FIRST RETROSPECTIVE IN OVER FORTY YEARS OF THE WORK OF PAINTER GINO SEVERINI OPENS IN PARIS

Gino Severini 1913

This is the first retrospective of the work of the Italian painter Gino Severini since that organised in 1967 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. It brings together some 70 works (original drawings, paintings…) from private collections, European museums (Triton Foundation Netherlands, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Estorick Collection in London and the Thyssen Foundation in Madrid…) and American museums including the MOMA, New York. The exhibition is on view from April 27 through July 25, 2011 at the Musée de l'Orangerie.

“Cortona and Paris are the cities I am most bound to : I was physically born in the first, intellectually and spiritually in the second.” Gino Severini

Severini at first remained close to his style, with an emphasis on Luminist effects and the contrast of light and shade.

He arrived in Paris in 1906 keen to find out more about the work of Seurat. In 1910, Raoul Dufy, who had the neighbouring studio, introduced him to scientific Divisionism. His urban views, painted in quite a free Pointillist style, are reminiscent of Signac but also seem quite close to the landscapes painted by Van Gogh in Paris in 1887 with their broken brushwork and lighter palette. His few pastel portraits are closer in style to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He continued the Divisionist experiments in his early Futurist works by integrating coloured planes and adding sequins to his dancers.

In 1911, Gino Severini joined the Futurist movement, having already signed the Manifesto in 1910. His large painting, The Dance of the Pan Pan at the Monico, was the highlight of the 1912 Futurist exhibition.

He acted as mediator between the artists from Milan and those of the Parisian avant-garde, and joined the Futurists on their European tour. His preferred subjects at this time were crowds, urban scenes and places of entertainment, very different from the themes of his artist friends (The Boulevard, Estorick Collection, London). He also represented movement in his series of dancers produced in 1912-1913.

In 1914 - 1915, at the invitation of Marinetti, Severini produced a series of paintings on the war (The train blindé [Armoured Train], MOMA, New York).

In 1916, after abandoning Futurism, he became part of the Cubist movement until 1919. He rubbed shoulders with Cocteau and Matisse, and met Juan Gris to whom he was very close both personally and stylistically. During this period, he painted still lifes that included real fragments of wallpaper, newspapers, musical scores, etc., basing them on a set of complicated calculations. His Cubism stood out for the subtlety of colour harmonies. It was at this time that he produced many theoretical works on geometry, the Golden Section and harmonic lines, resulting in the publication in 1921 of his book From Cubism to Classicism on the relationship between art and mathematics. He sought a return to the traditional values of painting by concentrating on “construction”.

From 1920 to 1943, his art entered a new phase with the “Return to the Figure”. With his Portrait de Jeanne et sa Maternité [Portrait of Jeanne and Maternity], dating from 1916 and representative of a classical and realist style, he became part of the “Return to Order” movement. Just like other artists of the time, Picasso, Gris and Derain, Severini was fascinated by the characters of Harlequin and by the Commedia dell’ Arte. His still lifes at this point became more decorative.

This new transformation in his painting style, so far removed from Cubism, is evident in the decorations he created for the Sitwel family at Montefugoni in Tuscany.

In the 1930s, he also worked on a number of religious mosaic murals for the churches of Tavannes and Saint Pierre de Fribourg in Switzerland. Severini painted relatively few easel paintings at that time. His subjects were more intimate and family-orientated. He alternated between hieratic portraits and still lifes (musical instruments, pigeons, ducks and fish) inspired by the decorations in Pompeii and by Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna. Along with other artists like De Chirico, Picabia, and Ernst, he was involved with the decoration of Rosenberg’s house. Between 1928 and 1930, he exhibited with the Italian artists in Paris (De Chirico, etc.).

His Arlequin [Harlequin] from 1938 (Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki) completes an exhibition that presents the many different aspects of an artist who was much more multi-facetted than his fame as a Futurist painter would have us believe. His work fits perfectly with the Musée de l'Orangerie collections, particularly in his desire for a classic “return to order” and his numerous representations of Harlequin that unquestionably bring him closer to André Derain.

Website : Musée de l'Orangerie

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

NOUVEL ACCROCHAGE A BEAUBOURG

Le Centre Pompidou propose un nouvel accrochage de ses collections des années 1960 à nos jours

Une présentation qui se veut plus aérée, plus contemporaine et plus ouverte sur la diversité de la création, organisée autour d'une galerie centrale chronologique.

Le Musée national d'art moderne en profite pour montrer de nombreuses acquisitions récentes, que le public n'a pas pu encore voir.

Arts plastiques, photographie, architecture, design, vidéo : à travers 600 oeuvres de 200 créateurs, la nouvelle présentation tente, tout en assumant ses partis pris, de restituer la vitalité d'une période très créative.

Cette nouvelle présentation succède à elles@centrepompidou, un accrochage thématique présenté depuis mai 2009 qui était consacré aux femmes artistes.

"Nous avons cherché une respiration de l'accrochage", explique le conservateur Jonas Storsve, avec "des salles très aérées, d'autres volontairement plus chahutées, plus denses, qui essaient de rendre l'atmosphère d'une époque".

Le visiteur retrouvera, dans la galerie centrale, les grandes figures de l'art depuis les années soixante : Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre Soulages, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Thomas Hirschhorn...

Les principaux courants artistiques de ces décennies se déploient de part et d'autre dans des salles dédiées : l'Arte Povera italienne (Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto...), le minimalisme (Brice Marden, Robert Ryman..), le groupe Fluxus, ou, plus récemment, la peinture de figuration "qui résiste", avec entre autres un autoportrait de Martin Kippenberger, "une des plus importantes acquisitions récentes" du Centre Pompidou, selon Jonas Storsve.

Les grandes installations de la collection sont toujours présentes, qu'il s'agisse du salon polychrome d'Agam, conçu pour l'Elysée du temps de Georges Pompidou, du Jardin d'hiver de Jean Dubuffet ou de la chambre sourde emplie de rouleaux de feutre de Joseph Beuys (Plight).

Le design, secteur particulièrement fertile dans les années 60 et 70, est présenté dans un espace largement ouvert sur le hall d'accueil. Des salles thématiques accueillent la photographie, la vidéo ou l'architecture. "Des présentations qui seront renouvelées plus rapidement, tous les six mois pour certaines d'entre elles. L'accrochage n'est pas figé", souligne le directeur du musée Alfred Pacquement.

Une salle est ainsi consacrée au grand architecte brésilien Paulo Mendes da Rocha, prix Pritzker 2006, une autre à la recherche architecturale avec un édifice étonnant du cabinet THEVERYMANY du Français Marc Fornes, sorte de cabane numérique conçue pour le musée, calculée par informatique et composée de 7.000 pièces et 32.000 rivets.

La photographie estexposée par grands ensembles et séries photographiques, récemment acquises pour la plupart : une série du photographe italien Ugo Mulas, présentée dans la salle Expérimentations italiennes des années 1970 ou le travail photographique de l’artiste américain Robert Gober, 1978-2000. Une salle est consacrée aux portraits du Moyen-Orient.

