David Hockney: Ma Normandie
Four Seasons in France
On a gloomy January morning in Covid-ridden Paris when nothing seemed to be going right, my spirits suddenly lifted when I walked into the Galerie Lelong in the eighth arrondissement and got an eyeful of David Hockney’s recent paintings, made … Read More
Jim Dine: A Day Longer
Like the Wind
Distressingly for art lovers, the reopening of museums in France has been postponed from December 15 to January 7, but the good news is that small art galleries are open. One exhibition well worth seeing is “A Day Longer,” a … Read More
Hubert Duprat
Studio-Grown Art
The better-known names of photographer Sarah Moon and painter Victor Brauner are the big attention-getters at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris right now, but upstairs is a show (which had only a few visitors the day I was there, … Read More
Man Ray and Fashion
Rag Trade to Riches
Man Ray was Surrealism’s jokester and jack-of-all-arts. The impish-looking American was a painter (not a very successful one, though he saw it as his primary talent), photographer (known for his pioneering photograms, or “rayograms,” and many iconic images, such as … Read More
Tobey or Not To Be
The American Picasso
I rarely review gallery shows on Paris Update because there are just so many of them in the city that it would be outside the scope of the site, but every once in a while an exhibition goes beyond the … Read More
Sarah Moon: PasséPrésent
Time Past and Time Future
I have to admit that, not knowing much about her and having a vague memory of fuzzy, romanticized fashion photos, I was not expecting much from the exhibition “Sarah Moon: PasséPrésent” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de … Read More
Body and Soul: Italian Renaissance Sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo
Antiquity Reinterpreted
“Body and Soul: Italian Renaissance Sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo,” another major exhibition at the Louvre (along with “Albrecht Altdorfer: Master of the German Renaissance”), looks at developments in Italian sculpture in the late 15th and early 16th century. The … Read More
Voyage sur la Route du Kisokaidō
Floating Along the Kisokaidō Road
Back at the beginning of Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate, its founder, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), had five roads built to connect the capital of Edo (now Tokyo) to the rest of the country. A couple of centuries later, two ukiyo-e (“images of … Read More
Matisse: Like a Novel
The Joy of Color by Matisse
Matisse exhibitions don’t happen very often, and when one comes along, it is a major event. The eagerly awaited show at the Centre Pompidou, “Matisse: Like a Novel,” uses Louis Aragon’s Henri Matisse: Roman (1971) as a kind of framework to … Read More
Albrecht Altdorfer: Master of the German Renaissance
The Weird, Wonderful World of Altdorfer
An exhibition about a little-known 16th-century German artist doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but “Albrecht Altdorfer: Master of the German Renaissance” at the Louvre turns out to be surprisingly entertaining thanks to the sheer exuberance and diverse talents … Read More