Art
Celebrating 19th-Century Chaos and Calamity with Le Petit Journal
No calamity was too chaotic or crime too grotesque for Le Petit Journal to illustrate.
Paris
Art
A Parisian Retrospective on Marcel Breuer's Manhattan Vision
PARIS — "What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?" architect Marcel Breuer asked in explaining his design for the Whitney Museum of American Art. "Surely it should work, it should fulfill its requirements, but what is its relationship to the New York landscape? What does it express, wh
Art
Making a Heaven in Hell: The Angel of the Odd's Dark Romanticism
PARIS — With the bloody revolutions of the late 1700s, the mood in Europe was apprehensive and brooding about the future. Perhaps then it's no surprise that the art from that time has a certain gloominess to it as well. Yet what is unexpected is the strange beauty certain artists began to give their
Art
Early Anatomical Specimens Model the Macabre
Long before Body Worlds shocked people with its theatrically preserved people or Damien Hirst even thought to dunk a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde, scientists were erring into the realm of art with their attempts at preserving life for anatomical study. The specimens in particular that emerge
Art
The Dark Side of the Sun at the Palais de Tokyo
PARIS — Organizing 236,000 square feet of exhibition space around one theme seems like an impossible task, as impossible as the coldness of the sun. However, since it was reborn in 2012 as Europe's largest non-collecting art museum, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris has been focusing on exactly that: mas
Art
Using Zombies to Look at the Architecture of Modern Decay
Our last century of urban sprawl seems too recent to already be in ruins, but we do tend to move on quickly from our best laid plans. Now looking at the stranded shopping malls in unfinished subdivisions or the half-built vision of some cheaply made utopian dream, you could see them as odd beacons o
Art
Walking Through Le Corbusier's Principles of Architecture in his Villa La Roche
Le Corbusier may have been one of the most influential and prolific modern architects of the 20th century, but I'd never had a chance to step inside one of the Swiss-born visionary's structures until I found myself walking down a long alleyway in Paris' 16th arrondissement to his Villa La Roche.
News
Quelle horreur! Louvre Strike Against Pickpocketing Menaces
Tens of thousands of the visitors who mob the Louvre each day drawn by those sirens the slightly smiling Mona Lisa, the amputated beauty the Venus de Milo, and the windswept Winged Victory of Samothrace had their hopes dashed like ships against the rocks by a staff strike in response to pickpocketin
Art
The Alchemy of Sorrow: Mixing Memorial Art with Contemporary Sculpture
Jan Fabre's current exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris features an open coffin and insects crawling all over human brains, yet it's one of the least startling things the high profile Belgian artist has done.
Art
In the Crosshairs: Art in Dialogue with Hunting
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 embedd
Art
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
Art
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 Mus