L'utilisation de la couleur dans l'environnement fait l'objet d'une salle spécifique. Au travers de nombreux dessins, maquettes et d'un spectaculaire siège-sculpture de Verner Panton, sont retracées la naissance du colorisme-conseil dans la création architecturale et industrielle, et l'intégration de la polychromie dans les grands ensembles urbains.

Le nouvel accrochage tente d'ouvrir les collections à des artistes non européens comme le Nigérian El Anatsui, dont une immense et somptueuse "tapisserie" en capsules de bouteilles accueille les visiteurs, l'Américain Jimmy Durham d'origine Cherokee, le Libanais Akram Zaakar et ses collections de portraits rétro, ou la Chilienne Sandra Vasquez de la Horra aux dessins poético-oniriques.

Un gigantesque champignon, oeuvre de 2010 de Carsten Höller très récemment acquise (Giant Triple Mushroom), se dresse en point de fuite de la galerie centrale.

Website : Centre Pompidou

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Bron/Source : France 2

EXHIBITION - THE DUTCH EAST INDIES AT HOME - AT AMSTERDAM'S MUSEUM GEELVINCK

Amsterdam's Museum Geelvinck presents the third exhibition in the series Asia from the Heart. ‘The Dutch East Indies at Home – traces of a colonial past’ will run from April 21 to October 10, 2011. The exhibition focuses on those traces of the former Dutch East Indies colony, which still linger in Dutch homes; remnants discernible in many aspects of Dutch culture.

The exhibition features an array of tangible memories, many of them collected in the days when the island archipelago of today’s Indonesia was known as the Dutch East Indies. Memories that in the intimacy of a family’s home still embody a specific Dutch East Indies character. Memories that live on as family histories, as decorative elements on living room walls, as mementoes on mantelpieces, or objects hidden away in drawers of old chests. Aromas and flavours that have become part of the Dutch culinary tradition. What could be more Dutch than the Indonesian rice table? These are all recognizable or almost forgotten remains of the Dutch colonial past. Sweet and bitter memories, still present in the here and now.

This exhibition consists for a large part of objects kindly provided on loan from the private collections of members of the Association of Friends of Asiatic Art. Previously, China and Japan featured in the series Asia from the Heart.

Some highlights:

• A complete Yogya silver tea service

• Wayang dolls in Keraton quality

• Works by, amongst others, Jan Daniel Beynon, Willem Hofker, Jan Frank and Rudolf Bonnet

• A seventeenth-century throne belonging to the Sultan of Yogya

• Hitherto unknown family home movies from the 1920-‘30’s Dutch East Indies

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the Museum Geelvinck Hinlopen Huis. It is located in a grand canal-mansion built in 1687, now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Canal District. This private museum focuses on lifestyle design at home; it seeks to connect the present day’s living room with its past. Fully operated by volunteers and a small professional staff, it enjoys the supportive expertise of guest curators for specific exhibitions.

Website : Museum Geelvinck

 

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ROYAL COLLECTION PRESENTS EXHIBITION OF 42 PAINTINGS OF DUTCH 17TH-CENTURY LANDSCAPES

This exhibition of 42 paintings draws on the Royal Collection’s rich holdings of Dutch 17th-century landscapes, including works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van der Heyden and Meyndert Hobbema. By the 17th century, landscape painting was well established as a distinct art form and one in which Netherlandish artists excelled. The fine detail and meticulous finish of Dutch pictures appealed to British taste, and 34 of the works in the exhibition were acquired by the future George IV between 1809 and 1820. The ability of Dutch artists to depict mood and emotion through landscape and the subject-matter drawn from everyday life influenced the great British painters John Constable and JMW Turner. Constable admired the ‘acres of sky expressed’ in Ruisdael’s Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream, and on seeing a seascape by Willem van de Velde the Younger, Turner remarked, ‘Ah! That made me a painter’. On view from April 15 through October 9, 2011.

At the conclusion of the Eighty Years War with Spain, the newly formed United Provinces of the north gained independence from the Spanish-controlled south. With a sense of national optimism came the rapid expansion of Dutch cities and towns. Civic pride manifested itself in the building of town halls and churches, and in paintings such as Jan van der Heyden’s minutely observed The Town of Veere with the Groote Kerk. A programme of land reclamation saw the northern peninsular of the United Provinces grow by a third between 1590 and 1650. Outdoor Merrymaking by Jan Miense Molenaer shows a typical Dutch ‘polder’ (reclaimed field) surrounded by a drainage ditch, dyke and windmills.

Between 1610 and 1630 a ‘tonal’ school of landscape painting emerged in Haarlem. It created a style that sought to convey through subtle transitions of colour the atmospheric effects of water, land and sky. In A River Landscape with Sailing Boats, Salomon van Ruysdael skilfully evokes the mood of dawn over the estuary through the blending of colour and texture. The thinly painted areas allow the grain of the wood to suggest ripples in the water.

The Royal Collection contains an outstanding group of works by Aelbert Cuyp, the most poetic of all Dutch landscape artists. Cuyp painted both recognisable views around Dordrecht and landscapes of his imagination, such as A Page with Two Horses. All are imbued with an extraordinary luminosity and spectrum of light. The earliest painting in the group, Cows in a Pasture beside a River, before Ruins, may have been intended as a celebration of the end of war and the anticipated benefits of peace.

As protectors of the land, sand dunes became a symbol of Dutch national pride. They are recurring motifs in landscape painting, either as the setting for seaside pastimes, as in Adriaen van de Velde’s Figures on the Coast at Scheveningen, or as the temporary home of hunters and soldiers, as in Paulus Potter’s Two Sportsmen outside an Inn. In A Hilly Landscape with a Hawking Party, Jan Wijnants exploits the decorative forms of twisting paths, broken fences and the rutted mud of the track. The artist may have been influenced by landscape decoration on contemporary Delftware or on Chinese porcelain imported by the Dutch East India Company.

As the foundation of trade and empire, the sea was the most important force in Dutch life. Ships were built in unprecedented quantities – around 40,000 vessels during the 17th century. The ‘Great Fishery’, as the herring trade was called, directly or indirectly employed one fifth of the population. The importance of the sea is reflected in the large number of marine artists active at this time. In The Royal Escape in a Breeze and A Calm: A States Yacht under sail Close to the Shore, Willem van de Velde the Younger skilfully depicts the changing effects of light and air, the direction of the sun and wind, and the behaviour of boats under different weather conditions.

