Who hasn’t yet heard of Vivian Maier, nanny by profession, photographer by avocation? Her story is so unusual and her photographs so good that she never ceases to fascinate. Now the Musée de Luxembourg is holding what is apparently the … Read More
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) is mega-famous in the United States for her flower paintings, almost to the point of oversaturation, but the current retrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou shows just how much more there was to the work of this versatile … Read More
The first thing you see when you enter the darkened “Salgado Amazônia” exhibition space in the Musée de la Musique at the Philharmonie de Paris will knock your socks off: a large, grainy, high-contrast black-and-white print of heavy, roiling, black-edged … Read More
Speaking of women-only exhibitions (see last week’s review of “Women in Abstraction”), I recommend a visit to the show “The Power of My Hands” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, which presents the work of 16 African women artists … Read More
Ideally, there would be no need for all-women exhibitions of art that make a special case for – and risk ghettoizing or condescending to – women artists; women would simply be included in sufficient numbers in all group shows and … Read More
Damien Hirst may have set out to shock and dismay in his early days with works featuring dead animals preserved in formaldehyde and maggots feasting on cows’ heads, but today he seems to be taking exactly the opposite approach: seeking … Read More
All the major fine-arts museums in the world, and many smaller ones, have departments devoted to Egypt. One of the best is that of the Louvre, in small part thanks to the spoils Napoleon brought back from the country after … Read More
Built by a king, emptied by revolutionaries and then taken over by the French Ministry of the Navy for over two centuries, the palatial Hôtel de la Marine has opened its doors to the public for the first time in … Read More
I fell in love with Eugène Atget’s photos of Paris long before I ever set foot on French soil when a friend gave me a book of his pictures many years ago. I couldn’t get enough. While I have seen … Read More
Anyone who loves Paris has to love the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the city’s history, located in part in the stately 16th-century mansion in the Marais once occupied by one of its pre-eminent citizens, the famous aristocratic letter-writer Madame … Read More
