Ker-Xavier Roussel: Jardin Privé, Jardin Rêvé
Bucolic Settings for Sexy Stories
Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867-1944) was something of a contrarian. He was classically trained but is best known as a Nabi painter, although he only painted in that style for a time in the 1890s and even then never subscribed to the … Read More
Berthe Morisot
Not Just a Pretty Painter
Berthe Morisot (1841-95), a key French Impressionist painter, has not been the subject of a major exhibition in France since 1941. Is this because she was a woman and therefore dismissed as a minor painter? Perhaps. The current exhibition of … Read More
Time Capsule at Fluctuart
Fluctuat nec Mergitur
Fluctuart is a gallery, but not a white cube. It’s a street-art gallery, but it’s located on the River Seine, not on the street. And, interestingly, graffiti artists would have a hard time defacing (or beautifying, depending on your point … Read More
City Prince/sses
The Tempestuous Kingdom of Creation
Paris’s Palais de Tokyo recently traveled to five sprawling mega-cities – Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City and Tehran – in search of artists who push the boundaries of contemporary art with outrageous and/or outsized works. The result is “City Prince/sses,” … Read More
Un Air dItalie: LOpéra de Paris de Louis XIV à la Révolution
Court Ballet Meets Italian Opera
The Paris Opera is celebrating two significant dates this year: the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first French Opera by Louis XIV, and the 30th of the opening of the opera house at Bastille, built as a result … Read More
Fields of Love: 100 Years of Rainbow Cinema
LGBTQI+ Filmfest
The importance of representation was brought home to me many years ago when a friend told me he had cried on seeing a mediocre 1982 film called Making Love because it was the first film with gay protagonists he had … Read More
Alberto Giacometti: Narrating the Body
Variations on a Theme
Alberto Giacometti may seem like a known quantity, but clever curators can still find ways to surprise us. That will be a constant challenge for the Fondation Giacometti, which opened a new space last year in a gorgeous Art Deco … Read More
Marquet: La Méditerranée, d’une Rive à l’Autre
Port-Hopping on the Med
What better place to see an exhibition of Albert Marquet’s paintings of Mediterranean ports than Sète, the fishing port he fell in love with while traveling with a group of friends in 1924. He liked it so much that he … Read More
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Mystery and Meaning
Much to her regret, Sally Mann first became famous, or should I say infamous, with the photos she took of her young children in the 1980s and ‘90s as they ran around the family’s country property in the summer, often … Read More
Henry Wessel, Fil Noir, Marguerite Bornhauser
Dark Stories
American photographer Henry Wessel (1942-2018), the subject of the exhibition “Henry Wessel: A Dark Thread” at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), had the unusual habit of not looking at the contact sheets of his photos until a year had … Read More