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
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
Artists in Montmartre
Wild Life on the Butte
The Musée de Montmartre bills itself as “the most charming museum in Paris,” and that may well be true. The word “charming” kept popping into my mind as I perused its current exhibition, “Artists in Montmartre: Legendary Places and Studios,” … Read More
The Nadars: A Photographic Legend
A Clan of Shutterbugs
I first came across the name Nadar while I was reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and started collecting other books about him and his work, including a small book of portraits by Paul Nadar of Proust and … Read More
Japon-Japonismes: Objets Inspirés
The Shock of the New
While visiting the exhibition “Japan-Japanisms: Inspired Objects” at Paris’s Musées des Arts Décoratifs, it occurred to me that modern Western art as we know it might have been something entirely different if the arts and crafts of Japan hadn’t suddenly … Read More
Grayson Perry: Vanity, Identity, Sexuality
A New Man
I remember the shock of seeing Grayson Perry’s work for the first time at an exhibition in London. What appeared to be beautiful, classically made vases turned out, upon closer inspection, to be decorated with images of abused and neglected children. … Read More
A Dream of Italy: The Marquis Campana’s Collection
Citizen Kane’s Italian Predecessor
It’s a story of acquisitiveness comparable to that of William Randolph Hearst, who is said to have owned a quarter of the world’s art at one point and whose life was immortalized in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane. A fascinating … Read More
JR: Momentum
Visual Messages Writ Large
Anyone who has seen the moving film Visages Villages by director Agnès Varda and photographer JR was probably especially touched, as I was, by the sweet-natured and talented JR. This young (now 35) Frenchman became famous for his guerrilla wheatpasting … Read More
Photographier Paris: Nouveaux Regards sur la Ville
A Fresh Look at Paris
The city of Paris, which claims to be the photography capital of the world, is hosting a show called “Photographier Paris,” a free exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville, with the intention of avoiding clichés about the city and showing … Read More