Heidi Ellison
Tissage-Tressage
Hanging by a Thread
Long disrespected as a “women’s” craft, weaving is coming into its own as an art form, just as ceramics, also long considered a craft rather than an art, has in recent years. “Tissage-Tressage,” a wonderful (and free) exhibition at the … Read More
Vivian Maier: The Color Work
The Snap-Happy Nanny
For such a private person, Vivian Maier took an awful lot of self-portraits. That was one of the impressions I got from the current show of color and black-and-white images by the enigmatic street photographer/nanny now on at Les Douches … Read More
Simonetta Restaurant
New Culinary Life on the Canal
Time was you couldn’t find an authentic Italian pizza in Paris to save your soul. Just about every pizzeria, so many of them run by people without a drop of Italian blood, had identical lists of pizzas (margarita, quatre saisons, … Read More
Pablo Valbuena: Si le Temps Est un Lieu
Life After Death
The vast spaces and smaller enclosed rooms of the amazingly successful Centquatre, aka 104, the city of Paris’s former morgue, are used for every purpose imaginable. This “artistic and cultural factory” hosts shops, a restaurant and a café, concerts and other … Read More
Sérusier’s “Talisman”
How a Painting Lesson Changed Art History
The Musée d’Orsay has put together a sweet little exhibition focusing on a small painting by Paul Sérusier that is considered seminal for the development of 19th-century art. As the curators note, “Landscape in the Bois d’Amour” (aka “Le Talisman”) is … Read More
Variations Restaurant
Varied Dining Experiences
I have been to the restaurant Variations in Paris’s 11th arrondissement twice now, both times because a friend happened to walk past it, liked the look of the place and its menu, and suggested that we go. The restaurant’s handsome … Read More
L’Ordre des Médecins
Operating without a Scalpel
L’Ordre des Médecins (Breath of Life), the first feature film directed by David Roux, takes place almost entirely in the closed world of a French hospital. Simon, played by the handsome and always convincing Jérémie Renier, is a self-assured 37-year-old pulmonologist … Read More
DAU
Soviet Time Warp in the Heart of Paris
Although I had read plenty of articles about it before I went, I was still mystified and had no idea what to expect from DAU (pronounced da-o), the sprawling immersive-theater/film/installation project of Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, which is being held in … Read More
Au Bon Coin
Homemade Goodness
Au Bon Coin is the kind of restaurant you’d have a hard time finding unless you had a friend who lived around the corner, which, luckily, I do. Tucked away in a back street in the 5th arrondissement, it serves … Read More
Réflexions sur la Question Antisémite
On Anti-Semitism in France: Inferiority Complex?
Delphine Horvilleur, one of only three women rabbis in France, goes back to the origins of anti-Semitism in her latest book, Réflexions sur la Question Antisémite (Reflections on the Question of Anti-Semitism) to show how racism and anti-Semitism differ from each … Read More