https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGflH-iHA_Y 9 reconstructed spaces A great woman. A great exhibition. Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) is the subject of an exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton comprising no less than nine reconstructed spaces, which give...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXWkF5fpi84 Call me again tomorrow “I was 24 years old. I travelled from Chile to Paris. I arrived at my hotel. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and I had the phone number of André Breton (ed. the theoretician of...
Free spirit The free-spirited and prolific Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), a great painter, was the subject of a retrospective at Moma in New York and at the Tate in London in 2014. Palazzo Grassi His work was also exhibited in 2016 at the Pinault Foundation’s Palazzo...
A seventh continent It’s like something out of science fiction. Human beings today have been granted a seventh continent – in addition to the known ones – that occupies over 1.6 million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean and is made up entirely of plastic...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL7tm-4pfMc Artists are seekers It’s always helpful to classify an artist in terms of a school, to put them in a box. But good artists can’t be pigeonholed. They’re seekers, and in the words of Picasso in fact they don’t seek,...
Crucial days There are crucial days that can change your life forever. Take the British painter Francis Bacon. On 26 October 1971 he was the subject of a major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Not only was it a marked success for him in Europe, accompanied by...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBa2p4_YCxA The great German photographer who lived in Paris, Peter Lindbergh, died on 3 September. I met him last January. At the Giacometti Institute he was exhibiting his dark images dedicated to the Swiss sculptor, inspired...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV6v3d0hX0A A pilgrimage destination Because New York has long been the global centre for art, and because New York is in all likelihood still to this day the global centre for collecting contemporary art and the art...
Multifaceted and ever-changing reality Besides the heat that extinguishes all possibility of articulated thought, today’s world is animated by extreme and evolving forces that make it very difficult to read phenomena and produce relevant creation. Incisive...
RMB city There is a before and after Cao Fei. Or at least there is a before and after RMB City. Chinese artist The Chinese artist (born in 1978) used the platform of the virtual online game Second Life to create a fictional city in 2007 which takes its name...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuFG2ey17o Maja Sacher In the art world she is known as a powerful collector. In this area the inspiration most likely comes from her grandmother, Maja Sacher from Basel, who became a serious collector of Picasso, Max Ernst,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYJmPfmdNY The weeping woman As far as art history is concerned, Dora Maar (1907-1997) will always be the “weeping woman” as named by her portrait, painted so many times by Picasso as a kind of fury with tears streaming down her...