While many Dutch painters found inspiration in their immediate surroundings, others, such as Karel du Jardin, Nicolaes Berchem and Cornelis van Poelenburgh, travelled to Italy in pursuit of the mountainous vistas and golden light. Since the early 16th century there had been a colony of northern artists in a small quarter of Rome immediately inside the Porta del Popolo. Figures before a Locanda by Johannes Lingelbach is set in the street where the artist lived and, rather than idealising the city, gives a realistic account of the squalor of low-life Rome. Karel du Jardin’s A Herdsman with an Ox, an Ass, and Sheep in the Campagna places its subject against the backdrop of the Roman countryside suffused with southern light, but the painting’s muted palette and careful observation remain typically Dutch. Aelbert Cuyp never ventured to the Mediterranean, but saw Italy through the works of his contemporaries. In his Evening Landscape with Figures and Sheep, the distinctly Dutch terrain is bathed in the warm colours and soft tones of Italy.

Website : The Royal Collection

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

GUGGENHEIM IN BILBAO PRESENTS THE LUMINOUS INTERVAL : THE D.DASKALOPOULOS COLLECTION

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents The Luminous Interval: The D.Daskalopoulos Collection on view from April 12 through September 11, 2011. This is the first large-scale presentation of one of the world’s most significant private collections of contemporary art. Sponsored by Iberdrola and occupying the museum’s second floor and part of the first, the exhibition features approximately 60 works by some 30 artists, encompassing a wide range of mediums with a special emphasis on sculpture and environmental installations. Grounded in an assembly of works dating from the 1980s and 1990s by eminent figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Paul McCarthy, Annette Messager, and Kiki Smith, but also foregrounding projects by younger talents, such as Paul Chan, Guyton\Walker, Nate Lowman, and Wangechi Mutu, the exhibition immerses visitors in a focused survey of some of the most salient artistic developments of the past few decades.

The exhibition’s title is derived from the writings of the Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), whose thinking has been particularly influential for the collecting practices of Dimitris Daskalopoulos. Kazantzakis envisioned life as a “luminous interval” during which struggle and disintegration are necessary prerequisites to creative production and renewal. The Luminous Interval: The D.Daskalopoulos Collection explores this coexistence of hope and despair within the human condition, with a particular focus on concepts of alienation, trauma, corporeality, and cultural identity.

The D.Daskalopoulos Collection reflects the tenor of the times, and many of the works in the exhibition confront both the crises and triumphs of contemporary life. While much of the art on view derives from or alludes to specific geopolitical or social contexts, Dimitris Daskalopoulos appreciates in this work its capacity to simultaneously broach universal themes, especially the unquestionable resilience of the human spirit.

Sprawling room-size installations are a hallmark of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, and the presentation in Bilbao incorporates a significant number of ambitiously scaled works, such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s tape-and-cardboard catacomb Cavemanman (2002), Annette Messager’s heart-shaped Dependence/Independence (1995), Wangechi Mutu’s baroque tableau of late capitalist excess Exhuming Gluttony (2006/11), and John Bock’s hallucinatory multimedia landscape Palms (2007). These chaotic environments are balanced by an opposing formal trope of rigid enclosure and geometric containment, exemplified in sculptures such as Mona Hatoum’s barricaded electrical cube Current Disturbance (1996), Kendell Geers’s razor-mesh grid Akropolis Now (2004), and Damien Hirst’s evacuated vitrine and grisly medicine cabinets, respectively entitled The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) and The Lovers (The Spontaneous Lovers) (The Committed Lovers) (The Detached Lovers) (The Compromising Lovers) (1991).

Many of the works in the exhibition delve into prevailing narratives of national and cultural identity. Steve McQueen’s poetic study of conflicts in the Congo and Iraq (Gravesend/Unexploded, 2007), Rivane Neuenschwander’s vision of eroding continental borders (Contingent, 2008), and Nate Lowman’s seductive depictions of offshore oil rigs (Oil Riggs, 2005), all comment either obliquely or directly on the conflicts surrounding the planet’s natural resources. Kutluğ Ataman’s Küba (2004) evokes a composite portrait of what constitutes a community by focusing on the inhabitants of a slum outside Istanbul, while Paul Pfeiffer’s The Saints (2007) investigates the dynamics of the crowd through the restaging of an iconic international soccer game. Alexandros Psychoulis’s Body Milk (2003) and Walid Raad/The Atlas Group’s I Was Overcome by a Momentary Panic at the Thought that I Might Be Right (2004) present two very different abstracted depictions of the aftermaths of violence in the Middle East.

Other groupings of works in the exhibition explore the most intimate aspects of individual identity, with a particular focus on the human body in varying states of repression, fecundity, and disintegration. In some cases, this is achieved through the creation of uncanny surrogates, such as Robert Gober’s transfigured sinks, cribs, and baskets, or the cast negative space of Rachel Whiteread’s studies of domestic experience. In others, including Smith’s unflinching delineations of bodily functions or Marina Abramović’s intimate, ritualistic encounter with a skeleton, a visceral sense of immediacy prevails. Yet another vein of corporeal renderings in the exhibition take an irreverently subversive approach to the subject, notably Paul McCarthy’s dismembered Tomato Head (Burgundy) (1994) and Sarah Lucas’s bathetically vanquished “bunny” in Bunny Gets Snookered #10 (1997).

The list of artists included in the exhibition comprises: Marina Abramoviċ (b. 1946, Belgrade, Yugoslavia); Kutluğ Ataman (b. 1961, Istanbul); Matthew Barney (b. 1967, San Francisco); John Bock (b. 1965, Gribbohm, Germany); Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris; d. 2010, New York); Paul Chan (b. 1973, Hong Kong); Mark Dion (b. 1961, New Bedford, Mass.) and Robert Williams (b. 1960, Liverpool, U.K.); Kendell Geers (b. May 1968); Robert Gober (b. 1954, Wallingford, Conn.); Guyton\Walker (Wade Guyton: b. 1972, Hammond, Ind.; Kelley Walker: b. 1969, Columbus, Ga.); Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut, Lebanon); Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957, Bern, Switzerland); Damien Hirst (b. 1965, Bristol, U.K.); Mike Kelley (b. 1954, Detroit, Mich.); William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg); Martin Kippenberger (b. 1953, Dortmund, Germany; d. 1997, Vienna); Nate Lowman (b. 1979, Las Vegas); Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London); Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City, Utah); Steve McQueen (b. 1969, London); Annette Messager (b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France); Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972, Nairobi, Kenya); Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil); Chris Ofili (b. 1968, Manchester, U.K.); Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Jalapa, Mexico); Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu); Alexandros Psychoulis (b. 1966, Volos, Greece); Walid Raad (b. 1967, Chbanieh, Lebanon); Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany [West Germany]); and Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963, London).

Website : Guggenheim Bilbao

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

MAJOR EXHIBITION ON BELGIAN ARTIST JAN FABRE AT KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM IN THE NETHERLANDS

From 10 April 2011, a major exhibition on and with Belgian artist Jan Fabre (Antwerp 1958) is on display in the Kröller-Müller Museum. The title, which consists of the simple words, garden (hortus) and body (corpus), derives from the universe of Jan Fabre. The insect, the human, the angel and the blue of the perpetually recurring moment at which night becomes day and life awakens, play an important role therein. They are the four basic elements with which Fabre composes and reveals to us, in ever-altering arrays, his thoughts on life and death, beauty and disgust, vulnerability and violence, mortality and eternity. The exhibition will run until 4 September 2011.

