Esprit de france - le blog

Eugène Boudin
Jacquemart-André museum
From the 22nd of March to the 22nd of July, 2013

The Jacquemart-André Museum presents the first Parisian retrospective since the end of the 19th century devoted to the painter Eugène Boudin.

Known for his seascapes and beach scenes, Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) was one of the first French artists to take his easel outside the studio to paint landscapes. In his numerous paintings, he especially focused on the rendering of elements and atmospheric effects. As such, he was one of the initiators of a renewed view of nature, and thus preceded the impressionists in this approach, not to mention his friend Claude Monet, who wrote late in life: “I owe everything to Boudin.”

Over the years, his palette became brighter and his touch lighter for a better rendition of reflections from the sky and water. From Normandy to Venice, which he discovered in his latter years, along with the beaches in the North, Brittany, and the South, he painted landscapes in movement in a subtle harmony of coloured greys. A genuine “King of the skies“, Eugène Boudin perfected the art of transcribing such changing elements as light, clouds, and waves. General director of the exhibition Laurent Manœuvre gathered nearly sixty paintings, watercolours, and drawings, thanks to loans from major international museums, portraying Eugène Boudin in his quest for light, from Honfleur to Venice, and paying a wonderful tribute to this artist so closely associated with the sea and its seascapes.

Eugène Boudin
From the 22nd of March to the 22nd of July, 2013
Musée Jacquemart-André
158 Boulevard Haussmann
75008 Paris
www.expo-eugeneboudin.com

Chagall – Between war and peace
Musée du Luxembourg
From the 21st of February to the 21st of July, 2013

Chagall was nearly a hundred when he died in 1985. He had crossed most of the 20th century, living through one revolution, two wars and a period of exile, and rubbing shoulders with some of its most avant-garde artists. His personal experience of History, the memory of people he knew, his travels and his homeland shine through in his work. Twentieth-century art largely repressed allegory and narrative.

It was because Chagall did not follow the rules and codes (or even dogma) of modernist thought, while drawing nourishment from it, that he was able to stay figurative and bear witness to his time. He borrowed some of the forms of the avant-garde movements (Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism) and sometimes seems to come close to them, but in the end remained independent. The parallel between the images of war and the images of peace reveals the complexity of an oeuvre which can never be reduced to a particular genre, but enfolds events, situations and the artist’s feelings. Depending on the circumstances, Chagall comes back to a few themes, enriching them each time with a personal dimension: his home town of Vitebsk, the Jewish traditions of his childhood, episodes from the Bible, including the Crucifixion, the couple and family life.

Opening with the outbreak of the First World War, the exhibition seeks to illustrate four key periods in Chagall’s life and work: Russia in wartime, Between the wars, Exile in the United States and The post-war years and the return to France.

This dialectic of war and peace in the broadest sense highlights the essential aspects of Chagall’s work. By exploring the decisive episodes in his life, it helps us understand the link between his vision of the human condition and his sincere, sensitive pictorial technique, which, thirty years after his death, is still strikingly innovative.


Chagall – Between war and peace
From the 21st of February to the 21st of July, 2013
Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris

Dalí
Centre Georges Pompidou
Until the 25th of March



The Centre Pompidou in Paris pays tribute to Salvador Dalí, one of the most complex and prolific artists of the 20th century.

Dalí is one of the undisputed masters in the history of modern art and one of its most popular figures at the same time. A highly controversial artist, his theatricality and greed (his nickname was “Avida Dollars”) as well as his provocative political stances were often derided. This new exhibition does not shy away from the sheer impact of his work to which his own larger- than-life persona, in turns genial and grotesque, is so intricately woven.

Over two hundred works (paintings, sculptures, drawings, etc.) are presented. Dalí never stops luring the viewer between two infinities, hovering between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, polarizing contractions and expansions. He switches from meticulous Flemish precision ( in a reference to Vermeer) to the showy baroque of tradition that he used in his museum-theatre in Figueras.

Among the masterpieces presented in Paris are some of Dalí’s most revered icons: The Persistence of Memory (Melting watches), 1931, Le Grand Masturbateur, 1929, Le Spectre du Sex appeal, 1934 as well as L’Énigme sans fin, 1938. The exhibition will also offer the opportunity to discover more than a hundred works on paper, objects, projects for stage and screen, films, photographs and excerpts from television programmes that reflect the intense activity of the artist turned “showman”.

The exhibition also shows the countless ephemeral works created by Dalí in front of an audience or a camera, which made him a precursor of performance art and happenings.

