Gauguin paintings at the National Gallery and MFA Boston may be fakes. Fabrice Fourmanoir is out to prove it

Meet the Gauguin obsessive who’s trying to prove that major art museums are showing fakes.

It’s the nude that bothers Fabrice Fourmanoir.

The way she’s painted is “unsightly” and “vulgar,” quite unlike the Polynesian women of his mind’s eye. Nor does he like the way she’s artificially inserted on the canvas, part of what he calls an “uninventive assemblage” with no coherent symbolism. Yet there she stands at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in a painting titled “The Invocation,” attributed to Paul Gauguin.

But Fourmanoir’s roving, inquisitorial eye doesn’t stop there. He’s similarly bothered by another painting, this one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, titled “Women and a White Horse.” Though it’s labeled as a Gauguin, its signature is “very weak,” he opines. And the background vegetation looks more like Tahiti than the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin was living when he was supposed to have painted it.

Fourmanoir isn’t your average weekend art sleuth. The life and works of Gauguin have consumed him for many decades. These two paintings make him suspicious, so much so that questioning their integrity has become a personal crusade. He thinks they’re impostors, and he won’t rest until there’s a full investigation.

Born in Calais, France, Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. Now, even as some of the most renowned art scholars continue to look with withering skepticism at Fourmanoir’s motives and credentials, he plans to make the most of his newfound status.

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Big Tech needs to step up. But instead we get “Mwa-Mwa-Mwa”

By Michael Stevenson, aka Monsieur Pas de Merde

The chief executive officers of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook sat before congress yesterday. Four white guys with unimaginable wealth. I wanted congress to inform them of the new “Big Tech Patriot Emergency Relief Bill” – informing them that, TFN, all their profits after 1 Billion will now be taxed at 99.5 percent. That revenue stream would EASILY replace the expiring Covid Relief package that we all pay for. But instead of my “Big Tech Patriot Emergency Relief Bill” – these creeps just blathered on like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. Cue the trombone: “Mwa-Mwa-Mwa”

French film favorite: “The Unknown Girl” (2016)

In the Dardenne brothers’ “The Unknown Girl”,  Adèle Haenel plays a doctor who investigates a possible murder

Adèle Haenel plays a doctor gets obsessed with the case of a dead woman after learning that the woman had died shortly after having rung her door for help. As Le Monde wrote “the Dardenne brothers have become the masters of a cinema humanist, naturalist, rebel, whose stories feed on the breeding ground of European social misery”

More about this film at IMDB website

Coronavirus: partial activity maintained until December in the tourism sector

“Professionals need long-term support,” said the Secretary of State for Tourism, announcing that recourse to partial unemployment, scheduled until September, would be extended.

In France, the epidemic Covid-19 has already killed 19,708 people in French hospitals, according to data provided by Public Health France. To which must be added the 10,515 deaths recorded in nursing homes and other medico-social centers, the data of which have been gradually raised since the beginning of April. The number of home deaths linked to this epidemic is difficult to calculate and is not yet known. But Olivier Véran, the Minister of Health, declared that this figure would be the subject of first estimates “in June” .

The number of recoveries displayed here corresponds to the returns home of people hospitalized for Covid-19. It does not include people who have been infected and who are cured at home, which is difficult to quantify.

The partial activity mechanism set up for the tourism sector will be extended until the end of 2020, announced Wednesday, July 29, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. Invited on France Info, the Secretary of State for Tourism indicated that the exact modalities of this four-month extension remained to be defined.

Introduced during confinement, this recourse to partial unemployment – both terms are used, but the partial activity does not imply registration with Pôle Emploi and is therefore not considered to be unemployment – had been put in place to help certain sectors to cope with the stoppage or decline in their activity [ . . . ]

Continue at Le MONDE: Coronavirus: partial activity maintained until December in the tourism sector

Brassens 1972

Now an iconic figure in France, Georges Brassens achieved fame through his elegant songs with their harmonically complex music for voice and guitar and articulate, diverse lyrics. He is considered one of France’s most accomplished postwar poets. He has also set to music poems by both well-known and relatively obscure poets, including Louis Aragon (Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux), Victor Hugo (La Légende de la Nonne, Gastibelza), Paul Verlaine, Jean Richepin, François Villon (La Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis), and Antoine Pol (Les Passantes). – Source: Wikipedia

France’s love affair with cinema tested by the virus

“I am sick of Netflix. I am sick of an algorithm serving me up the same old thing,” said Anne-Sophie Duchamp as she put on her face mask to enter an arthouse cinema on Paris’ Left Bank.