With his sculptures, films and drawings in the exhibition spaces and corridors and with five installations in the sculpture garden, Jan Fabre briefly makes the Kröller-Müller Museum his own personal domain. The emphasis here is on the human body; on the physical and the capacity for depleting and recharging energies. The man who measures the clouds (1998) is the first sculpture by Fabre that visitors to the exhibition encounter, while walking on the path through the front garden of the museum towards the entrance. On the right, a human figure stands on a small stepladder, perched on the edge of the museum’s roof. The man measures the clouds with a ruler. For Fabre, he symbolizes that which an artist does: balancing on the border between the possible and impossible.

Jan Fabre is internationally renowned as one of today’s most original and versatile artists. He has been making his name as a groundbreaking performance artist for over 25 years already. This basis provides the source for his plays and operas on the one hand, and his sculptural work on the other. The Kröller-Müller Museum is hosting Jan Fabre as a visual artist.

Website : Kröller-Müller Museum - Otterlo

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

COMPREHENSIVE RETROSPECTIVE OF THE ACKNOWLEDGED JAPANASE MASTER OF PORCELAIN, FUKAMI

Active for over 40 years, Fukami’s early and rare stoneware sculptures are testimony of the young potter's experiments, but today he is internationally known for his celebrated pale-blue glazed porcelains. Collected by at least 47 museums world-wide, Fukami can be considered to be the most successful living Japanese artist of any medium.

Since 1967, when he was 20 years old, Fukami’s artworks have been exhibited at numerous exhibitions in Japan and abroad. Since 1969, he regularly won prizes for his work, including the Grand Prize at the prestigious 43rd Faenza International Ceramic Exhibition in Italy in 1985. In 1997, Fukami received the Kyoto Prefecture Culture Prize and in 2008, was appointed by the City of Kyoto as a ‘Person of Cultural Merit.’

This exhibition features a broad selection of Fukami’s most significant sculptures, ranging from his earliest works until his most recent. Though his glaze is inspired by Chinese porcelains of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, his abstract sculptures testify to his impressive inventiveness and sensitivity with regard to form. With heights of over 7 feet (2 m), his sculptures are unusual for work in porcelain because, porcelain being a much denser material than stoneware, large objects are extremely difficult to create.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a book is being published that illustrates not only the works selected for this exhibition but provides a detailed account of Fukami Sueharu’s entire oeuvre.

Website : Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture - Hanford - California

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OLIDON REDON, LE PRINCE DU RÊVE, AU GRAND PALAIS A PARIS

Odilon Redon est à redécouvrir au Grand Palais, à l'occasion d'une belle rétrospective.

Considéré comme un précurseur du symbolisme et du surréalisme, Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a créé au début de sa carrière un univers fantastique fascinant en noir, avant de basculer vers un monde en couleur plus serein.

L'exposition du Grand Palais retrace ce parcours en 180 peintures, pastels, fusains et dessins et une centaine d'estampes.

Redon décide de devenir peintre dans les années qui suivent le romantisme mais il s’inspirera surtout du graveur bordelais Rodolphe Bresdin dont il reçoit les conseils à partir de 1865, après avoir brièvement étudié avec Jean-Léon Gérôme à l’Ecole des beaux-arts de Paris.

Un univers noir et mystérieux

Dix des douze ensembles lithographiques qu’il a publiés sont exposés en entier au Grand Palais. Du premier, Dans le rêve, il dira qu’il est « peut-être un de mes préférés ». Déjà, il y dessine des têtes étranges qui flottent dans l’air, des yeux, des êtres étranges.

Le second album est dédié à Edgar Poe dont l’univers onirique le fascine. Les yeux reviennent, dans les arbres, sous forme d’un ballon qui s’élève dans le ciel. Les gravures ne sont pas des illustrations des histoires de Poe. Redon a inventé les légendes écrites sous les lithographies. Il se défendra d’ailleurs, plus tard, de faire des illustrations d’œuvres littéraires. « Illustration » est un mot défectueux, remarque-t-il au sujet de La tentation de Saint Antoine, inspirée de Flaubert. Il préférerait le terme de « transmission » ou « interprétation, et encore, ils ne sont pas exacts pour dire tout à fait le résultat d’un de mes lectures passant dans mes noirs organisés ».

De la même façon, on ne trouve pas dans l’hommage de Redon à Goya d’emprunts au peintre espagnol. Il y décline la représentation du visage humain sous des formes étranges.

A côté de ces recueils sont exposés des fusains et des gravures extraordinaires, comme l’Araignée souriante, la Plante grasse figurant une tête de noir dans un pot. Ces dessins sont peuplés de figures fantomatiques ou de squelettes prenant la forme d’un arbre. Quelques années plus tard, le collectionneur et critique Thadée Natanson le surnommera le « prince du rêve ».

La couleur investit le rêve

A partir de 1890, l’univers onirique de Redon s’ouvre à la couleur. Il est abusif de parler de passage à la couleur. Redon a toujours pratiqué la peinture. Mais il la réservait au travail sur le motif, son travail imaginaire ne relevant que de ses « Noirs », fusains et gravures.

A ce moment-là, son univers onirique s’ouvre progressivement à la peinture et au pastel. Les Yeux clos est l’œuvre qui marque cette transition : deux versions, une lithographie et une peinture, sont exposées côte à côte.

Pendant dix ans, Redon travaille en couleur et en noir. Il abandonnera complètement la gravure au tournant du siècle. Pendant cette période, il va progressivement vers la lumière, son univers se fait plus serein. Même Songes (1891), une série de lithographies dédiées à son ami Armand Clavaud, qui s’est suicidé, est moins sombre que les précédentes. Il y est question de lueur, de « monde sublunaire ». Le dernier dessin s’intitule Le Jour et une fenêtre y regarde vers la lumière.

A cette époque, il peint des enfants, des jeunes filles, des thèmes religieux, Christ ou Bouddha. Les couleurs sont de plus en plus éclatantes, comme dans cet hommage à Gauguin qui explose de turquoise ou de vermillon. D’ailleurs, Redon a fortement influencé les Nabis et les fauves.

L'abandon du noir

A la fin de sa vie, l’œuvre de Redon se fait carrément décorative : il peint des bouquets de fleurs, dessine des cartons pour les Gobelins. L’exposition a reconstitué le décor qu’il a peint dans la salle à manger du château de Domecy, pour le baron Robert de Domecy, qui était son mécène.

Un fauteuil, une maquette pour un tapis affichent des décors floraux colorés et légers.

Dans des tableaux de plus en plus grands, il peint aussi des scènes mythologiques ou religieuses.

Rien dans la vie de Redon ne semble expliquer l’univers sombre et angoissant de ses débuts., Il mène une existence bourgeoise tout à fait tranquille et discrète. Redon n’a pas connu d’excès, de voyage ou d’exil. Il n’a pas d’atelier, travaillant dans des appartements cossus.

