mars, 2011

mars 30th, 2011

Art Nouveau – Art Deco: sale of 29 March 2011

The collections of the Castle of Gourdon: a museum for sale

In Paris, Palais de Tokyo, took place Tuesday, March 29, 2011, the first auction of private collections in the castle of Gourdon, comprising one of the most beautiful set in the world of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

Sales, which are spread over three days, are due to closure of the Museum of Decorative Arts Gourdon Castle, located in southern France, near Nice.

For this event in Paris, Christie’s sales orchestra, the first consisted of 78 batches of exceptional pieces of Art Deco furniture.

The record sales went to the « chaise longue aux skis » (couch to ski) called the « Maharaja » by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, 1929, sold for 2,865,000 euros ($ 4,025,123).

The « table à jeux et suite de quatre chaises » (game table and four chairs) by Jean Dunand, estimated between 3 and 5 million euros ($ 4,241,836 to 7,069,727) has however been able to find a buyer.

The most lively auction also came back with two pieces of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. One for a cabinet called « cave à liqueur » (liquor cellar), from 1926, estimated between 300,000 and 400,000 euros ($ 423,000 to 564,000) and sold for 1,498,600 euros ($ 2,105,428). The other for a convenient « Lassalle » from 1925, estimated between 500,000 and 700,000 euros ($ 705,000 to 987,000) and sold for 1,801,000 euros ($ 2,530,278).

Finally, several pieces of Robert Mallet-Stevens (hairdresser, a pair of easy chairs, armchairs, …) were preempted by the Centre of National Monuments.

More informations : www.christies.com

Castle Gourdon : www.chateau-gourdon.com

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mars 18th, 2011

François Morellet, Réinstallations

Centre Pompidou March 2 to July 4, 2011

In the series of the Centre Pompidou retrospective devoted to the great figures of contemporary art, a new exhibition presents a rereading of the work of François Morellet.

This exhibition focuses on one aspect of the original and pioneering work by the artist, facilities.

In collaboration with the curators of the exhibition, Alfred Pacquement and Serge Lemoine, François Morellet has selected twenty-six works of varying sizes that cover the major turning points in his career from 1963 to today.

Very different in nature from each other and made of various materials – tubes of neon lights with projection pieces of wood, paper, silk screen adhesive strips on the walls, canvas frames, aluminum tubes, metal plates, they are installed in space and on the walls.

The whole is « relocated » in the gallery 2, 6th Floor, Centre Pompidou, to create a varied course full of contrasts and surprises, able to cause visual impacts as to arouse pleasure both elegance that’s about the beauty of the effect.

Museum Centre Pompidou : Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris

More informations : www.centrepompidou.fr

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mars 17th, 2011

Picasso the most expensive exhibited in London

The most expensive painting to be sold at auction Nude, Green Leaves and Bust by Pablo Picasso is presented to the public for the first time ever in the UK at Tate Modern in London. The work has been lent to Tate from a Private Collection and be on display in a new Pablo Picasso room on Level 3.

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is one of the sequence of paintings of Picasso’s muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, made by the artist at Boisgeloup, Normandy, in the early months of 1932.

Picasso first encountered Marie-Thérèse Walter in January 1927 but their relationship had to remain secret from his wife, Olga. Although Picasso had long disguised his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is among the group of works which openly chart the obsessiveness between the lovers. It was painted on 8 March 1932 and is the most intense among the group of large nudes completed in single, sometimes consecutive, days and marking a high-point of Picasso’s creative energy. The setting (probably in the sculpture studios of the Château de Boisgeloup outside Paris) includes a secretive curtain that provides the screen onto which the sculptural bust casts a double shadow. It is as if the white of the foreground nude was, literally as well as metaphorically, illuminating the space.

After many years in private hands, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie’s, New York on 4 May 2010 to a private collector for a world record price of $ 106.5 million (76.5 million €). Before it was sold, the work had been in the collection of LA based collectors Sidney and Frances Brody for almost six decades. They had acquired the work in 1951 from Paul Rosenberg, whom in turn had acquired it from the artist in 1936. During that period it had been exhibited publicly only once, in 1961, to commemorate Picasso’s 80th birthday.