Dalí
Centre Georges Pompidou
Until the 25th of March

+33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

Auguste Rodin – « Rodin, Wings of Glory »
Espace Musées – Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
Until the end of April 2013

Since the end of 2012, the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport offers a free museum. This unique experience is offered to international passengers through Espace Musées, a new cultural showcase that promotes French artistic heritage, in partnership with Parisian leading museums. Espaces Musées is free and open from the first to the last flight of the day. Each year, two thematic exhibitions will take place in the Charles de Gaulle airport’s 2E Terminal (Hall M). Serge Lemoine, former president at the Orsay Museum, is in charge of artistic direction.

For the opening, Espaces Musées presents “Rodin, Wings of Glory” produced in partnership with the Rodin Museum. 50 original works including the masterpieces Le Penseur, Le Baiser, and L’Age d’airain will be presented until the end of April 2013. The theme of this first exhibition, evoking takeoff, is the occasion to discover unknown works by Auguste Rodin. Winged figures and a large plaster wing are shown for the first time. They are references to the conquest of the skies and space myth, challenge for a sculptor.

“Our ambition is to offer passengers we welcome each year at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport a walk rich in emotions, for the enjoyment of the trip to begin at the airport and for travelers from around the world to take with them one last image of France’s magic“, said Augustin de Romanet, Chairman – CEO of Aéroports de Paris.

Auguste Rodin – “Rodin, Wings of Glory”
Until the end of April 2013
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
Espace Musées
Terminal 2E – M Hall

Les Bénédictions, ou les Gloires

Edward Hopper
Grand Palais
From October 10th 2012 to January 28th 2013

This exhibition is part of the exhibitions you should not miss in Paris this fall. We already told you about the Picasso, the Turner and the Monet exhibitions at Le Grand Palais. In October, Le Grand Palais will present a retrospective of the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

The exhibition follows a chronological path organized in two parts showing Hopper’s style evolution from the training years (1900 – 1924) to the maturity, when Hopper produced emblematic paintings such as House by the Railroad (1924) and Two Comedians (1966).

Edward Hopper’s favorite themes are shown here: night melancholy, light variations, city buildings, daily life scenes of the American middle class… He moves around from realism to symbolism, from formalism to romantism.

Le Grand Palais highlights these various aspects of Hopper work in this outstanding exhibition.

Edward Hopper
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill

75008 Paris 

+ 33 (0)1 44 13 17 30

Auguste Rodin – Rodin, flesh and marble
Musée Rodin Paris
From June 8th 2012 to September 1st 2013

Until the 1st of September 2013, the Rodin Museum presents around 50 marble sculptures and 10 earthenware models, questioning the importance of marble and its place in Rodin’s work. The artist is famous as a plaster modeler and sculptor while his contemporaries saw him as a “dominator of stone” before whom “marble trembled”.

Rodin knew how to give life to the hard and cold material marble is and you will observe how he gives shape to the modern soul. The flesh, that sculptors have taken great pains to represent since ancient times, becomes livelier than ever with him. Look at The Kiss or The Danaïd! What sensuality! The marble looks soft. The exhibition also highlights the strong symbolic dimension is part of the choice, and so marble takes us back to Antiquity, to the myths of ancient Greece, and to Italy of the Renaissance through the figure of Michelangelo.

The scenography offers a very good dynamic journey that will let you multiply points of view on the works.

Auguste Rodin – Rodin, flesh and marble
Until September 1st 2013
Musée Rodin
79, rue de Varenne
75007 Paris
+33 (0)1 44 18 61 10


Gerhard Richter – Panorama
Centre George Pompidou
From June 6th 2012 to September 24th 2012

The Centre Pompidou pays tribute to Gerhard Richter, one of the great figures of contemporary painting. The Panorama retrospective brings together a selection of 150 major works by Gerhard Richter. The artist has been involved in the conception of the exhibition, which offers a double insight, both chronological and thematic.

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty.” Gerhard Richter has the ability to reinvent himself, and yet every time to push his work into a new direction and to promote a new vision of painting and of art history.

Gerhard Richter has been experimenting with radically different pictorial styles: “photo-paintings” in the 1960′s, abstractions in which he blended color grids, gestural abstraction and monochromes in the 1970′s, reinvented portraits, landscapes and historical paintings in the 1980′s. At the same time, he was also exploring a new kind of abstract paintings suffused with acid colors in which geometric and gestural shapes dissolve. In the 1990′s, the artist fine-tuned what would become his signature technique of spreading wet paint with a large wooden or metal board.

This is the first exhibition in a French museum since the Centre Pompidou exhibition in 1977. In addition to celebrating the artist’s 80th birthday, Panorama is a tribute to one of the greatest painters of the past fifty years.