Mais surtout, comment un homme qui a dessiné des univers aussi étranges et macabres a-t-il pu ainsi finir sa vie dans les fleurs ? C’est ce que Rodolphe Rapetti, le commissaire général de l’exposition, appelle dans sa présentation « l’énigme Redon ». « Il me paraît nécessaire de souligner que s’il est énigmatique, c’est sans doute moins en raison de ses sujets qu’à cause de son évolution. On n’en connaît pas à cette époque-là d’équivalente, qui parte à ce point des tréfonds obscurs du monde intérieur pour aboutir à un art dont la coloration est aussi exubérante. »

« Il paraît miraculeux, et c’est là un mystère probablement insoluble, que cette ombre ait par la suite donné une telle lumière », souligne Rodolphe Rapetti dans le catalogue.

Website : Grand Palais

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Bron/Source : France 3

FIRST EXHIBITION TO FOCUS ON MOTIF OF THE OPEN WINDOW IN 19TH CENTURY ART AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Constant Moyaux (French, 1835-1911), View of Rome from theArtist’s Room at the Villa Medici, 1863. Watercolor on paper, 11 5/8 x 9 in. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

During the Romantic era, the open window appeared either as the sole subject or the main feature in many pictures of interiors that were filled with a poetic play of light and perceptible silence. Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 5 through July 4, 2011, is the first exhibition to focus on this motif as captured by German, Danish, French, and Russian artists around 1810–20. Works in the exhibition range from the initial appearance of the motif in two sepia drawings of about 1805–06 by Caspar David Friedrich to paintings of luminous empty rooms from the late 1840s by Adolph Menzel. The show features 31 oil paintings and 26 works on paper, and consists mostly of generous loans from museums in Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Austria, Sweden, and the United States.

In 1805–06, the important German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) created two sepia drawings that became greatly influential showing views outside the windows of his studio in Dresden. In Friedrich's treatment of the open window, the Romantics recognized a potent symbol for the experience of standing on the threshold between an interior and the outside world. The motif's juxtaposition of the very close and the far away became a metaphor for unfulfilled longing, a sentiment first expressed by the Romantic poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1802), who wrote: "Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic." Like Friedrich, other Romantic artists were drawn to the view from the window for its symbolic power, and not simply for the beauty of the landscape itself. For them, the rectangular or square shape of the canvas echoed perfectly the window as a view of the world.

Rooms with a View features the two seminal Friedrich images—shown for the first time in this country—as well as works by some 40 other artists, mostly from Northern Europe, including Carl Gustav Carus, Johan Christian Dahl, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Léon Cogniet, Wilhelm Bendz, and Adolph Menzel, among others. Many of the artists are little known on these shores, their works unseen until now.

The works in the exhibition are in distinct groupings: austere hushed rooms with contemplative figures reading, sewing, or writing; studios with artists at work; and windows as sole motif. The mood in these pictures can shift from early Romantic severity to Biedermeier coziness to poetic Realism, yet they all share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narration that characterized earlier genre painting.

Rooms with a View begins with a gallery of works depicting rooms with figures. The vogue for pictures of bare rooms that reflect their sitters' frugal lifestyles coincides with the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15 and their aftermath, when daily life in both Germany and Denmark had turned grim. Ironically, this period coincided with the "golden age" of Danish painting, characterized by visual poetry in the works of Wilhelm Bendz (1804–1832) and Emil Bærentzen (1799–1868), who celebrated modest family life and gatherings. Similarly, none of the upheaval of the time is reflected in the works of the German artist Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847), who countered outward chaos with idyllically ordered interiors. Sober attention to detail marks these 19th-century interiors, in which silence and light become the main subjects. Figures are seen from the back or in lost profile as they sit at a window to read, write, sew, or, as in Friedrich's iconic Woman at the Window (1822), gaze through it.

Artists' studios are featured in the next gallery of the exhibition. Depictions of artists in their studios have a long tradition, especially in the interiors of 17th–century Dutch genre painting. The moods created in 17th–century and early 19th–century pictures are quite different, however, as is the treatment of the window. In the earlier pictures, windows are most often shown in an oblique, foreshortened view, and as sources of light, without views. By contrast, in the 19th–century pictures, windows usually run parallel to the picture plane, with views seen through them. Some of the works featured in this section are a painting of Caspar David Friedrich in his austere Dresden studio as portrayed by Georg Friedrich Kersting, his admiring younger colleague, canvases by French artists showing unidentified female artists working in elegant drawings, rooms overlooking picturesque Parisian views, as well as pictures by their male colleagues, who could compete for the prestigious Prix de Rome, which allowed them to spend five years as pensionnaires at the Académie de France in the Villa Medici in Rome.

The two Caspar David Friedrich sepia drawings of 1805-06 that inaugurated the Romantic motif of the open window are highlighted in the next gallery devoted to works on paper. Unlike the stark balance between the darkened interior and the pale landscape rendered in these views, the artists who followed Friedrich created gentler versions of the motif. Their windows open onto flat plains in Sweden, parks in German spas, or rooftops in Copenhagen, and artist's studios overlook houses in Dresden or Turin, bucolic Vienna suburbs, or Roman cityscapes saturated with light.

Rooms with a View concludes with a gallery of paintings of open windows and empty rooms. For artists, the enduring attraction of this subject lies in its purely visual appeal: echoing the rectangular or square shape of the canvas, the window view turns into a "picture within a picture." Even a barren landscape, when framed in a window, can be transformed into an enthralling scene. Some artists recorded actual sites—Copenhagen's harbor, the river Elbe near Dresden, the Bay of Naples—while others invented, or even largely blocked, the views from their studios or painted them in the chill of moonlight. Highlights of this section include View of Pillnitz Castle (1823) by Johann Christian Dahl (1788–1857) and four paintings by the German Realist Adolph Menzel (1815– 1905). Created between 1845 and 1851, Menzel's pictures are devoted to the effects of light in mostly empty rooms, such as his bedroom in daylight with a view of expanding Berlin outside the window, his sitting room with closed shutters at twilight, and the building's staircase at night.

Menzel never exhibited these small works during his lifetime, regarding them as mere experiments, and they were discovered only after his death. 

Website : Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

CESAIRE, LAM, PICASSO AU GRAND PALAIS A PARIS

Pour célébrer les 70 ans de la rencontre entre Aimé Césaire et Wifredo Lam, le Grand Palais leur rend hommage.

L'exposition, veut rendre compte de ce "coup de foudre" entre le poète martiniquais et le peintre cubain. Elle s'intéresse aussi à leurs échanges avec Picasso, ainsi qu'avec d'autres artistes.

Elle présente des peintures et des gravures de Wifredo Lam, des gravures de Picasso, des textes et des ouvrages de Césaire, Breton.

L’exposition, qui est organisée dans le cadre de l’Année des Outre-mer, a été montée en un temps record, profitant de la libération imprévue d’un espace au Grand Palais, raconte l’écrivain Daniel Maximin, commissaire de l’exposition. Elle sera ensuite présentée en Martinique et en Guadeloupe.

