Category: Arts

Paris prepares for its first Christmas outside Notre Dame

Notre Dame
Notre Dame

The cathedral’s famed celebrations will take place at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois as its congregants and choir carry their faith “beyond the walls.”

Notre Dame kept Christmas going even during two world wars – a beacon of hope amid the bloodshed.

Yet an accidental fire in peacetime finally stopped the Paris cathedral from celebrating Midnight Mass this year, for the first time in over two centuries.

As the lights stay dim in the once-invincible 855-year-old landmark, officials are trying hard to focus on the immediate task of keeping burned out Notre Dame’s spirit alive in exile through service, song, and prayer.

“This is the first time since the French Revolution that there will be no midnight Mass [at Notre Dame],” cathedral rector Patrick Chauvet told The Associated Press.

There was even a Christmas service amid the carnage of World War I, Mr. Chauvet noted, “because the canons were there and the canons had to celebrate somewhere,” referring to the cathedral’s clergy. During World War II, when Paris was under Nazi occupation, “there was no problem.” He said that to his knowledge, it was only closed for Christmas in the period after 1789, when the anti-Catholic French revolutionaries turned the monument into “a temple of reason.”

Christmas-in-exile at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois this year will be a history-making moment.

“We have the opportunity to celebrate the Mass outside the walls, so to speak … but with some indicators that Notre Dame is connected to us,” Mr. Chauvet said.

Those indicators include a wooden liturgical platform that has been constructed in the Saint-Germain church to resemble Notre Dame’s own. A service will be led at midnight on Dec. 24 by Mr. Chauvet to a crowd of faithful, including many who would normally worship in the cathedral, accompanied by song from some of Notre Dame’s now-itinerant choir.

The cathedral’s iconic Gothic sculpture “The Virgin of Paris,” from which some say Notre Dame owes its name, is also on display in the new annex.

The 14th-century masterpiece, which measures around six feet and depicts Mary and baby Jesus, has come to embody the officials’ message of hope following the fire.

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Fine Arts Paris and beyond

The fair underscores its links with the museum world in its third edition. Plus highlights from Paris Photo and Also Known as Africa

Fine Arts Paris began in 2017 as a boutique affair of 34 dealers, and though it has now grown to 46 exhibitors – most of them French – it still prides itself on carefully crafted displays and museum-quality works. This year (13–17 November), the fair is looking to underscore its links with the museum world with an events programme that offers behind-the-scenes tours of various institutions. Visitors will also be treated to a first look at the Château de Fontainebleau’s most recent acquisition: a late 16th-century mythological scene by a follower of Francesco Primaticcio. La Piscine – the museum of art and industry in Roubaix – provides a pop-up display of works from its collection, by artists including Marc Chagall and Camille Claudel.

At Galerie Charvet there is a selling exhibition on the theme of museum interiors; highlights include a painting of a man polishing the armour of a horse guard at the Royal Armoury in Turin, by the Piedmontese artist Giovanni Giani in 1892. [ . . . ]
Continue at APOLLO MAGAZINE: Fine Arts Paris and beyond | Apollo Magazine

Artist ‘Humiliated’ After His Nude Sculpture Was Covered With Underwear for Paris Event

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The United Nations’ cultural agency has been criticized for covering up the genitalia of a series of nude sculptures with underwear.

Works by French sculptor Stéphane Simon, which show nude, classical-style figures taking selfies, were being displayed in Paris during UNESCO’s European Heritage Days event in September.

But officials decided to cover the offending parts of the artworks with underwear, to the shock of Simon and the ridicule of arts commentators.

Source: Artist ‘Humiliated’ After His Nude Sculpture Was Covered With Underwear for Paris Event | KTLA

Auguste Rodin, the father of modern sculpture

His figures capture the most universal of human emotions – passion, contemplation, despair. Auguste Rodin is known as the father of modern sculpture, an artist who managed to convey the drama of life in stone and in bronze. His talent and monumental works have been celebrated for a century now at the Rodin Museum in Paris. FRANCE 24 brings you a special programme on Rodin’s artistic legacy.

Watch at: Encore! – Special programme: Auguste Rodin, the father of modern sculpture

Berthe Morisot au musée d’Orsay : une rétrospective rare d’une grande artiste

Grâce à de nombreux prêts, le musée d’Orsay propose une rétrospective exceptionnelle de Berthe Morisot, un des grands noms de l’impressionnisme

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) is not a dilettante painter, who would have exercised her talent as a bourgeois woman educated in the arts, in the shadow of Manet, Renoir and Monet, but a true professional painter, a founding figure of the Impressionism which exercised an art full of daring and modernity: this is shown by an exceptional exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay , which had never devoted a retrospective to him.

This is an event because of the 75 or so works collected at the Musée d’Orsay, half (37) come from private collections, only a dozen from French museums, the others are lent by foreign museums. Indeed, French public collections have been slow to take Berthe Morisot seriously and have very few of his works, while collectors and American museums have quickly bought his paintings. The exhibition shows paintings that have never been seen in France for decades.

Berthe Morisot, \ "Autoportrait \", 1885, Paris, Marmottan-Claude Monet Museum, Denis and Annie Rouart Foundation, Annie Rouart bequest, 1993
Self portrait

Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841 into a bourgeois family (her father, then, is prefect). Her future wife and mother at home are all drawn. But his mother, open to the arts, teaches music and painting to her three daughters. It is not a career, but the two younger girls, Berthe and Edma, show a talent that leads them from a particular course to a certain Geoffroy Alphonse Chocarne to the Louvre where they copy the classics, from 1858. There they meet Henri Fantin-Latour, before meeting Corot. 

Continue reading “Berthe Morisot au musée d’Orsay : une rétrospective rare d’une grande artiste” →

Avignon 2019: Rosemary Standley, from Moriarty, queen of the festival

In the beautiful show inspired by Lewis Carroll to Macha Makeïeff, she is the voice. The one that guides all the others. The singer of the Moriarty group is also a little actress, a nasty queen of hearts wrapped in a red coat. She tells “Télérama” how easy it is to navigate the whimsical and crazy world of the nineteenth-century English writer..

Source: Avignon 2019: Rosemary Standley, from Moriarty, queen of the festival – Arts et scènes – Télérama.fr