Paris

Art

A Velvet Underground Extravaganza Where Images Drown Out the Music

PARIS — Arty, esoteric, noise music may not be for everyone, but the Velvet Underground arose from just such obscure subgenre territory.

Art

Artist Duo TOILETPAPER’s Kitschy Department Store Wipeout

PARIS — Jaded neo-pop (one is tempted to say “poop” here) is on view in the Galeries Lafayette’s très kitsch exhibition TP–RAMA, the latest from art-commerce duo of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, aka TOILETPAPER.

Art

André Masson's Tortured and Sensuous Automatic Drawings

PARIS — In the polyvalent and multilayered drawings of André Masson, you can sense a free hand in love with its own movement, but not with itself.

Art

Apollinaire, the Immigrant Poet Who Shaped the Parisian Avant-Garde

PARIS — On September 7, 1911, French police arrested poet Guillame Apollinaire for stealing the Mona Lisa.

Art

Taxidermists Restore Napoléon's Beloved White Horse

Napoléon Bonaparte reportedly rode over 130 horses during his 14-year reign, but only one ended up as taxidermy: the Arabian stallion named le Vizir.

Art

How Artists Interpreted the Transformation of Paris into a City of Light

GREENWICH, Conn. — Everything was illuminated at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, from 5,000 electric lamps igniting the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Waterfall, a cascading fountain animated by colored lights.

Art

In the Jungle of Henri Rousseau's Imagination

PARIS — Henri Rousseau is art history’s best-known naïf painter.

Art

JR's Photoshop Trompe l’Oeil at the Louvre

PARIS — We have long loved our illusions.

Art

The Pleasures and Risks of Ahistorical Curating

PARIS — In Carambolages, currently at the Grand Palais, we are plunged into the big, fuzzy, ahistorical world of anti-categories typical of the networked global economic order.

In Brief

The Louvre and Musée d'Orsay Shut Down as Seine River Floods [UPDATED]

Record rainfall in Paris has caused intense and dangerous flooding of the Seine River to the extent that the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay are closing temporarily to safeguard their collections.

Art

Art That Takes Flight Toward a Higher Consciousness

PARIS — An uplifting yet melancholy poetry pervades Ken Matsubara’s show at Galerie Eric Mouchet, Hou-Chou, Releasing Birds, through the flickering of endlessly looped moving images that suggest shadowy ghosts.

Art

A Monumental Critique of Empire, from Napoleonic to Corporate Times

PARIS — Scattered throughout the cavernous nave of the Grand Palais are mountains of shipping containers.