Il s’agissait de « casser deux images : celle d’un paradis terrestre et celle d’un enfer marqué par les séismes, les éruptions volcaniques et les cyclones, auxquels on peut ajouter l’enfer historique de l’esclavage et de la traite », explique l’écrivain. Si ces images sont fausses, elles étaient aussi dans la tête d’hommes comme Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) ou Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), qui ont grandi aux Antilles, estime-t-il. Mais « ils ont compris assez vite que ces images étaient fausses » et « Césaire, qui se dit ‘debout et libre’, a passé sa vie à les combattre ».

Les deux hommes, qui ont donc grandi l’un en Martinique, l’autre à Cuba, partent découvrir le monde. Au début des années 1930, le poète fait ses études à Paris, et découvre « toutes les poésies du monde ». Près de dix ans plus tôt, déjà, Lam est parti étudier la peinture à Madrid, avant de s’installer à Paris en 1938, où il rencontre tout ce qui compte sur la scène artistique. Michel Leiris lui fait découvrir l’art africain.

Chez eux, « ils ont cru qu’ils étaient des hommes muets », raconte Daniel Maximin. « L’histoire de cette exposition est celle du ré-enracinement » des deux hommes, qui s’est produit à l’occasion de leur découverte du monde et auquel le choc des fascismes et du nazisme a, selon lui, donné naissance. En même temps que ce ré-enracinement dans leur terre, « ils ont décidé de porter une parole qui a aussi une dimension universelle », souligne Daniel Maximin.

L’histoire de l’exposition est aussi l’histoire de trois coups de foudre, entre Lam, Picasso et Césaire.

Lam rencontre Picasso en 1938 à Paris. Le maître espagnol reconnaît en lui un peintre et un frère, ou plutôt un « cousin ». Les deux artistes sont marqués par l’art africain, et l’influence du cubisme, comme celle du surréalisme, est importante dans sa peinture.

En 1941, Wifredo Lam, réfugié à Marseille pour fuir le nazisme, embarque sur un bateau avec de nombreux artistes et intellectuels comme André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anna Seghers ou Victor Serge. L’exposition s’ouvre sur des dessins des Carnets de Marseille, créés par Lam à ce moment-là.

En escale en Martinique, les artistes sont arrêtés par les autorités collaborationnistes françaises. Ils y restent restent un mois et ce séjour est pour tous fondamental. Ils rencontrent Aimé et Suzanne Césaire. La lecture du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal du poète martiniquais est un choc pour André Breton, qui le qualifie de « plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps ».

Naît aussi un « coup de foudre éternel » entre Césaire et Lam, selon les mots de Daniel Maximin.

Suzanne et Aimé Césaire emmènent Lam et Breton, et aussi André Masson, dans la forêt martiniquaise d’Absalon qui marque durablement tous les artistes. Elle inspirera un tableau foisonnant à André Masson (Antille, 1943), qui illustrera le recueil Martinique, charmeuse de serpents d’André Breton (1941). A tout soupçon d’exotisme, Masson oppose que « le monde entier m’appartient ». Daniel Maximin voit là une « extraordinaire alliance » entre l’Europe et le monde caraïbe.

Selon Daniel Maximin, la forêt, c’est pour les artistes antillais « les retrouvailles avec la nature caraïbe, symbole d’une histoire de douleurs, de cataclysmes et de résistance ». Et c’est là que le peintre, grâce à ces rencontres, devient Wifredo Lam. « Il découvre la puissance d’une nature. » Quand Lam rentre à Cuba, il ajoute la nature aux hommes dans ses peintures et oppose la verticalité à l’horizontalité des peuples écrasés.

Il peint La Jungle, une de ses œuvres clés. Le tableau, qui est conservé au MoMA de New York, n’a pas pu être obtenu pour l’exposition, explique Eskil Lam, fils du peintre et co-commissaire de l’exposition.

Mais on peut voir au Grand Palais une série de grands tableaux où des figures féminines fantastiques apparaissent au milieu d’une nature luxuriante. Daniel Maximin fait remarquer les « énormes pieds nus » de ces figures, qui représentent « l’enracinement », et symbolisent une dimension populaire et paysanne comme une dimension africaine revendiquée.

Troisième grande rencontre : celle de Pablo Picasso avec Aimé Césaire. Ils se rencontrent en 1948, en Pologne, aux congrès des intellectuels pour la paix. Le poète demande à l’artiste espagnol d’illustrer ses poèmes. Un recueil, Corps perdu, est publié avec 32 gravures de Picasso, où revient la « tête de nègre » et le masque, symboles de l’identité africaine. Une douzaine d’eaux-fortes sont exposées dans le cadre de l’exposition, à côté d’extraits des poèmes de Césaire.

L’exposition se clôt sur une série de gravures réalisées par Wifredo Lam à la fin de sa vie. Cette fois-ci, elles n’étaient pas conçues pour illustrer des textes. C’est lui, au contraire, qui a demandé à Aimé Césaire de composer des poèmes pour les accompagner. Ces images fantastiques évoquent l’univers de la santeria cubaine, religion syncrétique qui a marqué son enfance et avec laquelle l’artiste s’est amusé.

Website : RMN

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Bron/Source : France 3

MUSEE D'ORSAY IN PARIS PRESENTS EDOUARD MANET : THE MAN WHO INVENTED MODERNITY

Musée d’Orsay presents Manet, the Man who invented Modernity, on view from April 5 through July 3, 2011. There has been no exhibition exclusively devoted to Manet in France since 1983, where Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett produced a memorable retrospective. In the ensuing twenty-five years, however, there has been much valuable research and fruitful reflection. A rejection of formalism and a return to history, personal as well as collective, characterise the best of this work, whether documenting Manet’s life story or analysing his work, its exhibitions and perceptions. In the mean time, our understanding of French painting from the period 1840 to 1880 became more refined and freed from over-Manicheistic interpretations. From these two developments, in which the musée d’Orsay continues to be involved, a new image of Manet and his generation has appeared.

This exhibition aims to demonstrate this in a most clear and attractive way. More than just a strictly linear, monographic retrospective, it constructs its premise around some twelve questions, each one closely related to the historical process from which Manet cannot be separated. Simplifying his modernity to an iconographic register or bringing it down to a few stylistic elements, comes, as we know, from a reductive approach. Manet is modern primarily because he embraces, as much as Courbet yet differently, the changes in the media that marked his era, and the unregulated circulation of images; secondly because imperial France, the backdrop to his developing career, was modern. And finally because the manner in which he challenged the masters of the Louvre was modern, extending beyond his militant Hispanism. It is clear that the aesthetic he forged after 1860 demands a broader definition of realism than is normally ascribed to him.

