Category: Arts

The Stubborn Genius of Auguste Rodin

The hundredth anniversary of the death of Auguste Rodin prompts “Rodin at the Met,” a show of the Metropolitan Museum’s considerable holdings in works by the artist. But no occasion is really needed. Rodin is always with us, the greatest sculptor of the nearly four centuries since Gian Lorenzo Bernini perfected and exalted the Baroque. Matter made flesh and returned to matter, with clay cast in bronze: Rodin. (There are carvings in the show, too, but made by assistants whom he directed. He couldn’t feel stone.) You know he’s great even when you’re not in a mood for him [ . . . ]

Read Full Story: The Stubborn Genius of Auguste Rodin | The New Yorker

All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patti Smith

AFTER DECADES as a major force in punk rock — dating back to her shows at CBGB’s and her 1975 LP Horses — Patti Smith has earned a considerable reputation as a literary figure as well. She has introduced books of poems by Blake and Rimbaud, published several volumes of her own verse and song lyrics, and won the National Book Award for Just Kids, her 2010 memoir about her crucial early years with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith’s new book is Devotion, a slim volume that is — at once — an ode to her favorite French writers, a short story or fable about a mysterious young ice skater, and a meditation on the creative process. (It is based on a speech Smith gave at Yale and is part of Yale University Press’s Why I Write series.)

Read full interview: All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patti Smith – Los Angeles Review of Books

The Peculiar Poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found

On the southern edge of Paris, a five-thousand-square-foot basement houses the city’s lost possessions. The Bureau of Found Objects, as it is officially called, is more than two hundred years old, and one of the largest centralized lost and founds in Europe. Any item left behind on the Métro, in a museum, in an airport, or found on the street and dropped, unaddressed, into a mailbox makes its way here, around six or seven hundred items each day. Umbrellas, wallets, purses, and mittens line the shelves, along with less quotidian possessions: a wedding dress with matching shoes, a prosthetic leg, an urn filled with human remains. The bureau is an administrative department, run by the Police Prefecture and staffed by very French functionaries—and yet it’s also an improbable, poetic space where the entrenched French bureaucracy and the societal ideals of the country collide [ . . . ]

Read Full Story: The Peculiar Poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found | The New Yorker

First festival: four “Photographic stories” in the den of the abbey of Silvacane

The Abbey of Silvacane in La Roque d’Anthéron (Bouches-du-Rhône) hosts until September 30, 2017 its first festival of “Photographic Stories”. Four projects, led by five international photographers – Hélène David, Ritta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth forming a duo, Corey Arnold and Amy Friend – give their singular vision of the world. On the menu of the journey: commitment, poetry, humor.

Source: First festival: four “Photographic stories” in the den of the abbey of Silvacane