“We’ve been stuck at home for months” because of the lockdown, she added, as she bought her ticket to see British director Mike Leigh’s  acerbic 1988 comedy, High Hopes.

“Why should I stay at home any longer when in Paris you can find a whole century of masterpieces showing in little cinemas every day.”

While cinema audiences across the world have been reluctant to venture back into the dark, not for the first time the French were seen as something of an exception.

As one of the most cinephile countries in the world, filmmakers and cinema owners have been counting on the French love affair with the silver screen to help save their skins.

Duchamp, who is in her 40s, insisted that going to a socially distanced cinema was “no more dangerous than going to the supermarket.”

A poll late in June just before cinemas reopened after an eight-week lockdown showed that 18.7 million people – almost a third of the population – planned to go to see a film in August.

Hollywood no-shows

But the reality has turned out to be rather more disappointing for cinemas, who are only allowed to be half full, with a free seat either side of each filmgoer.

With Hollywood delaying the release of blockbusters like Tom Cruise’s Top Gun 2 and Wonder Woman 1984 that would normally drive summer ticket sales, multiplexes in particular are suffering.

There was a further blow Thursday when Christopher Nolan’s spy drama Tenet was put back for a third time by Warner Brothers until August 12.

“It is much tougher than we imagined,” said Aurelie Delage, manager of the six-screen Cinemascop Megarama at Garat in western France.

It is so grim in fact that “I am not looking at figures,” she told AFP.

“This can’t last.”

Only small art house cinemas seemed to be bucking the trend, although there was some good news Wednesday as weekly admissions broke the 1 million mark for the first time since the end of the lockdown, helped by the success of the French comedy Divorce Club.

Encouraging as the 13 percent week-on-week rise was, it is still only a third of the business cinemas were doing this time in 2019.

“People have been stuck inside during the lockdown and now they want to be out in the air, on a bar or restaurant terrace when the weather is good,” Delage argued.

Yet the French have been far more enthusiastic than their neighbors, with German cinema entries down to just 17 percent of normal levels and the situation in Spain even more catastrophic at just 13 percent.

Chance for small films

Only the Dutch have been as phlegmatic, according to a study by Comscore.

This has given hope to independent filmmakers who see a chance of stepping into the gap, insisting that the public are hungry for new movies.

US director Michael Covino will release his cycling bromance The Climb, a big hit at 2019’s Cannes film festival, in France next week, having resisted the temptation to put it out on a streaming service.

“The best place to see a comedy is in a cinema with other people,” he said.

The clear run has also probably helped the black comedian Jean-Pascal Zadi’s broad satire Tout simplement noir (Very Simply Black) become a hit.

Some half a million people have flocked to see him take a hammer to racial stereotypes in a fortnight.

French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz – who has a walk-on role in the comedy – is also going ahead with the 25th anniversary of the re-release of his classic, La Haine, with race and police violence once again in the spotlight.

Kassovitz is convinced there is pent-up demand “to go out to see films.”

“That is why there is a quite a lot of re-releases this summer to rekindle that desire,” he told AFP.

But what cinema owners across Europe really want, said Marc-Olivier Sebbag of the French Cinemas Federation, is for the big Hollywood studios to start releasing their new movies in Europe without waiting for cinemas on the other side of the Altantic to reopen.

“I hope we will be listened to,” he added.

In the meantime Hugo Benamozig, co-director of the French adventure flick send-up, Terrible Jungle, starring Catherine Deneuve, is gung-ho about its release next week.

If they waited till after the summer, “our film might be drowned” by the dam-bust of US blockbusters which have been held back by the coronavirus, he said.

Source: France’s love affair with cinema tested by the virus – Global Times