With this objective in mind, the exhibition aims to revisit the many links Manet’s art has with Romantic culture either visual, literary or political. It focuses on the teaching from Thomas Couture, Baudelaire’s support and encouragement, the reform of religious art, erotic imagery and its unresolved issues, etc. But the originality of an artist as unpredictable as Manet cannot be reduced to the sum of the sources from which he distils his art. Other sections of the exhibition try to throw light on his fragmented art, his relationship with women painters (Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès), his decision to remain outside the main Impressionist movement and his complicity with Mallarmé at his darkest. The final piece of the exhibition at the Gallery de la Vie Moderne_, shows, in 1880, a painter obsessed by the Salon and raises the question of what “the freedom to create” meant to him. This means that “_Manet, the Man who Invented Modernity” highlights later works that are less well known and, more importantly, little understood if regarded as simply a stage in the process towards “pure painting”.

 

Website : Musée d'Orsay

 

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

RARELY SHOWN WORKS BY HEINZ MACK ON VIEW AT MUSEUM KUNST PALAST IN DUSSELDORF

Heinz Mack, Tusche auf Papier, 2010 © VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2011

Heinz Mack became famous as an artist and co-founder of the internationally influential artist group ZERO primarily through his light reliefs and light installations. Less known is his extensive graphic oeuvre on which he himself comments, ‘For me, graphic art is a language without words, a perfect poetic language with its own syntax, intonation and rhythm. Pure visual poetry, as it contains no rational meaning.’ The medium of drawing grants the artist a high degree of spontaneity; at the same time the artist appreciates the inner logic and discipline which become apparent in a good drawing. This is also why Mack described his works on paper as the ‘grammar’ of his art: ‘I believe that the lines condense into an energy filed, a structure in which all parts, all elements are indissolubly connected with each other and set in vibration or motion when we contemplate them with sensibility, calmness and open-minded interest.’

Focusing on the graphic oeuvre museum kunst illuminates a rarely shown, as yet largely unpublished facet of this versatile artist. The exhibition includes a concentrated selection of pencil, quill, ink drawings and pastels.

Heinz Mack was born in 1931 in Lollar, Hessen, attended the National Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf 1950-1953 (state examination) and in 1956 completed his studies in philosophy with the state examination at the University of Cologne.

Together with Otto Piene he founded the Gruppe ZERO in Düsseldorf in 1957.

One year later Mack participated in the Documenta II in Kassel and received the Art Award of the city of Krefeld.

Mack received the Premio Marzotto. 1964 - 1966 Mack had an atelier in New York and took part in the Documenta III.

In 1965 the artist was honoured with the 1st Prix arts plastiques of the 4th Biennale de Paris.

In 1970 he was appointed Professor and invited to lecture in Osaka (Japan) and becomes a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, which he remained until 1992.

At the XXXV Biennale in Venice in the same year, he represented Western Germany together with Uecker, Pfahler and Lenk.

1962-1968 and 1976 were times of large working expeditions into the Algerian desert and to the Arctic.

He received the first prize in the international competition Licht 79 in the Netherlands in 1979.

1992 brought the Great Culture Award from the Rheinischen Sparkassen-Verbandes.

In 2004 the artist was awarded the Große Bundesverdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in recognition of his works and his commitment as a cultural representative.

In 2007 the Museum of Islamic Art in Pergamonmuseum in Berlin honoured him with a large exhibition which was visited by around 120,000 people.

Heinz Mack's central artistic theme is light. His sculptures and paintings are a medium for transporting light.

His complete abstract works are very diverse: Sculptures from various materials, also monumental ones for outdoors, light pillars, light rotors, light reliefs and light cubes; paintings such as the Dynamischen Strukturen from the ZERO times from 1957-1966 and the increasingly large format and strongly coloured paintings as of 1991, the so-called Chromatischen Konstellationen.

Drawings, ink drawings, pastels, prints, and literary works, abstract photography with black and white hand prints and colour photography produced in the Slide-Sec process. Design of public squares and rooms, also church interiors, stage settings and mosaics.

His works have been shown in around 300 solo exhibitions to this date.

Website : Museum Kunst Palast

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

LA VILLE DE PARIS CELEBRE LA COMMUNE

140 ans après la Commune de Paris, la ville rend hommage aux insurgés de 1871 et à leur gouvernement éphémère

Avec des photos, des gravures, des journaux de l'époque, une exposition à l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris raconte les deux mois pendant lesquels les fédérés ont administré la ville.

L'euphorie qu'a suscité ce gouvernement populaire, puis son écrasement et la répression qui a suivi.

« La Mairie de Paris se devait d’accueillir un hommage à la Commune de Paris », estime le maire Bertrand Delanoë dans la présentation de l’exposition, saluant ce « moment d’enthousiasme et d’espoir », ce « moment de générosité et d’idéaux », soulignant que la Commune a été « pionnière sur des sujets essentiels » comme « la promotion de la laïcité, la protection des travailleurs, l’émancipation des femmes ».

« On a voulu faire une exposition événementielle, pédagogique, avec des explications conséquentes », explique le commissaire de l’exposition Pierre Casselle, directeur de la Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville. « Le but était que le visiteur sache ce qui s’est passé pendant ces deux mois dramatiques de l’histoire de Paris », ajoute-t-il.

L’iconographie de cette période n’est pas évidente : s’il y a un certain nombre de photos, elles concernent essentiellement les barricades et les ruines. Il a donc été fait appel à des reproductions de journaux illustrés, à des affiches originales, à des documents manuscrits et à de nombreuses gravures.

L’histoire de la Commune est présentée chronologiquement, depuis sa proclamation, le 20 avril 1871. Thiers a voulu désarmer Paris, retirer notamment les canons installés lors du siège de la ville par les Prussiens. Les Parisiens ont refusé et une partie de l’armée a fraternisé avec eux. Le gouvernement quitte Paris pour Versailles.

La proclamation de la Commune

On peut voir à l’Hôtel de Ville l’affiche de proclamation de la Commune de Paris, telle qu’elle est placardée dans les rues de la capitale. Le Cri du peuple, journal de Jules Vallès, titre : La Fête.

Des élections sont organisées le 26 mars et le gouvernement de la Commune siège dans l’Hôtel de Ville. Les gardes nationaux s’installent dans la cour et dans la grande salle des fêtes, comme le montrent des gravures de l’époque.

L’assemblée municipale, jeune et populaire, prend rapidement des décisions sociales, annoncées par voie d’affiche : la suppression du travail de nuit, l’attribution de fournitures scolaires gratuites, la remise des termes dus par les locataires… Dans un gros cahier sont consignés les PV manuscrits de la Commune.

Celle-ci décide de détruire la colonne Vendôme, symbole à ses yeux du militarisme : c’est pour la Commune un « attentat perpétuel à l’un des trois grands principes de la République française, la fraternité ». Sur des photos, les badauds regardent la colonne à terre.

Dès le mois d’avril, les fédérés lancent des attaques à l’extérieur de Paris contre les Versaillais, mais leurs piètres chefs militaires encaissent des défaites. Ils tentent de donner une dimension nationale à leur combat en envoyant des affiches au reste de la France : elles sont envoyées par des ballons qui s’élèvent depuis l’Hôtel de Ville.