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mars 11th, 2011

Odilon Redon, March 23 – June 20, 2011

Paris – Grand Palais National gallery

The exhibition in timeline format revisits the work of one of the geniuses of modern art: Odilon Redon.

From the anguish of the dark period (charcoal, lithographs) to the colourful explosion of the late works, Odilon Redon (1840-1916) had a deep impact on the Symbolist generation, and subsequently the Nabis and the young Fauves, with their bold use of colour. He explored the meanders of thought process, and the esoteric aspect of the human soul, marked by the mechanisms of dream.

The exhibition is organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux, and the Orsay and Fabre Museums, and is staged in collaboration with the Department of Prints and Photography of the French National Library. A chronological look back at the artist’s stylistic development, from blacks to colours, it will be showing 170 outstanding works (paintings, drawings, pastels and charcoal) from major French and international collections (Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK). It will also be displaying archive documents (photos, letters, magazines, books) illustrating the links between Odilon Redon and the intellectuals of his time.

General Commissioner: Rodolphe Rapetti, General Curator for Heritage, associate researcher at INHA.

Grand Palais: entrance to the exhibition, avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris 8e.

More informations: http://www.grandpalais.fr

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mars 7th, 2011

Miró sculptor

Paris – Maillol Museum from March 16 to July 31, 2011

Maillol Museum pays tribute to the work of Joan Miró sculpture. If the artist is universally recognized, his sculptures have been the subject of an exhibition in Paris for nearly 40 years. The museum brings to 99 the opportunity sculptures, 22 ceramics and 20 works on paper. The provenance of most of them is the exceptional collection of Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation.

His first ceramics with Josep Llorens Artigas performed, date from 1941-1945. Soon after, Miro running his first sculptures in bronze.

In 1964, Joan Miro participates in the creation of the Fondation Maeght, where he finally found a place for which he will create monumental works. The meeting between Joan Miró and Aimé Maeght was essential. For the first time the sculpture by Miró is intentionally associated with the architecture and nature for him endless source of inspiration and it will create specifically for the Foundation Maeght a garden of monumental sculptures and ceramics, dreamlike world people the « Labyrinth », which recalls that Miro is not only a painter but also a sculptor.

In 1974, ten years after the opening of the Fondation Maeght, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ville de Paris presented a set of sculptures by Joan Miró. Almost 40 years later, the Maillol Museum Miro situates this in mind and pays tribute to this great artist, just as Picasso was a painter and sculptor.

Musée Maillol : 61, rue de Grenelle – 75007 Paris.

More informations: http://www.museemaillol.com

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mars 2nd, 2011

Louvre museum: Egypt in stone, Egypt in paper

Thematic exhibitions from march 2 to june 2 2011

La Chapelle des ancêtres de Thoutmosis III

Prisse d’Avennes was one of many keen travelers exploring the shores of the Nile in the first half of the 19th century, fascinated by Pharaonic ruins and Arab monuments alike.

With an open, inquiring mind, he approached the rich diversity of Egypt as an archaeologist, Egyptologist, and ethnologist. During his two sojourns in the country – the first lasting 17 years, from 1827 to 1844, the second, an extended tour from 1858 to 1860 – he amassed a rich crop of manuscript notes, mostly unpublished, and a significant body of graphic works recording the appearance and state of the monuments, including tracings of carved decorations and inscriptions, watercolors, prints, photographs and annotated cuttings. Unlike collectors of antiquities, he brought few objects home from Egypt – but those he did (including the papyrus that bears his name, and Thutmosis III’s Chapel of the Ancestors, now in the Louvre) are of the highest historical importance.

His rich, dense body of work was bequeathed to the manuscripts section of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Hence the exhibition’s original format: Égypte de papier (‘Egypt on paper’) at the Bibliothèque Nationale, including fine works from the library’s iconography collection representing the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the Arab world, on public display for the first time; and Égypte de pierre (‘Egypt in stone’) at the Louvre, adjacent to the Chapel of the Ancestors, including unpublished archives on the transport of the monument to France, and the discovery of its historical importance since the 19th century.

Curator : Elisabeth Delange, Musée du Louvre, Department of Egyptian Antiquities

More informations: http://www.louvre.fr

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