What’s Hot, What’s Not
Exhibitions in Paris, Summer 2021
After nearly 7 months of starvation, I have been binging on museums lately. By the time this newsletter goes out, I will have seen 11 temporary museum exhibitions, 1 museum opening, 1 museum reopening and 1 gallery show in a little over 3 weeks. Which might not sound like all that many except that I refrained from visiting museums on weekends and spent 10 days at my home in the Dordogne, where I hadn’t been able to go for nearly a year because of the travel restrictions imposed during the long months of our most recent confinement.
Now I have the delicious task of deciding which exhibitions to tell you about and which to ‘file away’ (category: self improvement). I’ve already told you about the Hyacinthe Rigaud exhibition at the Chateau de Versailles. That was a retrospective, a review of the oeuvre, the life’s work, of an artist. But it was much more than just rows of paintings hung in chronological order. There were themes and ample wall texts offering insightful explanations. With an in-depth look at the painting of Louis XIV for which Rigaud is most famous. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Hyacinthe Rigaud exposition, Chateau de Versailles
I was going to write a review of the exhibition I saw at Musée d’Orsay, “The Origins of the World” for this week. But then I decided to do something different. I am going to write short reviews, capsule reviews, of all of the exhibitions, including the ones which may find their way into my ‘file away’ file. Because when you think about it, for all of the exhibitions I have seen, somebody spent a lot of time and considerable thought putting them together so it seems that I should spend at least some time and a little thought in telling you about them. Especially since some of you may be here or coming here soon and thinking about which exhibition/s you might want to see. I won’t be able to tell you anything about a 12th temporary exhibition, at the Fondation Giacometti (Figure 2) on the influence of Egyptian art on Giacometti because I am going there on Monday, June 14, after I have submitted this article to the editor.
Figure 2. Giacometti & Ancient Egypt exposition, Fondation Giacometti Institut
Figure 3. Corridor at the Musée du Louvre
As I think I have mentioned before, what I especially love about temporary exhibitions is that they always have a point or points to make, they are always about something. They are organized around specific themes or topics. I often think as I am walking along the miles of corridors at the Louvre, (Figure 3) that if any one of the paintings that are just so much wall decoration at the Louvre were at a provincial museum, like the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, for example, or the Musée des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux, for another, closer, example, they would be the jewel in the crown of that museum’s collection. And similarly, if any of those unseen paintings were part of a temporary exhibition, as they sometimes are, you WOULD look at them.
Temporary exhibitions can consider an unknown or little known aspect of a well known artist’s work, or they can follow a theme across time and / or place, or they can address a particular wrong that they want to right or an absence they wish to address or rectify. But whatever they are, they are never just rows of paintings marching endlessly along miles of corridors.
Before we get started, I will admit to going to two museums that didn’t have a temporary, theme driven, exhibition on offer. But one of the museums, François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce, (Figure 4) the newest museum in Paris which displays the billionaire’s cutting edge contemporary art and the other museum, the Musée Carnavalet, (Figure 5) one of the city’s oldest museums with a collection that tells the history of the city of Paris with historical art, mostly decorative arts objets, both opened / reopened this week. Each is in an old building that has undergone major renovations. They are both exquisite. You simply must see both. I will write reviews of each in the weeks ahead.
Figure 4. Bourse de Commerce
Figure 5. Musée du Carnavalet
I went to a gallery I was planning to visit when the government inexplicably closed the galleries, too. It was the Galerie Dina Vierny on rue Jacob. (Figure 6) I saw an exhibition of the paintings by Séraphine de Senlis who had been featured in an exhibition at the Musée Maillol some time ago. And I spoke with one of Dina Vierny’s grandsons who along with his brother now run the museum and gallery. And I dared to ask about his grandfather! Because you might remember that while lots of information survives about Dina Vierny and Maillol, all we really know about Dina’s husband or husbands is that she bore two sons. Which two sons carried on her legacy both in the gallery and museum and the sons of one of those sons now run both. Lucky guys, charming guy.
