Esprit de france - le blog

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

Dominique Issermann – Laetitia Casta
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
From January 18th 2012 to March 25th 2012

During three days, Dominique Issermann has photographed Laetitia Casta in thermal baths built by the architect Peter Zumthor in Switzerland. Dominique Issermann “drags Laeticia in the choreography of a new book, a wonderful woman, naked, who stands in the generous and elusive perspective of a perfect building.” It is a pas de deux, a photographic choreography.

This is also Dominique Issermann’s last silver film work to savor through these 33 prints. The 33 photographs are rolled and unrolled like the construction of one unique image of the archetypal Laeticia Casta, in her free and supreme nudity.

You can feel Dominique Issermann holding her breath to seize the best of Laetitia moving in the building and the one of the architect Peter Zumthor breathing through the walls, the stairs, the baths, the corridors.

Private and sensual.

Dominique Issermann – Laetitia Casta
Until March 25th 2012
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5 rue de Fourcy 
75004 Paris

Laetitia Casta ©Dominique Issermann

Laetitia Casta ©Dominique Issermann

What about your New Year resolution being to fully enjoy the great exhibitions Paris offers? Here is a guide to help you.

Let’s begin the year with the Edvard Munch “Modern eye”? In this exhibition at Centre George Pompidou until the 23rd of January, the famous Norwegian painter’s work (1863-1944) is shown through a new approach, or how the artist’s curiosity for all types of representation nourished and inspired his work. Educational and well done.

From the 6th of March, 2012, the Cité de la Musique will pay tribute to Bob Dylan, great figure of 20th Century’s popular music. Conceived by the Grammy Museum of Los Angeles, the exhibition portrays his amazing story through unpublished pictures, video archives, rare objects and documents.

From the 7th of March to the 18th of June, the George Pompidou center will dedicate an exhibition to the “pairs and series” of Matisse. Like most of the major artists of the 20th century, Matisse loved repetition. You will discover variations of portraits, nude, landscapes and interiors… themes beloved of Matisse.

At the same time (March 7th – August 5th), the fantasy universe of the American director Tim Burton will show up at the Cinématèque Française. From the arty start of Edward Scissorhands’ creator to his first films, from his teenager works to his studies at the prestigious CalArts School, the genesis of his originality will hold no secrets for you anymore.

From the 13th of March to the 1st of July, “Degas and the nude” will be exhibited at the Orsay Museum. This exhibition explores the evolution of Degas’s practice of the nude: academic at the beginning, sliding to erotic and intimate during his long career.

The Grand Palais will show a radical and original commitment: “Animal beauty” (March 21st – July 16th) is a selection of masterpieces where animals are represented alone and for themselves, without any human presence. What is the program? 130 works of art of various artists such as Dürer, Géricault, Matisse, Louise Bourgeois, Kokoschka and Jeff Koons!

Photography lovers will not miss the retrospective dedicated to Helmut Newton at the Grand Palais (March 24th – June 17th). Women, money, fashion, celebrity are seen through the photographer’s eye, sometimes provocative sometimes violent always beautiful. June Newton, the wife of the photograph dead in 2004, is in charge of the exhibition preparation.

Coming with autumn, the Grand Palais again… will offer starting October 10th the first and very expected Parisian retrospective of Edward Hopper, great painter of loneliness.

You will finish this rich artistic year with Dali’s surrealism at the Centre George Pompidou from November 21st. 150 works of art, whose the well-known soft watches, optical illusions, Gala the beloved muse and the famous perpendicular moustaches; the whole presented in a spectacular scenography.

Painting, cinema, photography, music…up to you to chose your New Year resolution(s). I now have to wish you a beautiful year and intense artistic and touristic emotions.

Vogue, Londres, 1967 © Helmut Newton EstateEdward Hopper From Williamsburg Bridge 1928 Oil on canvas 73,7 x 109,2 cm © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, dist. Press service Rmn-Grand Palais / image of the MMA

Edward Hopper From Williamsburg Bridge 1928 Oil on canvas 73,7 x 109,2 cm © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, dist. Press service Rmn-Grand Palais / image of the MMA

«Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… The Stein family»  
Grand Palais
From October 5th 2011 to January 16th 2012 – Extended until the 22nd of January

Do you remember the character Gertrude Stein in “Midnight in Paris”? In the movie of Woody Allen, this influential woman, artists’ friend, used to see them in her apartment to advice them – sometimes reading a manuscript for Hemingway, sometimes giving her opinion on a painting of Picasso. We feel how Gertrude Stein’s opinion was important for the emerging artists who will become the great painters Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Bonnard, Vallotton and Picabia.

Until the 16th of January 2012, the Grand Palais exhibits the Stein Family collection, made up of Gertrude, but also Léo and the couple Michael and Sarah. This nonstandard and wealthy American family established in Paris (rue Madame and rue Fleurus on the left bank) contributed to set a new standard as regards artistic taste in modern art. They welcomed many artists settled in Paris and built an avant-garde collection. Very avant-garde…. Léo Stein bought the Fauve painting “Femme au chapeau” of Matisse just after it created a scandal during the autumn exhibition of 1905.

