the world and the energies behind all that exists, creating metaphors of the life-force that flows from primor-dial sources – metaphors, above all, of the spiritual energies that seek to change rigid structures. The exhibition centres around the leading topics of the Arte povera: time, the history of the earth, energy and alchemy.
Che fare? Arte povera includes works by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Salvo and Gilberto Zorio. Many of the works shown will be from the collection of the museum. The Arte povera has been a mainstay of the collection ever since the founding of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. These works, more than forty in all, will be shown alongside works from public and private European collections, including some little-known works from the early years.

Website : Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

ROYAL AIR FORCE MUSEUM UNVEILS THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN BEACON

At a fundraising dinner, The Royal Air Force Museum announced its vision for the future.
As part of its modernisation and development plan the Royal Air Force Museum has undertaken the initial planning for a new Battle of Britain Exhibition building at its London site.
The new building will allow wider public access and ensure that the Museum’s unique collection of Battle of Britain aircraft, memorabilia and archives is preserved for the education of future generations.
This exhibition will also complement the modernisation already achieved with the refurbishment of the Graham White Hangar, the relocation of the former Hendon airfield watchtower and opening of the Milestones of Flight building at Hendon, together with the construction of the National Cold War exhibition building at the Cosford site.
The provision of suitable funding, and the agreement with interested parties and authorities with whom the Museum is consulting widely, will dictate when the Trustees of the Museum will take the final decision to proceed with construction.
It is very fitting that in the year of the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain the Royal Air Force Museum, as part of its modernisation and development plan, has undertaken the initial planning for a new Battle of Britain exhibition building at its Hendon site in London. Provisionally called the “Battle of Britain Beacon”, the plan looks towards the construction of a striking, landmark building which will do appropriate justice to this most defining event in the world’s history. The exciting concept will allow wider public access and ensure that the Museum’s unique collection of Battle of Britain aircraft, memorabilia and archives is preserved for the education and enjoyment of future generations. The building in its final form will include the latest audio/visual techniques to bring to life all aspects of the Battle, from the work of the groundcrews, whose tireless endeavours kept the aircraft in the air, through the life of the civilian population, to the gallant efforts of those who fought in the skies above Great Britain.
The new exhibition building will complement the successful modernisation already achieved at Hendon with the refurbishment of the Grahame White Hangar, the imminent refurbishment of the former airfield watchtower and the opening of Milestones of Flight exhibition building. It will also allow the current somewhat restricted Battle of Britain Hall on the site to be used to display more of the Museum’s aircraft and archive collection. The Museum’s Cosford site has also seen the opening of the impressive National Cold War exhibition building opened in 2007 which has ensured the preservation of many of the important Cold War aircraft which we under threat
The Museum is now consulting widely about the “Battle of Britain Beacon” project. The provision of the required private sector funding, and the agreement with interested parties and authorities, will dictate when the Trustees of the Museum will take the final decision to proceed with construction. However, by the 75th Anniversary of the Battle in 2015, only a small number of the gallant “Few” who flew in the Battle would be able to witness this project becoming a reality.

Website : The Royal Aire Force Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

BONNEFANTEN BRENGT HOMMAGE AAN PIERRE KEMP

Het Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht opent op 30 mei een tentoonstelling over een van de grote Nederlandse dichters van de 20e eeuw, Maastrichtenaar Pierre Kemp (1886-1967).
Kemp, die in 1959 de P.C. Hooftprijs kreeg, was behalve schrijver ook een verdienstelijk schilder. Hij liet zich daarbij inspireren door het symbolisme en het Duits expressionisme. Zijn stijl kenmerkte zich door een helder kleurgebruik en een fantasierijke, naïeve beeldtaal. De tentoonstelling laat daarvan veertig olieverfschilderijtjes, werken op papier en schetsboekjes zien. Verder wordt een korte film uit 1967 over de schrijver-schilder vertoond. Het zijn de enige bewegende beelden ooit van hem gemaakt en die zijn al veertig jaar niet meer vertoond.
Bij de opening van de expositie presenteert schrijver Wiel Kusters een nieuwe biografie van Kemp. Ook wordt muziek van Hendrik Andriessen ten gehore gebracht, op tekst van de Limburgse dichter. De tentoonstelling duurt tot 29 augustus.

Website : Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht

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Bron/Source :DePers.nl

L'INVENTAIRE DE L'ATELIER DE COURBET RETROUVE

L'inventaire original de l'atelier de Gustave Courbet a été découvert par un notaire de Besançon
Me Raphaël Callier a découvert ce document de 21 pages dans le fonds laissé par son prédécesseur et l'a remis aux Archives départementales du Doubs, a fait savoir mercredi le Conseil général.L'inventaire de l'atelier avait été dressé le 21 novembre 1879, deux ans après le décès du peintre.
Le document, établi par un notaire de Besançon, recense et estime les 501 oeuvres de l'atelier de Gustave Courbet, originaire d'Ornans (Doubs) et décédé le 31 décembre 1877.Parmi les tableaux, une vingtaine sont de Courbet , dont une esquisse des Demoiselles du Bord de la Seine, évaluée à l'époque à cent cinquante francs, et Courbet, fou de peur, peinture qui avait été évaluée à soixante francs.Les autres oeuvres sont essentiellement des peintures, pour la plupart anonymes, quelques sculptures, dont une statuette représentant Courbet par Charles-François Leboeuf, et quelques photographies, dont l'une de Courbet avec sa famille."Cet inventaire est très intéressant pour connaître le personnage qu'était Courbet. On peut se demander pourquoi il collectionnait de telles oeuvres: beaucoup d'entre elles sont des oeuvres religieuses", constate le Conseil général du Doubs, responsable des archives départementales."A l'époque, la valeur totale de l'inventaire s'était élevée à 6.807 francs, un certain nombre de peintures sur toile étant estimées à 1 franc", ajoute le Conseil général.

Website : Gustave Courbet - The Complete Works

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Bron/Source : France 2

KUNSTMUSEUM BERN CELEBRATES CENTENARY OF DEATH OF ALBERT ANKER WITH EXHIBITION

The Kunstmuseum Bern is putting on a large retrospective of Albert Anker's manifold oeuvre to commemorate the centenary of this key Swiss artist's death. The exhibition will take up several themes representative for Anker's work and demonstrate how exceptional he was as a painter. Video works by Chantal Michel, a performance and media artist who lives in Bern, enhance the presentation.
A trigger for this exhibition was the immensely popular Anker show that was organized by the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2007-2008 for four Japanese Museums. The works on show comprise paintings, drawings, watercolors, and faiences. The exhibition is undoubtedly a highlight in the year of celebrations concerning the centenary of Anker's death.
Photographic precision
Anker depicted the world with photographic precision. As a painter he witnessed the social changes of his times. Ins, a village in Seeland, was his hometown. It underwent extensive development in the 19th century. He actively participated in Ins community life throughout his life, even if he preferred, over a longer period of time, to live and work in Paris during the winter months. Very often he recorded unspectacular moments in the unencumbered intergenerational communal life in the village. Many of his paintings depict children attending school, on school excursions, or while doing their homework or at play. Anker was well-acquainted with the education system and for many years worked as secretary for the Ins school commission. As a result his paintings reflect the developments of the education system in Switzerland and communicate the new understanding of raising children, educating them, and learning through playing and games.
People and Rural Life
Sharing his day-to-day life with the people he portrayed, Anker showed great empathy for his sitters. Especially his portraits of children are unique in 19th-century art. He comprehended children as little personalities and independent of the roles dictated by their social class, age, and gender. Also his still lifes evidence the proximity of human presence in a variety of ways, for example, by traces of usage on the represented objects. Anker's images definitely win our credibility and appear somehow familiar. Truth and beauty are not contradictory in his eyes. His close contact to his fellow human beings makes his intimate and light-bathed realism still moving for viewers today.
A Contemporary Dream by Chantal Michel
Chantal Michel bridges the gap to contemporary times. The Bernese performance and media artist has taken up the challenge of finding an appropriate contemporary response to the old master of Swiss art history. Chantal Michel has long focused intensively on Anker. She comprehends the video installation she created especially for the Anker exhibition as a "contemporary dream within the world of Anker's imagery". The installation comprises six projections of forty different video sequences in total.

