Blog
Étienne Delaune, Renaissance’s engraver
Étienne Delaune was first a goldsmith. He even made a magnificent engraving that depicts, with striking realism, a goldsmith’s workshop.And it must be noted in this regard, that such representations of craftsmen at work were rare during the Renaissance. This burin illustrates the proximity of the work between a […]
Some respiration
In May, 2011 I began to write and to publish the articles that, almost weekly, you may have read during these six years, which I have tried to make various. With elements of thought, on the art world and on artistic life; also with elements of information and knowledge on […]
The Venice Biennale, art and the refugee crisis
In 1992, amid the collapse of socialism and the tumultuous breakup of Yugoslavia, a group of artists came together to create a utopian fictional state. Part art project, part political statement, the state –called NSK– reconsidered what a modern globalized nation could be. It was rooted in no single territory […]
Giacometti, an incomparable visionary
Midway through the exhibition in Tate Modern (from 10 May to 10 September), emotion hits you like a blast of heat from a furnace. The chill of irony thaws. The intellectual and erotic games are over. There is only one thing worth making art about, Alberto Giacometti has decided, and […]
Black Dolls and Identity
From the 1890s to the 1930s in Macon, Georgia, a black handyman named Leo Moss was a pioneer of black dolls. He painted doll faces black with chimney soot and had his wife design their clothes. Their papier-mache heads were made out of scrap pieces of wallpaper he collected on […]
Documenta, Athens, Kassel
Even today, in a supersaturated calendar of worldwide art events, no show matters more than Documenta, a colossal German exhibition of contemporary art, reinvented every five or so years as a “museum of 100 days.” Of 13 editions so far, two have become touchstones in recent art history: the freewheeling […]
Catalan architects, Art and Soulages
Three Catalan architects who have built little outside Catalonia have been named as the 2017 winners of the Pritzker prize, the world’s most prestigious architecture award. For a glamorous gong that is usually bestowed on star architects for galleries and opera houses, it is a radical departure to see it […]
The explosion of biennials
It was like a cultural version of Davos, held in the wintry grandeur of central Oslo. For three days, delegates and guests sat in a conference called Oslo Pilot, holding critical discussions about “relational aesthetics” and the role of public art in society. But really, last November’s event was all […]
Supporting the National Endowment for the Arts
I completely agree with this text wrote by Thomas P. Campbell, Director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA), and published in The New York Times on February, 22: “Four years ago, in a small warehouse in central China, a team of Chinese archaeologists […]
IT’S A REVOLUTIONARY ART OR BRUTAL PROPAGANDA?
The Bolshevik party took power in October 1917 in a coup that replaced a previous democratic revolution with a totalitarian one. From the beginning, and increasingly as they fought a savage civil war against their opponents, Lenin’s Bolsheviks used torture, surveillance and executions to build a one-party state. Rural society […]