Each member of the family is described through the exhibition. We discover the history and amazing collection of this precursor family which felt and supported the great modern painting masters before they moment of glory.

«Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… The Stein family»
Until January 16th 2012
Grand Palais

Avenue Winston Churchill 

75008 Paris
Website of the exhibition “Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… The Stein family”

Fra Angelico and the masters of light
Musée Jaquemart-André
From September 23rd 2011 to January 16th 2012

The Jacquemart-André Museum is the first French museum to pay tribute to Fra Angelico (1387-1455) and reconsider this exceptional artist’s career. The exhibition will present nearly 25 major works by Fra Angelico and a similar number of panels painted by some of his prestigious contemporaries, such as Lorenzo Monaco, Masolino, Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi and Zanobi Strozzi.

Fra Angelico was a major player in Florence’s artistic and cultural revolution at the beginning of the 15th century. His work combines the golden lustre inherited from Gothic style with a new understanding of perspective. He initiated the artistic movement which specialists have named the “Peintres de la Lumière” (painters of light).

Fra Angelico was a pupil of Lorenzo Monaco and, like him, a monk. He learned his art in Florence, a city saturated with the International Gothic style. This refined style, which combined influences from Northern Europe and Italy, inspired Fra Angelico to create works with deep spiritual meaning, that you will see some examples in this exhibition

Fra Angelico and the masters of light
From September 23rd 2011 to January 16th 2012
Musée Jaquemart-André
158, boulevard Haussmann
75008 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 62 11 59
www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com

Maya – From dawn to dusk
Musée du quai Branly
From June 21st to October 2nd 2011

Until the 2nd of September, the musée du Quai Branly presents the Maya civilization through more than 160 exceptional objects: painted ceramics, steles, cut semiprecious stones, funerary objects, architectural remains, ornaments… The pieces, most of which have never left their country of origin, are presented following a chronological logic going back over 4000 years of History : rise, peak and decline at the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in 1524 C.E.

You will particularly enjoy the great delicacy of objects, and the expressivity and boundless imagination the collection evokes, especially anthropomorphisms. It allows entering the intimacy of the Maya civilization that worshiped jaguar, quetzal, rain and death.

The exhibition ends with a more contemporary section integrating multimedia and photographs, permitting the transmission of a broad view of ancient and contemporary Maya culture, and creating a link between past and present.

Maya – From dawn to dusk
Until the 2nd of October
Musée du quai Branly
37, quai Branly
75007 Paris
Tél: + 33 (0)1 56 61 70 00
www.quaibranly.fr

Charlotte Perriand – From photography to design
Petit Palais
From April 7th to September 18th 2011

Until the 18th of September, the Petit Palais presents the work of Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and reveals for the first time the part played by photography in the creative process of this lady of design, today produced by Cassina.

She began using photography for her preliminary studies when she joined the Le Corbusier/Pierre Jeanneret studio as furniture design associate in 1928 (where she was by the way the only woman). Photography used as a visual notebook for the one who had “the eye in the shape of a fan”. Then, it will be a mean for observing the “laws of nature” – in the mountains, especially – and the urban context. This provided her with inspiration for her experiments with forms, materials and spatial arrangements.

The exhibition particularly emphasizes her passion for objects found in the course of her walks (with her friend Fernand Leger). A stone, a pierced piece of wood, … everything is a source of inspiration in their distancing of the rationalist spirit of the 1920s, these brought greater flexibility and formal freedom to her work. For example the banquette Tokyo designed in 1954 but inspired from a fish bone found in 1933!

The Petit Palais thus offers the opportunity to rediscover an artist alert to her natural and social setting, a free woman who opened the way for today’s women designers.

The exhibition comprises 380 photos and 70 items of furniture, including a suite that once belonged to Perriand herself.

Charlotte Perriand – From photography to design
Until the 18th of September
Petit Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
Tél. : + 33 (0)1 53 43 40 00
www.petitpalais.paris.fr

Paris – Delhi – Bombay …
Centre George Pompidou
From May 25th to September 19th 2011

Until the 19th of September 2011, the Centre Pompidou presents a major exhibition that explores Indian society through the eyes of Indian and French artists. The fruit of an unprecedented Franco-Indian collaboration, Paris-Delhi-Bombay is intended to promote communication between the two cultures, establishing new and lasting links.

Taking the form of a unique confrontation of perspectives, this pioneering project draws on the experiences and visions of creative artists: how is India seen by Indian and French artists?

More than fifty artists offer their take on the profound changes being undergone by Indian society, looking at questions of politics (the foundations of democracy, the issue of partition, the rise of the middle classes), belief (religion, spirituality…), identity (national, regional, sexual, caste…), urban development (rural exodus, growth of the megalopolis), craft production (tradition and modernity, cultural heritage and contemporary technologies) and domestic life (family, marriage, women’s emancipation, cookery…).

Indian and French artists cast new light on the India of today, offering their own interpretation of this complex society.

Paris – Delhi – Bombay …
Until the 19th of September
Centre George Pompidou
Place George Pompidou
75004 Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr