Art Gelender

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
25 March – 17 July 2011

The Musée d’Art Moderne is offering a fresh appreciation of Kees Van Dongen (1877–1968), the dazzling, disconcerting painter who made his reputation in Paris in the 1920s. The exhibition includes and adds to « All eyes on Kees Van Dongen », shown at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (18 September 2010 – 23 January 2011).

This exhibition centres on the success that came with his Paris period. The exhibition comprises some 90 paintings and drawings, together with ceramics, dating from 1895 to the early 1930s.

The exhibition title suggests not so much a succession of periods as an overlay of artistic poses: the Dutch rebel mixing in anarchist circles around 1895 and ever ready to caricature and denounce; and the avant-garde artist playing a very personal role in the Fauvist movement and a decisive one in its dissemination abroad, in Holland, Germany and Russia. The « urbane » Fauve Kees Van Dongen focused on the female body, and in particular on the face made-up to the point of deformation under the electric lighting he borrowed from Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec and which became, in a way, his trademark.

Colour made Van Dongen the guiding spirit of Fauvism, the colour he revivified with his trips to Morocco, Spain and Egypt and his reinvention of the Orient in the early 1910s. Yet Paris remained his dominant subject: the Montmartre of the early 20th century, where he would meet Picasso and Derain and which would charm him with its working-class vitality and vie de bohème; Montparnasse before and after the First World War, where he was one of the main driving forces with his depictions of a new, more eroticised woman; and then the Paris of the Roaring Twenties – the « cocktail period », he called it – when he would devote himself exclusively to the new elite, to now forgotten literary men and women and stars of stage and screen, anticipating by forty years the world of Andy Warhol’s « beautiful people ». The poses are wildly overdone, with melodramatic costumes and props laying bare all the artificiality of models who existed solely in terms of the roles they played.

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 11 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75016 Paris
(open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm).

More informations: www.mam.paris.fr

Centre Pompidou March 2 to July 4, 2011

In the series of the Centre Pompidou retrospective devoted to the great figures of contemporary art, a new exhibition presents a rereading of the work of François Morellet.

This exhibition focuses on one aspect of the original and pioneering work by the artist, facilities.

In collaboration with the curators of the exhibition, Alfred Pacquement and Serge Lemoine, François Morellet has selected twenty-six works of varying sizes that cover the major turning points in his career from 1963 to today.

Very different in nature from each other and made of various materials – tubes of neon lights with projection pieces of wood, paper, silk screen adhesive strips on the walls, canvas frames, aluminum tubes, metal plates, they are installed in space and on the walls.

The whole is « relocated » in the gallery 2, 6th Floor, Centre Pompidou, to create a varied course full of contrasts and surprises, able to cause visual impacts as to arouse pleasure both elegance that’s about the beauty of the effect.

Museum Centre Pompidou : Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris

More informations : www.centrepompidou.fr

Thematic exhibitions from march 2 to june 2 2011

La Chapelle des ancêtres de Thoutmosis III

Prisse d’Avennes was one of many keen travelers exploring the shores of the Nile in the first half of the 19th century, fascinated by Pharaonic ruins and Arab monuments alike.

With an open, inquiring mind, he approached the rich diversity of Egypt as an archaeologist, Egyptologist, and ethnologist. During his two sojourns in the country – the first lasting 17 years, from 1827 to 1844, the second, an extended tour from 1858 to 1860 – he amassed a rich crop of manuscript notes, mostly unpublished, and a significant body of graphic works recording the appearance and state of the monuments, including tracings of carved decorations and inscriptions, watercolors, prints, photographs and annotated cuttings. Unlike collectors of antiquities, he brought few objects home from Egypt – but those he did (including the papyrus that bears his name, and Thutmosis III’s Chapel of the Ancestors, now in the Louvre) are of the highest historical importance.

His rich, dense body of work was bequeathed to the manuscripts section of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Hence the exhibition’s original format: Égypte de papier (‘Egypt on paper’) at the Bibliothèque Nationale, including fine works from the library’s iconography collection representing the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the Arab world, on public display for the first time; and Égypte de pierre (‘Egypt in stone’) at the Louvre, adjacent to the Chapel of the Ancestors, including unpublished archives on the transport of the monument to France, and the discovery of its historical importance since the 19th century.

Curator : Elisabeth Delange, Musée du Louvre, Department of Egyptian Antiquities

More informations: http://www.louvre.fr