Website : Kunstmuseum Bern

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

FESTIVAL DE CANNES 12-23.05.2010

Le Festival de Cannes célèbre le cinéma depuis plus de 60 ans. Au fil des années, L'Association Française du Festival International du Film a su évoluer tout en gardant l’essentiel : la passion du cinéma, la découverte de nouveaux talents, l’enthousiasme des festivaliers et des professionnels du monde entier venant contribuer à la naissance et à la diffusion des films.
Le Festival de Cannes a toujours été le reflet de son époque : le lieu de toutes les cultures, de tous les espoirs, d’une forte effervescence et surtout, de la transmission. Défendre des projets ambitieux, différents, donner la possibilité à des cinéastes en herbe d’émerger. Une vitrine de talents et le respect de tous les goûts.
La sélection officielle
Au cœur du Festival : celle qu’on attend et qu’on célèbre, avec différents volets : la Compétition, Un Certain Regard, les films Hors Compétition, les Séances Spéciales, la compétition des courts métrages et les films d’école de la Cinéfondation.Le tout représente un florilège d’œuvres singulières, d’approches cinématographiques originales, de découvertes ou de confirmation de talents, mis en valeur et récompensé par les jurys.
Soutenir la création
Le prix de la Caméra d’or récompense le meilleur premier film présenté en Sélection officielle (Compétition et Un Certain Regard), à la Quinzaine des réalisateurs ou à la Semaine Internationale de la Critique.La Cinéfondation, en plus de la sélection, soutient la relève du cinéma international à travers la résidence et l’atelier.
Le Short Film Corner, créé en 2004, se consacre à la promotion du film court.
Pour tous les cinéphiles
Le Festival de Cannes propose des programmes et des événements qui permettent de découvrir le cinéma autrement : le programme Cannes Classics, La leçon de cinéma, Les hommages, le cinéma de la plage en plein air et ouvert à tous…
Les services pour les professionnels
Le Marché du Film contribue au dynamisme de l’industrie mondiale du cinéma. Il offre des services qui permettent les échanges et les rencontres professionnelles : le village international, le producers network et cinando.com
Accueil des cinématographies
Le Village international est le lieu où tous les pays producteurs de cinéma ont la possibilité de présenter la richesse de leur cinématographie dans le cadre d’un pavillon.

Website

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LA PINACOTHEQUE S'AGRANDIT

La Pinacothèque de Paris va s'agrandir pour exposer des collections permanentes.

Ces collections seront constituées de dépôts de collectionneurs privés, a expliqué mercredi le directeur du musée, Marc Restellini.
Il va louer des locaux dans un immeuble voisin, à l'angle de la rue de Sèze et de la rue Vignon, qui lui permettront d'avoir 3000 m2 supplémentaires sur deux niveaux. Le nouvel espace doit ouvrir en janvier 2011.
Marc Restellini, fondateur de la Pinacothèque, espère réunir entre 150 et 250 tableaux pour ce nouvel espace. Il veut construire un musée "transversal", mêlant les époques et les zones géographiques. L'idée est de faire "dialoguer" les oeuvres. "Ca prend le contre-pied des musées qui ont tendance à se spécialiser", affirme-t-il.
"Cela se présente très bien", a indiqué. "J'ai déjà une soixantaine d'oeuvres que des collectionneurs privés, de différentes nationalités, sont disposés à me prêter de façon permanente", a-t-il déclaré. "Cela va du Tintoret à Pollock, en passant par Rembrandt, Boucher, Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, Derain, Rouault, Munch", indique Marc Restellini qui "ne désespère pas d'avoir un Raphaël".
"Beaucoup de gens ont des tableaux dans des coffres et le regrettent. Un tableau dans un coffre est un tableau qui meurt", souligne ce petit-fils de peintre. Le prêt des oeuvres ne sera pas rémunéré mais la Pinacothèque ouvrira en interne un atelier de restauration et un laboratoire d'analyses scientifiques dont pourront bénéficier les tableaux.
Pour mener à bien son projet, la Pinacothèque va investir cinq millions d'euros dont trois millions pour les travaux.
Fondée en 2003 par Marc Restellini, historien d'art, la Pinacothèque, espace d'exposition privé, est installée actuellement dans un immeuble de la place de la Madeleine, sur 2.000 m2.

