04.17.08
Posted in Art, Paris Life at 1:26 pm by rachel
My good friend Corry likes to photograph and keep track of various kinds of graffiti throughout the city. She’s drawn my attention to certain artists, like the Invader (check out this photo set on flickr for more) and other trends, such as paper graffiti. Over these many months of living in Paris, I’ve captured a few examples of graffiti in various forms.
This is a stenciled image - a common technique for creating repeated images throughout the city (or the world).
This paper découpage-style graffiti seems to be gaining popularity in Paris.
Another example of découpage. Note also the Invader mosaic to the left.
I saw this marker drawing on a post near my bus stop at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
My favorite: knit graffiti. The appearance of this example was part of an exhibition in Paris by Knitta Please, and was on rue Vieille du Temple - a street we frequent several times a week, since it’s between our apartment and Corry’s.
Another mosaic, with one of our favorite video game characters.
And just in case you thought graffiti was a recent phenomenon, here’s an example from 1879, in no other place than the Pantheon!
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02.12.08
Posted in Art, Travel at 4:50 pm by rachel
What’s a trip to Barcelona without a dozen or so pictures of the unusual architectural works by Antoni Gaudì? Here are some of my favorites:
The Casa Milà
The stained glass was especially beautiful at night…
I love how the Sagrada Familia Cathedral looks like a sand castle. It is slowly being covered in mosaics, so one day will be quite a festival of color.
Wikipedia has this cool list of Gaudi buildings if you want to see more.
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11.27.07
Posted in Art at 1:36 pm by rachel
In the last few days I have found a comfort in the beautiful photographic work of Irene Suchocki. A Toronto native, Suchocki now lives in Montreal where she continues her experimentation with digital photography to evoke dramatic and mysterious moods with a melancholic sense of the ephemeral nature of life. The self-taught photographer describes her works as “little poems for the eyes.”
Her photographs are surprisingly affordable and would make unique and precious gifts. They’re on my wish list.
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10.23.07
Posted in Art, Books & Paper at 10:11 am by rachel
It is always exciting to hear from readers that are interested in the random things I find to write about on my blog. The post I wrote about Peynet illustrations back in March drew some particularly enthusiastic responses, with two readers even sending me images of Peynet works that they own. I’m thrilled!
Last spring, Chris sent me a photo of a Peynet hankerkechief received as a gift around 1963. The drawing and caption are a play on the French version of “he loves me, he loves me not,” which is “je t’aime un peu… beaucoup… pasionnément… à la folie… pas du tout” (I love you a little, a lot, passionately, like crazy, not at all.)
Your hour will be mine. Would you like to at “passionately a quarter to” or “half past crazy”?
Melissa purchased two Peynet drawings at a Parisian bouquiniste along the Seine. The first one is from the 1950’s and refers to the famous hat maker Elsa Schiaparelli.
Schiaparelli’s Crazy Success
The second illustration is dated 1960 and refers to the ubiquitous Nicolas wine boutiques with a sentiment surely still shared by many:
Forget you? It would be impossible, dear… Like asking me to live without Nicolas wines…
Aren’t they just charming? Thanks for sharing, Chris and Melissa!
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10.19.07
Posted in Art at 9:18 pm by rachel
Seth took this photo in my grandparents’ garden
I took photography 101 in high school. Armed with my dad’s SLR, I made my friends accompany me on nature shoots and run while I photographed them in action. I still remember the pleasant smell of the darkroom chemicals. I learned how to make a sepia print the “real” way and tried my best to develop my prints according to the test strip we made for each one.
It was a long process that yielded mostly grainy, gray photos, though I do have a few gems I still cherish.
Well twelve years later here I am with a digital SLR and need to learn everything all over again. Maybe not the darkroom techniques, but everything else. Bernie’s Beginner’s Guide to the rescue! I hadn’t heard about this site before, but I’ll certainly be coming back, since I can’t memorize everything about focal length, aperture, and metering just yet. In the mean time, I have some more hard drive space to clear out before I can add any more photos…
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09.17.07
Posted in Academic, Art, Books & Paper, Paris Life at 10:11 am by rachel
The rich and tumultuous history of Paris can be told in part by a vast series of photographs, lithographs, and other images now available to anyone with an internet connection. The Paris en Images collection is an excellent database with a search feature which allows the researcher to find images by keyword and date. What’s even better is that they are freely available for private and scholarly use.
