A letter protesting the construction of the Eiffel Tower was published in Paris on February 14, 1887, less than three weeks after Gustave Eiffel broke ground on the tower that would far overtake the Washington Monument as the world’s tallest manmade structure.
Centre Iris… pour la photographie is disconnected from the gallery landscape of Paris both for its situation north of the Pompidou Center and its exhibition space in a vaulted white-washed basement.
That’s a disconnect that makes it perfectly suited for the intense and haunting portraits by American photographer Quinn Jacobson in an exhibit of his work entitled “Glass Memories,” showing until June 19, 2010.
The Marmottan Monet Museum is one of the undervisited glories of the museumscape of Paris, no doubt due to its location toward the western edge of the city. The museum, formerly the home of Paul Marmottan, originally paid full homage to Marmottan’s passion for collecting art, furniture, and bronzes from the Napoleonic/Empire era of the early 19th century. But following a donation in 1957, the museum began to assert itself as an important recipient for Impressionist, near-Impressionist, and post-Impressionists works.
You might wonder why I haven’t chosen a painting by Rembrandt or Vermeer to illustrate an article about an exhibit entitled The Dutch Golden Age, From Rembrandt to Vermeer, showing at the Pinachothèque de Paris until Feb. 7, 2010. But to do so would be as misleading as that second half of the title of the show itself.
"It makes no sense to compare," Marc Restellini, director of the Pinacothèque de Paris in Paris told me when I asked him why Maurice Utrillo was the famous painter of Montmarte while his mother Suzanne Valadon has generally been forgotten. Restellini's exhibit, showing at the Pinacotheque until September 15, places the mother-son paintings side-by-side. Viewing it raise for me the question as to why one painter was once considered "better" than the other. It’s also interesting to see how two people from the same family saw the world differently.
Shortly after the signing of the Declaration of Independencein Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin accepted a mission from the Continental Congress to seeking an alliance with France and eventually recognition of the independence of the United States of American from the British Empire.
In October 1776, Franklin set off on the 6-week transatlantic crossing to join Silas Deane on the American mission to obtain favor from the Court of France.
Paris has pulled out all the stops to examine how Picasso looked at and dialogued with the greats that preceded him: Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais, Picasso/Delacroix at the Louvre, Picasso/Manet at the Orsay. Heady stuff that gives clues into what Picasso was thinking.
But what were his subjects thinking? Typically nothing since his subjects in these cases were mostly earlier paintings, and in any their humanity has largely been erased.