Website : La Pinacothèque de Paris

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Bron/Source : France 2

EXHIBITION AND SYMPOSIUM CELEBRATE MARCEL DUCHAMP'S LAST GREAT MASTERPIECE

In 1946 Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks in Switzerland, five days of which, from 5 to 9 August, at Lake Geneva with one of his lovers, Mary Reynolds. He took up residence at the Bellevue Hotel (today, Le Baron Tavernier) in Bellevue near Chexbres. The hotel is located in the very heart of the Lavaux vineyards which have been designated a world heritage site by UNESCO. The hotel on the Route Corniche offers the most striking panoramas in the region with a magnificent view of the lake flanked in the background by the mountains of Vaud, Valais and Savoy and the entire chain of the Jura range. On clear days one can see practically the entire lake from Villeneuve to Geneva, as if it were a vast bay.
The Corniche runs through the extraordinary vineyards of the region, linking Chexbres with the villages of Epesses, Riex and Cully. The Bellevue Hotel is also only some 100 meters away from a spot known locally as the “balcon du monde”, which affords a spectacular view of the lake as well as a feeling for the sheerness of the vineyards along the Dézaley slope. Their steep gradient also explains the waterfall between Bellevue and Chexbres. The topography is rocky and precipitous, with the water gushing out from under the buildings in the hamlet of Chexbres, as if it were coming out of their insides, and then cascading in cataracts down to the lake—exactly on the border between the communities of Chexbres and Puidoux (to which Bellevue belongs). Le Forestay, as the waterfall is called, consists of three steps. Surging over the cliffs in Chexbres, it then slows down for a moment before crashing onto the back of the Dézaley hills below. There it is contained in a brook for a few hundred meters until finally gushing out over another cliff near the historic village of Rivaz to plunge into Lake Geneva where the shoreline is at its steepest and therefore gives a most perilous and exciting impression.
The Bellevue Hotel where Marcel Duchamp stayed is situated not far from the first step of Le Forestay. Night after night he must have heard the roar of the waterfall sundering the idyllic silence, its incessant gushing resembling the unexpected din of ocean breakers. By day, the waterfall is rather inconspicuous, almost hidden away, in reverse proportion to the imposing panorama of the lake. It cuts through the landscape of the vineyards, carving a vulva-like path down the hillside that is partially concealed by pine trees and woods. Duchamp took a picture of this topography and incorporated it into his last great masterpiece, the installation Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (1946-1966). It is the chute d’eau, the vagina of nature, that rushes down between two spread-eagled flanks.
One can still identify the waterfall today despite substantial changes in the locality over the past 60 years. Right in the streambed, at the bottom of the first fall, there are still two large boulders, one of which is clearly discernable in Duchamp’s photograph while the other is hidden behind bushes.
Significantly, Duchamp may well be the first and only great artist ever to visit the impressive region of Lavaux who did not turn to the lake and the mountains as a source of inspiration, as did his famous colleagues Gustave Courbet, Ferdinand Hodler or William Turner. Duchamp chose to devote himself to the other side, to look into the vineyards, to capture this fountainhead springing from the inner recesses of the earth—an orgasm that becomes an additional source for this magnificent lake and turns it into an overwhelming visual experience.
Duchamp’s subject matter is concealed by design, as it were, deliberately unspecific and yet still spectacular; it could occur anywhere in the world as it is not inescapably linked to this place. The artist has transformed a specifically local situation into one that is unspecific and universal, while nonetheless retaining a sense of the individual and the personal.
Duchamp’s photograph also renders the sound that we hear long before catching sight of the waterfall through the trees. He captures what is hidden and, in his installation in Philadelphia, turns it into moving time, into the relentless, driving force of life.
The wonderful is the center and, at the same time, the inconspicuous duplication of the naked woman with no pubic hair, holding a gas lamp in her hand. Our gaze is instantly arrested by the hairless vagina, an open cut that intrudes upon vision. But as soon as we pass beyond its visual blatancy, we discover the gash in nature, illuminated and set in motion by a special mechanism. It looks as if water were squirting out between the boulders and the pine trees and we do not perceive civilization although it is inescapably present.
We actually seem to hear the waterfall, smell the gushing waters (in fact, in 1946 the good citizens of Chexbres still used to empty their garbage into the waterfall) and feel the vibrant photographed bushes; we look through the two peepholes in the wooden door at the heaped up dead branches and we can almost hear the woman breathing, lying there spread-eagled, the leg bent outward to reveal her sex while wielding the gaslight in one hand to illuminate the waterfall.
