Art
What Giacometti Learned From de Sade
Prompted by his friend André Breton, Alberto Giacometti first read de Sade in 1933, and his studio notes ruminated on seduction, idolatry, and fetishism.
France
Art
The Quiet Dignity of Peter Hujar
Hujar wrote that his portrait subjects were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
Art
A Letter to President Macron: Reparations Before Restitution
In the wake of initiatives to repatriate Africa's stolen property, the author of this letter asks the French President to repair what his ancestors have broken, before attempting to restore the war trophies of colonial conquest.
Art
Mondrian Before Abstraction
Decades before becoming New York’s Pied Piper for nonobjective art, Piet Mondrian had established a reputation in Europe for navigating and remaking realism in his own image.
Art
60 Years of Posters Celebrating the Cuban Revolution
Despite the contradictions of the Cuban Revolution, the posters on view at the Museum of Decorative Arts suggest that, on paper, artists had freedom to express their optimism and support.
Art
Images of 100,000 Artworks From Paris Museum Collections Now Freely Available to the Public
Paris Musées is offering digital downloads of masterpieces by artists including Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, and Eugène Delacroix.
Art
This Former Engineer's Impressive Snow Art Will Blow Your Mind
With nothing more than just a pair of snow boots, his legs, and some intuitive math, Simon Beck has created hundreds of land art pieces around the world.
Art
The Unsparing Pages of Francis Bacon
Almost 30 years after his death, the unabated edginess of Bacon’s paintings, and the dark literary sources informing them, put the lie to our self-mythologizing.
In Brief
For $111, You Can Enter a Charity Raffle to Win a $1M Picasso
A French charity is raffling a Picasso still life this coming January. The proceeds from the draw will go to providing clean water to communities in Cameroon, Madagascar, and Morocco.
Art
An Artist Activates Histories Through Memory
In Zineb Sedira’s work, archival material is not dead and past, but is active, suggesting that there is no such thing as “frozen in time.”
Art
El Greco, Modernist Hero
Set the works of El Greco alongside those of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, or Pablo Picasso, and you can see why they admired and copied him.
News
Parisian Strikes Bring City's Art Scene to a Halt
As protesters take to the streets to oppose President Macron’s proposed retirement reforms, a number of art institutions have partially or fully closed.