PARIS — When I stepped into the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, I knew I would be seeing a lot of taxidermy trophies and guns in this museum of the hunt and nature, but I wasn’t expecting contemporary art. However, since its renovation in 2007, the museum in Paris’ Marais neighborhood has embedded installations and works of art in its stately space, a move which definitely lightens what could be very dated-feeling period rooms where stuffed bears and foxes rest alongside antique furniture and old oil paintings of hunting scenes.
Paris
Posted inArt
Resurrecting the Modernist Legacy of Designer Eileen Gray
PARIS — Eileen Gray designed furniture that didn’t so much inhabit as space as touch lightly on it. With discreet forms and minimalist waves that contrasted their industrial materials to the waning of Art Nouveau, the Irish designer quietly influenced the modernism that would guide architecture and design beyond the 1920s and 30s. Yet while her contemporaries like Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer have their names as cemented in modernist history as their sturdy designs, Gray’s legacy has been less studied.
Posted inArt
The Museum of Everything
PARIS — For a brief time, a former Catholic seminary on Paris’ classy Boulevard Raspail was overtaken with a psychoanalyst’s jubilee of art from self-taught creators who worked in secret or seclusion, in mental asylums or hospitals, or just from their own particular perspective of the world. The Museum of Everything is a traveling exhibition started by British filmmaker James Brett in 2009 that’s been widely successful in its unique curation of overlooked art.
Posted inArt
The Poetic Parisian Street Art of Fred le Chevalier
PARIS — As I’ve been wandering the streets of Paris this week, one artist seems to be haunting my path with his dark and elegant street art. Fred le Chevalier, as he signs his work, has paste up drawings of red-lipped pale women posed with strange creatures like owls, large cats, and anthropomorphic suns.
Posted inOpinion
Rainy Cityscapes in Paris and Hong Kong
LOS ANGELES — I love the rain, and especially the aesthetic of rain. I always think back to the work of Hiroshige, whose rainy woodcut prints famously inspired Van Gogh’s impressionistic landscapes.
Posted inOpinion
Is Damien Hirst Lazy?
A spotted judgment pops up on the streets of Paris. And someone goes in stoned (we think) to the Hirst show in LA.
Posted inArt
WTF Is…Haute Couture?
More often than ever the term “haute couture” pervades department stores, small-scale boutiques and celebrities’ clothing lines, but the appropriation of the term does not make it anything special.
Posted inNews
Art-trafficking Ring Surfaces at Paris Auction House
Some auction items on view at Hôtel Drouot (via flickr.com/colodio) The New York Times reports on a serious scandal that’s rocking the Hôtel Drouot, which is “France’s oldest, largest, most storied and most profitable auction site, a frenetic three-story bazaar of marvels and junk: Picassos and Basquiats, stamps and used handbags, dusty carpets, couches, clattering […]