published on March 18, 2009
The musée des Arts décoratifs, in the Louvre Palace, in Paris, drawing solely from its collections, features through november the 1st, the colour red, in all its dimensions, its perceptions.
The exhibition explores numerous domains in which red is an inescapable element, and the different symbolisms of this colour in all societies down the ages.
‘To say the ‘colour red’ is almost a pleonasm. Red is the colour par excellence […] the first of all colours’ (Michel Pastoureau, Dictionnaire des couleurs de notre temps).
Above: straw hat with indented peak, by David Shilling (1989)
Among the themes evoked are danger, hell, pleasure, power, luxury, dressing in red, the timelessness of red in the decorative arts and the various techniques and materials of red. A colour that symbolizes also fire and blood…
Musée des Arts décoratifs (Palais du Louvre)
The study Gallery
107, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
Phone reception: +33 (0)1 44 55 57 50
Through 1st of November 2009
published on March 17, 2009
Until the 23rd of August, the Rodin Museum honors portraiture through the exhibition ‘The Making of the portrait, Rodin meet his models’. It highlights the creative process and the artist’s approach in the construction of his final work.
Claire de Choiseul, study, earthenware
Moulded out of the same clay, the faces of Baudelaire, Clemenceau, Balzac, stand alongside those of the bourgeois of the late 19th century. On this occasion, the Rodin museum took out of its reserves many restored pieces, some of which are shown to the public for the first time.
Madame Garnier, earthenware
Public or private, commemorative or intimate, the sculptor has created throughout his career portraits of great diversity – artists, politicians, bankers, loved women, socialites, French and foreign, every last one of these faces, contemporary of Rodin, immortalized and presented in one exhibition.
Moreover, to visit the Rodin museum at this time of the year is a must, for the park is blooming and a nice restaurant welcomes you in an remarkable setting, strewn with Rodin’s masterpieces…
Musée Rodin
79 rue de Varennes
75007 Paris
Tel: 01 44 18 61 10
Through 23rd of August 2009
published on March 4, 2009
To discover or rediscover during summer…
In an area completely renovated, combining modernity and the 1900 spirit, daylight highlights the collections.
You will go back in time, from the 1900 art to Ancient Greece and Rome, and understand how great moments in the history of Western art combine with the technical and artistic innovations, to produce masterpieces.
In this new place of art, creativity and conviviality, paintings, sculptures and art objects testify.
You will then certainly enjoy the charm of the interior garden with its pools lined with mosaics, its colonnades and its coffee shop.
Le Petit Palais
Avenue du Président Winston-Churchill – 75008 Paris
Tel : 00 33 1 53 43 40 00
Site : www.petitpalais.paris.fr
Open every day except Mondays and days off, from 10am to 6pm.
Metro
Lines: 13 or 1. Station: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau
Bus
Line 72 . Bus stop: Grand Palais
published on March 1, 2009
The Grand Palais, in Paris,
hosts, through July 13 2009, an extraordinary series of the portraits that made Andy Warhol so famous.
The artist started in 1962 with the portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and revisited the Mona Lisa and Elvis Presley. From 1967 to 1987, he fulfilled commissions and using a process that he began to adopt systematically, produced the portraits of dozens of different personalities, celebrated or unknown, re-establishing the portrait genre, by introducing new codes.
Warhol held up a mirror in which the social microcosm and the bigger world beyond could see themselves reflected.
In the series presented in the Grand Palais, Warhol painted a picture of an entire society and invented a new form of artistic production – serial and almost mass produced. The effect of the principle of repetition was a central preoccupation of Warhol’s work during this period.
In his studio, “The Factory”, Andy Warhol developed a systematic process in the early 1970s – he made up his models and photographed them with a Big Shot Polaroid. He carefully selected the shots, then painted and silk screened the portraits (among which Man Ray, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Willy Brandt, Edward Kennedy, Princesse de Monaco, Gunther Sachs,Yves Saint-Laurent, Sonia Rykiel…).
Two hundred and fifty works – selected from the thousand portraits executed since the early 1960s – are on show now, at Les Galeries du Grand Palais, in Paris.
A must of your spring in Paris…
Through July 13 2009
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais
3, avenue du Général-Eisenhower
75008 Paris
Tél : 01 44 13 17 17
published on February 27, 2009
Through June 21, at the Jacquemart-André Museum, the exceptional works collected during the 19th century by the German baron Bernard von Lindenau are shown for the first time in Paris.
The exhibition highlights the succession of major aesthetic trends which deeply transformed Italian art between the second half of the 13th century and the end of the 15th century. The Greek style and Byzantine influence on the one hand and the appearance of the modern style after Giotto and the spread of the international Gothic style on the other, gradually gave way to the Renaissance style.
This anthology of prestigious artists, from Guido da Siena to Liberale di Verona, enables us to see two major schools side by side: the Sienese School, which counts Lippo Memmi, Pietro Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro amongst its ranks, and the Florentine School, represented, amongst others, by Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, Masaccio and Filippo Lippi.
A fascinating and rare glimpse of post-medieval painting…
Through 21st of June 2009
Musée Jacquemart-André
158, boulevard Haussmann 75008 Paris
Téléphone : 01 45 62 11 59
www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com
Open all year round, between 10 a.m and 6 p.m