Gerhard Richter – Panorama
Until September 24th 2012
Centre George Pompidou
+33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Due to the success of the exhibition, it is highly recommended to buy tickets online before your visit to avoid queuing.

Helmut Newton
Grand Palais
From March 24th 2012 to June 17th 2012

This is the first retrospective of Helmut Newton in France since he died in 2004. June Newton, wife of the photographer during 60 years and photographer herself, developed it. The exhibition is a collection of more than 200 images, almost only high quality original or vintage prints made under the control of Helmut Newton: Polaroid, work prints of various sizes, monumental works. It is enriched with a movie directed by June, only element of the exhibition allowing to learn more about Newton’s personality and modus operandi.

Fashion, nudes, portraits, sex, the themes Helmut Newton loved are evoked in “sections” and let the visitor understand how did Newton’s universe created as he was mainly working in an “applied photography” to fashion and portraits. Strong and seductive women, determined look, magnificent nudity through a new and unique vision of the woman contemporary body. Yves Saint Laurent was told to have given power to Women with his creations. We could say the same for Helmut Newton who long went with Saint Laurent’s approach.

Do not miss the last room dedicated to portraits. It offers a formidable vision of some models…

Helmut Newton
Until June 17th 2012
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill   
75008 Paris
01 44 13 17 30
To know more and book your tickets: www.rmn.fr

Yves Saint Laurent, Vogue France, Rue Aubriot, Paris 1975 © Helmut Newton Estate

Bergstrom, au-dessus de Paris, Paris, 1976 © Helmut Newton Estate

Matisse, Paires et Séries
Centre Pompidou
From March 7th 2012 to June 18th 2012

Featuring some sixty paintings, including four large gouache cutouts, and thirty drawings, the exhibition “Matisse Paires et Séries” examines a distinctive aspect of Matisse’s art: his repeated explorations of the same subject through different treatments – for him a way of exploring art itself.

The exhibition particularly illuminates in bringing to bear the tools of historical, critical and technical analysis on the genesis of the works displayed, this examination of pairs and series revealing the line of development of Matisse’s work as a whole, with its ruptures, reversals and breakthroughs. It shows the degree to which Matisse’s work prompted and nourished the development of modern painting, endlessly posing the questions of representation, of realism, and of the relationships between drawing and color, surface and volume, interiority and exteriority.

Matisse used to develop new formal solutions, put into question his own, earlier advances, making him a profound student of form. It covers the whole of Matisse’s artistic career, from 1899 to 1952, the major periods being represented in chronological order, from the pointillism he experimented with in the summer of 1904 (with two versions of Luxe, Calme et Volupté, here juxtaposed in a rare opportunity for direct comparison) to the ambitious paper cutouts of the 1950s (with the famous Nu bleu series of 1952), taking in on the way the renowned Thèmes et variations series of drawings on paper, a kind of conceptual culmination of the procedure.

Matisse, Paires et Séries
Until June 18th 2012
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris

www.centrepompidou.fr

Degas and the Nude
Musée d’Orsay
From March 13th 2012 to July 1st 2012

After an hommage to Claude Monet and Edouard Manet in 2010 and 2011, the Orsay Museum presents « Degas and the Nude » highlighting an other great master of the second part of the 19th Century.

Some recurrent themes of Degas’ painting such as dance, horse races, war scenes or portraits have been fully explored and presented. Nude, which is as much important, did not get the attention it deserves.

Degas kept depicting naked bodies through his career, repeating the same motifs and using the same poses at interval of several decades.

More than any other genre, Degas’ nudes show his technical and plastic evolutions and offer a retrospective illustrating why Degas is such an important artist for the avant-gardes’ history of the 19th century.

The exhibition offers a chronologic path in seven sections enhancing breaks and continuity along the 50 years of artistic activity: the training, Degas’ progressive emancipation from tradition, the definitive break with shape idealization, heritage left by Degas to the next generation of artists…

Through this exhibition, you will learn how innovation in techniques (painting, sculpture, charcoal, pastel) reveals another Degas, fascinating and playing a major role in the emergence of artistic modernity in Europe.

Degas and the Nude
Until July 1st 2012
Musée d’Orsay
62 Rue de Lille
75007 Paris
+33 (0)1 45 49 47 03
Book your tickets online to get a direct access to the exhibition: www.musee-orsay.fr

Femme nue couchée, 1886-88 Pastel, 48 x 87 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Le Tub, 1886 Pastel sur carton, 60 x 83 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay, legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © Musée d'Orsay, dist. RMN / Patrice Schmidt