Figure 6. Alexandre Louquin, grandson of Dina Vierny & painting by Séraphine de Senlis, Galerie Dina Vierny
Figure 7. Signac, Les Harmonies Colores, Musée Jacquemart-André
But, let’s head back to the temporary exhibitions and let’s start at the beginning, which means at the beautiful Musée Jacquemart-André, the first place I went when the museums opened, this time and last time. Last time it was an exhibition on the master of light, sea and air, the precursor of the Impressionists, JMW Turner, mostly his seascapes. This time the artist was Paul Signac, mostly his seascapes. (Figure 7) Paul Signac, you may remember was Georges Seurat’s friend and painting colleague, with whom he plunged head first into Pointallism. Following the color system that the chemist Michel Chevreul had devised in the late 1830s called Simultaneous Contrasts, they meticulously painted canvases that required the eye of the observer to blend the colors on the canvas rather than the artist to blend the colors for them on the palette. All those little dots, all that time. In this exhibition we meet Seurat and Signac’s fellow pointillists and we see what Seurat might have done next, had he not died of a weekend fever at the age of 31. How? Well, by following the career of Signac. Which involved a lot of water and ports and not much, not really any, pointillism.
Talking about water, the exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, in Montmartre focuses on storms and shipwrecks (and stranded passengers) in an exhibition entitled, "Tempêtes et naufrages. De Vernet à Courbet” (Figure 8) It is small but intelligent and interesting. If you don’t know this museum, you definitely must visit. The permanent collection is free and the courtyard cafe is delightful.
Figure 8. Tempêtes et naufrages. De Vernet à Courbet, Musée de la Vie Romantique.
The exhibition at the Orangerie is called Magritte/Renoir. (Figures 9 & 10) When I first read the title, I thought surely this is a typo (or a joke). Because we all know Magritte, the Belgium Surrealist. And we all know Renoir, the painter of mostly chubby nude girls. A more unlikely combination seems, well, unlikely. And yet, there it was and there I went. Magritte gravitated to Renoir at a very particular moment in time. According to the curator of the exhibition, avant garde art movements need a sense of progress. And progress is an optimistic idea, not that easy to believe in as Europe rushed toward a second world war. Suddenly, the past seemed as relevant as the future, and ‘quotation as valid as invention’. Magritte began to riff on the canvases of Renoir. Like Picasso and Matisse, he saw Renoir as a painter of happiness, and so he kept painting and then put his ideas into words with a manifesto he called “Surrealism in Full Sunlight”. Which he sent to André Breton, whose grip on Surrealism had done what it could to destroy de Chirico. Breton responded to Magritte’s manifesto in a telegram which read, in part, “blatantly obvious - stop - you must be joking.” There is a lot more in this exhibition, including deeply profound stuff like Plato’s Cave and deeply superficial stuff like kitsch and the contemporary master of kitsch, Jeff Koons.
Figure 9. Magritte Renoir, Musée de l’Orangerie
Figure 10. Reclining Nude, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Two exhibitions have as their theme, women artists. At the Musée du Luxembourg, the exhibition is called “Peintres femmes, 1780-1830 Naissance d’un combat,” (Women Painters, 1780-1830 Birth of a Fight.) (Figure 11) The title lets you know that this exhibition is about something and that something isn’t how lucky women were to sometimes be taken seriously by their male colleagues. We learn about how women were systematically denied the same educational opportunities as those male colleagues. Specifically, they were not permitted to draw from the male nude. And that meant that they were never going to be able to paint a a multi-figural history painting at a time when history painting was the most prestigious category of subjects. Because a working knowledge of musculature, etc. was essential and it was never going to be theirs. Perverse, right? Don’t let somebody do something and then dismiss them because they haven’t done it. But we do know two artists from this period, Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. Their canvases are in major museum collections. This exhibition introduces us to their colleagues and traces the trials and triumphs of women artists at the turn of the 19th century in France.
Figure 11. Peintres femmes, 1780-1830 Naissance d’un combat, Musée du Luxembourg
When I was teaching at the California College of the Arts (where my son later went, to study glass blowing), I devised and taught a course I called Women as Artists / Women as Art. The women as Artists included some of the women discussed in this exhibition at the Luxembourg.