The barricade has been almost as much a part of Parisian history as the Seine river. Since the 16th century Parisians have dug up paving stones and piled them into barricades during numerous revolutions, insurrections, and protests. Here, I’ve picked some of my favorite images of barricades, and in places very much recognizable in present-day Paris. We think of Parisian history (and by extension that of France) as being an ever-changing series of radically different regimes. It’s interesting to me, however, to see the continuity in the form of protest, both on the right and left.
Revolution of 1848, Remains of a Barricade on rue Royale
Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871, Barricade at l’Étoile
Paris Commune, 1871, Barricade at Hôtel de Ville
Paris Commune, 1871, Vendôme Column Pulled to the Ground
Construction of a Barricade at a Gate of Paris, August 1914
1934, Protest of the Ligues de droite (right-wing political organization)
Liberation of Paris, Barricade at the Pont Neuf and rue Dauphine, August 1944
May 1968, Barricade on the rue Racine
Further reading:
Mark Traugott, “Barricades as Repertoire: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of French Contention.” Social Science History, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp.309-323.
Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Revolution at a Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871.” Yale French Studies, No. 101, Fragments of Revolution. (2001), pp. 54-78.
Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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08.14.07
Posted in Art, Travel at 9:53 am by rachel
I couldn’t leave Milwaukee last month without a trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM). It’s one of my favorite museums because it houses a broad range of art for its size, with examples of virtually every major artistic period in its collection. The museum also exhibits some important examples of folk art, American design, Haitian art, and photography. The most obvious work of art here is the building itself: the new addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001, resembles a bird with wings that open and close.
Until September 9th, MAM is holding an exhibition entitled “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape,” which focuses on the artist’s landscape painting from the 1860s and 1870s. This period was a formative one for Pissarro, who evolved from the realist tradition of the Barbizon school to a new impressionistic aesthetic, the theory of which he helped found.
The exhibition shows fifty of Pissarro’s paintings, arranged in chronological order. This arrangement highlights the contrast between his earlier, more academic paintings, and the artist’s experiments with color and brush-strokes into the 1870s. A wall-sized map of Paris and its environs indicates the locations Pissarro worked on landscapes and countryside scenes such as his 1864 Strollers on a Country Road, La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire (at right).
My favorite Pissarro painting, Hoarfrost at Ennery (below), is one of the last on display. After showing it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874, Pissarro was fiercely criticized for painting shadows of trees that lie outside the boundaries of the canvas, a technique which gives the painting depth and interest. What is most striking is the geometric composition of the scene, with criss-crossing diagonal lines dividing the plane into large fields of contrasting warm and cool colors. It should come as no surprise, then, that Paul Cézanne – whose paintings are so geometrically composed many consider him a proto-cubist – was a pupil of Pissarro’s.
Pissarro, Hoarfrost at Ennery, 1873
We took advantage of the afternoon and stayed at the museum until closing. As soon as we walked out of the building, MAM’s “wings” began to close, so I snapped some quick shots of the action.
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06.14.07
Posted in Art, Paris Life at 8:53 am by rachel
A friend of mine was in town this week and had a long list of exhibitions, concerts, and plays she was going to see. I went along with her to the Rodin Museum to see the show entitled Le Rêve Japonais (The Japanese Dream). Both the show and the museum were wonderful, as was the serene sculpture garden. For someone like me who is not usually a fan of sculpture, I was pleasantly surprised. It occurred to me that perhaps I never enjoyed sculpture because I hadn’t studied it very much at all.
The exhibition included many Japanese works from Rodin’s personal collection, as well as sketches the artist carried out himself that show the influence of Japanese prints on his own art. A sign at the entrance warns parents that some of the images are not suitable for children. Indeed, many of the prints were erotic and quite graphic. A large part of the exhibition focused on the Japanese actress Hanako, who appears in many sculptures and photographs.
The garden at the Rodin Museum seems to get a lot of press, and rightly so. Three of the artist’s major works – The Burghers of Calais (see photo above), The Gates of Hell, and The Thinker – are shown here amidst blooming flowers and winding paths. It is bordered by the walls of the enormous but graceful 18th-century hôtel particulier that houses the museum itself (and another great sculpture, The Kiss) and which served as the artist’s residence (!) from 1908. A visit to the gardens without access to the rest of the museum costs just one euro. I don’t know why it took me eight months to finally visit!
