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...
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...
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...
Unknown Imagine an absurd situation where there’s a canvas measuring 144cm x 173cm whose author remains unknown, whose sale price also remains unknown, and whose buyer’s identity isn’t really known either. This mass of mysteries has been the subject of intense...
Endless speculation There’s been endless speculation in the media surrounding the nature and whereabouts of the Salvator Mundi, a heavily restored painting depicting Christ blessing the world, not because it is (or isn’t) by Leonardo but primarily...
Paul Cézanne The story begins in the pine forests of Aix. Imagine the cicadas, the hot sun beating down, and Paul Cézanne coming to this spot every day to paint, in an old quarry where stones were cut in the 18th century and used to construct the majestic...
Art super star It was only after her death that the American artist Louise Bourgeois (1910-2010) became a contemporary art superstar, thanks to a proliferation of exhibitions around the world and a large-scale promotion campaign on the part of, among others, the...