Figure 12. Empire des Sens, Musée Cognacq-Jay
The women as Art included all of the artists who are the focus of another exhibition, this one at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, called Empire des Sens. (Figure 12) Scheduled to coincide with the 250 anniversary of the death of François Boucher, another painter of rounded bellies and ample buttocks, we are immersed in the world of sensual, aka sexual delights, sometimes offered, sometimes taken, by the masters of the genre from Watteau to Greuze. I definitely have to devote an entire article to this exhibition, at the end of which you will find yourself in line, waiting to gain admission to a little room, where only a few people can go at a time, for practical reasons, the room is tiny and current sanitary measures that require people in museums to stay 1 meter apart. In this room, you will find pre-photography, pre-internet pornography. It isn’t ‘cute’ but engravings and watercolors are a lot less aggressive than film and video. It is so aggravating, women contemporaries of Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and Greuze couldn’t attend life drawing classes because they were thought to be too delicate to see a naked guy. But for their male colleagues it was a different story, those guys could paint and often bed as many bouncy buttocked broads as they wished, and then sell those paintings to eager (male) patrons.
Right. As I was saying, there is another exhibition on women artists, this one is at the Pompidou and is entitled, ‘Elle font l’abstraction’ (Women in Abstraction). (Figure 13) And now we are as far removed from women being denied access to life drawing classes as we can be. Who needs them ??? This is a huge exhibition and covers 120 years, from 1860 t0 1980. It is also multidisciplinary (dance, costume design, film) and international (European, American, Asian, African) and the number of issues it raises will set your head spinning. I got 1/2 way through the exhibition in 2 hours. I need at least another 2 hours for the second half of the exhibition. So I will obviously be returning. One little bit I will tell you about here. At the Bauhaus, although there was an initial effort to accept anyone who merited a place, there quickly became an unwritten quota for women. Kind of like Princeton and Jews or UC Berkeley and Asians. And once women were admitted, they were directed into the newly formed textile department. So, really how far along is that from denying women access to life drawing classes. I will tell you who started that textile department when I write my review, because that is pretty creepy too and smacks of female complicity.
Figure 13. Elle font l’abstraction, Centre Pompidou
There are two more exhibitions to tell you about. And interestingly they are at the two most visited museums in Paris, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. At the Louvre is an exhibition I had a ticket to see before everything closed down last fall. I was so disappointed to have missed it. But when museums reopened, there it still was. The exhibition, entitled, “Le Corps et L’âme” (The Body and Soul): Italian Renaissance sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo. (Figure 14) It includes some of the most familiar sculptures in the history of art. Like for example, two of Michelangelo’s Slaves (which are in the Louvre’s permanent collection). The exhibition explores several themes that Italian Renaissance artists pursued as they looked for innovative ways to depict the human body in motion and to express human emotion.
Figure 14. Le Corps et l’Âme de Donatello à Michel-ange, Musée du Louvre
And one last temporary exhibition, this one at the Musée d’Orsay, with a very long title: ‘Avant et après Darwin, Les Origines du Monde, l’invention de la nature au XIX siècle. (Before and after Darwin: The origins of the world, the invention of nature in the 19th century). (Figure 15) But the exhibition begins well before the 19th century, setting the stage with medieval and renaissance works of art that show what Europeans understood about the origins and age of the world. But voyages of discovery shook all that was believed and understood about the number of species that existed. Darwin’s theories on the origin of species and the term he popularized, survival of the fittest, has brought us to eugenics, to Social Darwinism. This exhibition combines beautiful objects and paintings with polemical discussions, ending with a cri du coeur, imploring us to pay attention to what is happening, to the earth and to all the species, including our own, living on it.
Figure 15. Avant et après Darwin, Les Origines du Monde, l’invention de la nature au XIX siècle, Musée d'Orsay
I am so happy that the museums are now reopened. I am looking forward to describing for you, at greater length some of the exhibitions I have already seen and some of the ones that are still on my list to see. Life is so beautiful and so intellectually satisfying here in Paris.
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