Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986) fait l’objet, pour la première fois en France, d’une rétrospective au Centre Pompidou. Cette artiste américaine, dont l’œuvre se déploie depuis l’entre-deux-guerres jusqu’aux années 1970, jouit aux Etats-Unis d’une grande renommée qui tient autant à la force de sa personnalité qu’à son rôle de pionnière de l’abstraction proprement américaine. On ne rappellera…
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Digressions around an engraving In June 1440, the great condottiere Niccolò Piccinino, then in the service of the Duke of Milan, learnt on his way back to Lombardy after having campaigned in Central Italy that the Florentines and their Allies were camping below the walls of Anghiari, a fortress on top of a hill; he…
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One of the most exciting contemporary achievements in the art of stained-glass can be found on the windows of the cathedral Saint Cyr et Sainte Julitte of Nevers, now a sleepy small town in the centre of France. Stained-glass is an often-neglected art form, probably because it is intimately linked to the universe of religious…
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Dans les temps étranges où une partie de l’humanité, et singulièrement celle qui habite l’Europe, attend des lendemains dont elle ne sait au juste qu’attendre, mais pressent qu’ils ne tiendront aucune des promesses qu’on voudrait leur prêter, on a pensé revenir à l’un de ces moments de l’histoire européenne d’où l’angoisse civilisationnelle paraissait absente, ces…
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Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2019 Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) est incontestablement un géant de la peinture du 20ème siècle. L’exposition qui lui est actuellement consacrée par le Centre Pompidou ne fait que le confirmer. Une grande exposition s’était tenue au Grand Palais en 1971, suivie en 1996 d’une importante rétrospective au Centre Pompidou. Etait-il pertinent…
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Paris, the Louvre, October 2019 Leonardo Da Vinci has achieved through the centuries a status of summus pictor, which the magnificent Paris exhibition set up for the 500th anniversary of his death further exemplifies, and authenticates. But his glory is enhanced by the image of his universality, both the universality of his fame and the…
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Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2019 “I was called an artist in the Sixties because they didn’t know how to define a pile of coal. But I am a painter, and I claim my initiation in painting. Because painting is the construction of images and doesn’t refer to a manner or, even less, a technique.” (In Alessandra…
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As anyone who has an interest in post-war art will probably know, Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963) is mostly known for one of the most provocative gestures in the history of art, the famed Merda d’Artista (1961), or “artist’s shit”. It consists of ninety cans of – supposedly – his own faeces, tinned in small…
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Ca’Pesaro, Venice, 2019 Ca’ Pesaro has taken the bold and useful step, on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, to organize a large retrospective – the first Italian one – of an unjustly neglected painter of the first half of the twentieth century, Arshile Gorky; the last such event is probably the Tate Modern retrospective…
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Gely Korzhev, retour à Venise , Ca’ Foscari, Venise, 10 mai – 3 novembre 2019 L’université Ca’Foscari accueille à l’occasion de la Biennale de Venise une exposition du peintre russe Gely Korzhev (1925 – 2012) dont le moins que l’on puisse dire est qu’il est peu connu en Europe, et d’autant moins connu qu’on l’associe avec…
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