Personnalités, de Varlin à Louise Michel

Une salle de l’exposition est consacrée aux personnalités de la Commune, avec des photos des 80 élus, parmi lesquels Gustave Courbet, Eugène Varlin, Gustave Flourens, Charles Delescluze, Eugène Pottier, Jules Vallès.

Si les femmes ne siègent pas, elles se sont mobilisées, participant parfois aux combats. Louise Michel, institutrice et figure essentielle de la Commune, sera déportée en Nouvelle-Calédonie.

On estime à 300.000 les Parisiens qui soutiennent vraiment la Commune, ouvriers, artisans, employés, artistes. Ils sont défendus par les combattants « fédérés », presque tous issus de la Garde nationale. Les barricades, emblématiques de la Commune, sont une affaire sérieuse. Pour défendre la ville contre les Versaillais, on crée même une Commission des barricades, dont la construction est encadrée par des polytechniciens. Immortalisées par de nombreuses photos, certaines sont de véritables monuments.

La semaine sanglante

Mais la Commune ne fait pas le poids militairement face à Versailles qui, en une semaine, la « semaine sanglante », l’écrase en entrant dans la ville par l’ouest.

Les affiches de la Commune appelant les soldats versaillais à fraterniser ne servent à rien. Les fédérés sont exécutés sans procès. En représailles, des otages, essentiellement des prêtres, sont tués. Une gravure montre les soldats de Versailles inspectant les mains pour y chercher de la poudre. Dans une célèbre lithographie, Manet a représenté des communards tués. La défense quartier par quartier, barricade par barricade, montre vite ses limites et les Versaillais avancent facilement. Les derniers combats ont lieu au cimetière du Père Lachaise.

La répression suit, 40.000 défenseurs de la Communes sont arrêtés et acheminés à pied à Versailles, où ils sont entassés avant de comparaître devant la justice militaire. Peu d’insurgés seront exécutés, mais plusieurs milliers partent en déportation.

Dans la débâcle, les communards ont incendié un certain nombre de bâtiments, le palais d’Orsay, les Tuileries et surtout l’Hôtel de Ville. Les images de Paris en feu, puis celles des ruines, ont marqué les esprits. Certains bâtiments détruits ressemblent à des ruines antiques. Ces images ont servi la propagande des Versaillais, qui les a exploitées pour présenter la Commune comme une entreprise de « folie destructrice ».

On édite des guides de visite des ruines de Paris, des cartes postales. L’exposition se termine sur une gravure montrant des étrangers s’extasiant devant les débris.

La Commune, 1871, Paris capitale insurgée, Hôtel de Ville de Paris, 29 rue de Rivoli, 75004 Paris

Tous les jours sauf dimanches et fêtes, 10h-19h

Exposition gratuite

Du 18 mars au 28 mai 2011

Website : Mairie de Paris

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Bron/Source : France 3

EXHIBITION AT JACQUEMART-ANDRE MUSEUM EVOKES THE PRIVATE WORLD OF THE CAILLEBOTTE BROTHERS

Gustave Caillebotte, Canotier au chapeau haut de forme, 1877-1878. Huile sur toile, 90 x 117 cm. Collection particulière. Courtesy Comité Caillebotte, Paris.

Through 11 July 2011, the Jacquemart-André Museum is presenting The Caillebotte Brothers’ Private World. Painter and photographer. An encounter between Impressionism and photography, this exhibition evokes the artistic and private world of the Caillebotte brothers.

This original perspective of Gustave’s paintings and Martial’s photography invites the visitor to enter the private world of a large Parisian family and explore the new urban lifestyle which was taking hold at the dawn of the XXth century. The Caillebotte brothers became witnesses of a period that was undergoing a major urban and technological transformation, and a way of life often illustrated by Impressionist artists.

An original exhibition

Gustave Caillebotte’s reputation for his talent as a painter and his role as patron of his Impressionist friends is well established. We also know that he had great affection for his brother Martial. But Martial himself, composer, pianist and photographer, remained relatively unknown.

However, a recent study of Martial’s photographic collection has revealed a great awareness of the subjects represented in the paintings of his brother Gustave: the views of Paris, the sailing boats, the gardens and the river banks. This discovery has enabled the Jacquemart-André Museum to do what no other museum has done before: compare Martial’s photographs directly with Gustave’s works.

Thanks to some exceptional loans from private and public collections, the exhibition reveals the underlying similarities between the Caillebotte brothers, by hanging 35 paintings alongside almost 150 modern prints for the first time. These prints were taken from Martial’s originals. Some of the paintings, which belong to private collections, have never been shown in public before.

A tale of family, a tale of friendship

Gustave (1848-1894) and Martial (1853-1910), and their brother René (1851-1876), were the children of Martial Caillebotte and Céleste Daufresne. Their half-brother from a previous marriage, Alfred Caillebotte (1834-1896) was ordained as a priest in 1858. An entrepreneur who made beds for the military, Martial Caillebotte Senior left a large fortune to his sons on his death in 1874. From that moment on, Gustave devoted himself to painting, while Martial dedicated himself to music. He composed several pieces for the piano (Airs de ballets, 1887) and some religious music, before discovering photography.

Gustave and Martial remained very close, having been marked by the death of their brother René in 1876 and their mother in 1878. The two brothers lived together and moved in the same circle of artists until Martial married in 1887. Two children were born of this marriage: Jean in 1888 and Geneviève in 1889. Gustave however remained a bachelor. On Gustave’s death in 1894, Martial, with Renoir’s help, made the necessary arrangements for the state to accept the bequest of the Impressionist paintings owned by his brother.

Shared enthusiasms

Gustave and Martial Caillebotte shared a number of enthusiasms. They became expert philatelists with their stamp collection. When Gustave became interested in horticulture, Martial photographed him at work in the garden or the greenhouse. Together they learned how to sail a yacht. Martial distinguished himself in all fields, for example winning several regattas in the sailing boats designed by Gustave.

The Caillebotte brothers depicted these shared interests in their painting and photography, thereby recreating the multiple aspects of their environment. With delicate touches, they evoke the gentle pace that characterised their lavish lifestyle, from Haussmann’s new Paris to family leisure pursuits.

Living in the new districts designed by Baron Haussmann, Gustave and Martial were privileged witnesses of the urban transformation which Paris underwent during this period. They were fascinated by symbols of modernity such as bridges and railways, and the hustle and bustle of the Parisian streets was one of their favourite themes. They were also very interested in outdoor activities. While gardening might have attracted their attention, the two sailing enthusiasts particularly enjoyed depicting sailing boats, boaters and bathers.

But they also cast a tender and sometimes amused eye on their friends and family, whose peaceful occupations they illustrated in a private setting. The days revolved around lunches and card parties, walks and reading: all themes that the brothers were particularly fond of.

Website : Musée Jacquemart- André

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Bron/Source : Artdaily