Frances Stonor Saunders, Qui mène la danse ? La CIA et la guerre froide culturelle, Paris, Denoël, 2003.Titre original : Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books, 2000. En 2000 la journaliste et historienne britannique Frances Stonor Saunders a fait paraître un ouvrage sur l’action de la CIA […]

Jacques le Brusq at the Gaïa gallery, Nantes. Jacques Le Brusq’s painting is the result of an intimate experience : being close to the powerful and mysterious nature of the Landes de Lanvaux forest in Morbihan. In the mid-1960s, he decided to settle in Saint Guyomard, at the Cour de Bovrel, an old manor house […]

Le peintre Luc Millet présente actuellement son travail à la galerie Le Triphasé*. Luc Millet peint sur papier marouflé sur bois. Cette technique spécifique lui permet d’obtenir une surface très lisse, propre aux effets de transparence et de profondeur. La surface ainsi obtenue est ensuite griffée à la pointe sèche, dans un geste nerveux qui […]

The Korean painter Chang Rim Ji exhibits his latest works at the gallery tRes, in Nantes, France. The exhibition shows paintings with yellow dominant, infinite variations on a floral theme taken from one painting to another, always the same, always different.It is less a surface that imposes itself on us from the outset than a […]

Au début de l’année 2024, est paru un essai d’Alain Finkielkraut, texte brillant, passionnant, émouvant : Pêcheurs de perles, (Gallimard, 2024). Il nous en livre lui-même les ressorts :« Je me suis plongé dans les carnets de citations que j’accumule pieusement depuis plusieurs décennies. J’ai tiré de ce vagabondage les phrases qui me font signe, qui […]

It is little to say that we are delighted to be able to admire the pastels and watercolours of Sam Szafran at the Musée de l’Orangerie, after a “long institutional purgatory” * which had kept him away from the official scene. The last Sam Szafran retrospective. 50 years of painting, at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation […]

From Kudrinskaya tower Here we are. Kudrinskaya Tower, sixteenth floor, Moscow, huge, as far as the eye can see. Our small delegation for Art for Europe has landed at 23:00 local time at Sheremetievo airport. Today is 20 February 2022. Our programme is full : one week to meet as many people as possible, private […]

From the end of the 1950s, Russian painters opposed, sometimes risking their lives, the formal straitjacket of Soviet official art, socialist realism. Regarded with contempt as “painters for the poor” by the communist nomenklatura, flouted, forced into exile like Alexandre Gleser, these dissidents nevertheless attracted the attention of informed collectors. Russian collectors were usually friends […]

The city of Trieste was the birthplace or residence of many writers: James Joyce lived there for many years, from 1904 to 1915, where he taught English and immersed himself in the culture and literary life of the city. Some of Ulysses’ secondary characters are inspired by real people Joyce met in Trieste. For example, […]

Thirty years after his Considérations sur l’état des beaux-arts (Gallimard 1983), Jean Clair gives us a disenchanted essay in which he first rebelled against the now established domination of the law of the market in the artistic sphere, making collections “inalienable” potential financial resources. Transformed into values of exchange, the works relocated, traveling, deprived of […]

From February 11, 2022, Lumiere Gallery presents photographs by Danila Tkachenko. A display of 30 superb author prints of delicacy and density. Danila Tkachenko travelled for four years in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan in search of architectural traces of the Soviet period—like fragments of a past that was definitely ineffectual. Danila Tkachenko photographs iconic […]

Defining contemporary art, or more precisely trying to define the notion of contemporaneity in art, seems all the less like an easy task because it must guard against any normative temptation. It is nevertheless to this exercise that Renaud Camus engages himself in this small work, which is in fact the text of the speech […]

Benjamin Olivennes gives us here an analysis and a documented panorama of what he himself calls “another twentieth century, another history of art”. In this joyfully polemical text, Benjamin Olivennes castigates the “official” history of art which condemns to the moans all those who would have the impudence not to prostrate themselves in front of […]

Much has been said about this text published more than forty years ago, in 1983. If this Critique of Modernity still finds its place today, it is because it puts at the centre of its reflection the gradual erasure of painting at the end of the Second World War. From the abstract gestuality of the […]

These Ecrits sur l’art gather the various texts of Mark Rothko from 1934 to 1969 : numerous letters to his friends painters, manifestos, interviews, educational articles, various notes, etc.Of this composite ensemble, one will remember in particular the letter of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to Edward Alden, art critic of the New York Times […]