Ever since the research by Jennifer Cough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont we know that Marcel Duchamp took photos of the Forestay in 1946. However, nobody has answered the question why the artist chose just this waterfall and not any other. One would have to assume that only few Duchamp scholars have ever visited this unique location on Lake Geneva, and so most of them are bound to be unaware of the fact that the then Bellevue Hotel offers a direct view onto the township of La Tour-de-Peilz where Gustave Courbet spent the last years of his life. And Gustave Courbet created the famous painting L’Origine du monde which was the immediate source of inspiration for Duchamp’s Etant donnés installation.
Duchamp had bad-mouthed the artistic ideas of Gustave Courbet all his life, not least because in his own work he was pursuing similar interests both in subject matter and content—interests that we should look into more thoroughly in particular with regard to Etant donnés. And Gustave Courbet was not only the painter of that unambiguous portrayal of a woman’s sex but he also painted a number of waterfalls and fountainheads in his artistic career which by their composition, in works such as La Source (1862, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), he brought in direct relation to the female act. So it cannot be by accident that Marcel Duchamp in 1946 chose Le Forestay as the point of departure of his masterpiece, from where he could turn his gaze down on the death site of his great predecessor and at the same time, at one gaze, see two mountains (the Tour de Mayen and Tour d’Aï) bulging out skyward—in a most exposed and provocative way, like two female breasts. What’s more, the name La Tour-de-Peilz also evokes a vast array of associations—pet, paix, or paie (➝ fart, peace, wages)—which in the context of Duchamp’s thinking are highly interesting and add further significance to his choice of place. Similarly, another village near the waterfall is called Cully, which when compounded with the regular Swiss German diminutive means “little buttocks”.
As mentioned above, the waterfall with the telltale name Le Forestay (forêt/forest/forst ➝ the woody) is topographically so much embedded into the surrounding landscape that it does not only spring forth from between two clearly accentuated flanks (thighs) but is also visible from the hotel through the trees—like a vagina through pubic hair. And even today one can see near the house to the left of the waterfall the remains of a water mill that in 1946 was still operative, and the mill is a central theme in Duchamp’s oeuvre, alluding, for instance in his Grand Verre (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1915-1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art), to male masturbation. Besides, the building was used to produce oil in (the house bore the inscription “Huilerie” ➝ oil mill), which in this sense and with reference to Courbet’s work can be interpreted as a metaphor for painting as a form of esthetic masturbation.
Apart from all this, Duchamp made his photograph in all likeliness from a place next to a little wooden shed directly across from the waterfall. At the time the structure belonged to the Société de tir pistolet Chexbres, Palézieux et environs that was using it as a shooting range. What is interesting here is not only the parallel of “shooting a photograph” and “shooting a bullet” but also the detail that from there the Rifles of the town of Puidoux fired across the Forestay on the territory of the community of Chexbres.
All these observations convey an entirely new turn to the contents and the meaning of Etant donnés. They allow not only to bring into play again the most important metaphorical preferences of Duchamp’s earlier pieces, they move this late work a lot closer to the retinal art of Gustave Courbet which the artist had wanted to overcome all his life.
The Events
Fourty years ago the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened Duchamps Diorama Etant donnés for the public. Without any doubt this is the ideal time to discuss these new facts and source materials immediately and on the spot, in the magical ambiance of Lake Geneva. We will not only gain exciting new insights into Duchamp’s work of the century but also have the chance of seeing the value of the Lavaux scenery for art in general in a whole new light.
Symposium
The floor will be given to the internationally most renowned Duchamp experts who will speak about the Forestay, the Lavaux- Region, Etant donnés and the Reception of Marcel Duchamp by contemporary artists. Concert
The program also includes the performance of Marcel Duchamp’s musical composition Musical Erratum by Swiss artist and musician Andreas Glauser.
Exhibitions
The Inauguration of the new Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp in Cully with a one-person show of German conceptual Artist Ecke Bonk. At Galerie Davel 14, an exhibition with works from more than 40 artists will spot a light on the influence of Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece on contemporary art, and at the same time will assemble a variety of new documentary material related to the Forestay Waterfall.
Intervention
Famous Swiss artist Roman Signer will realize a work – an Hommage à Marcel Duchamp – directly in the Forestay waterfall during the events.

Website : Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall - 06.05.2010-13.06.2010

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