Musée Rodin
79, rue de Varenne
Paris 7e
01.44.18.61.10
métro Varenne or Invalides
Open everyday but Monday
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06.04.07
Posted in Academic, Art, Paris Life at 11:00 am by rachel
Was Picasso – lover of women, Spaniard expatriate, passionate painter – preoccupied with the figure of the gypsy seductress, Carmen? The Musée Picasso is currently holding an exhibition based on the premise that the character of Carmen, first developed in Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novel and then interpreted in Georges Bizet’s 1874 opera, was an influential figure in the painter’s oeuvre and imaginary. Alan Riding’s interesting review in the International Herald Tribune promotes this reading of Picasso’s work, imagining a seductive Carmen as motor and muse for his representations of the many women he painted throughout his life. I am not convinced this reading “sticks,” however, once you’ve examined the sources on display.
To be sure, Picasso twice illustrated editions of Carmen – once in the late 1940s and again in 1964 (Le Carmen des Carmen) – and entitled “Carmen” an early drawing of a Spanish woman. A Spaniard and also lover of many women, images of his lovers wearing mantilla veils appear in dozens of drawings and paintings, as does imagery of the corrida. These two themes – seductive women and the bullfight – are indeed the principal components of the Carmen story and so, also, form the bulk of the Picasso works in the exhibition.
But I argue that these themes are simply identifiers of the Spanish culture from which Picasso came and then definitively left behind during the Franco era. The retro-fit operation of placing Carmen behind these works of art doesn’t seem to fit when Carmen really represents an exotic, Spanish caricature that would mean more to an outsider (say, a French author) than to the painter himself.
The Corrida
An avid fan of the corrida, Picasso quite often experienced this tradition of stamina and struggle, honor and sacrifice. It should be no surprise that the bullfight would emerge in so many of his drawings and paintings: Alan Riding has a convincing argument that Picasso used the bullfight in his art as a metaphor for animalistic human passions. Nonetheless, it would hold more strongly that the corrida imagery came from first-hand experience and artistic interpretation than it did from a 19th-century French story the artist read or opera he saw. It is not doubtful Picasso was interested in the corrida theme of the Carmen story, but the interest most likely preceded the story and not the other way around. It made up the cultural imaginary that surrounded him.
The Seductress
Much has been said about Picasso’s personal life. Womanizer to some, serial monogamist to others, he was married twice and had four children with three different women, and had many other companions in between. Françoise Gilot notoriously wrote about their 9-year relationship in often unflattering terms. I am not convinced, however, that this behavior is linked to a “Carmen” that Picasso sought time after time in his serial amorous exploits. The theme of the femme fatale has more far-reaching origins and widespread interpretations than the particular figure of Carmen. Fin-de-siècle and Belle Epoque art and literature is particularly preoccupied with dangerous, hysterical, and eroticized femmes fatales, through figures like the biblical Salomé in the symbolist art of Gustave Moreau, paintings by Gustav Klimt, and literary works by decadent writers like Joris-Karl Huysmans. If in Picasso’s work or life such a figure emerges, it would be more useful to analyze this phenomenon in the broader context of late 19th- and early 20th-century art.
In all, the exhibition did not seem to provide convincing evidence of a “Carmen” figure as the influential force behind the works displayed, but promoted instead a hind-sight look at his oeuvre through Merimée’s lens. Spain seen through the eyes of a Frenchman (be it Mérimée or Bizet) then caricaturized and reintroduced to a Spaniard? It may be giving too much credit to the mythical Carmen what Picasso’s own native visual inspiration and cultural imagery produced in his work. This context would serve as a more accurate and equally interesting premise to the exhibition.
“Picasso-Carmen: Sol y Sombra” runs until June 24.
Musée Picasso, 5, rue de Thorigny, 3rd arrondissement.
Open everyday but Tuesday from 9:30am-6:00pm.
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03.24.07
Posted in Academic, Art at 10:22 am by rachel
I do a lot of research in the microfilm room of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Reel after reel of newspaper pages sometimes have surprises that amuse or shock me, and make the time fly by. Sometimes I find sensational fin-de-siècle headlines about “vampires” (people with rabies), sad souls jumping from the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, or the latest duel (a common way to resolve differences). But searching through Ici Paris, a later newspaper from the 1940s and 1950s, I found the sweetest drawings by a cartoonist named Raymond Peynet.
You may recognize his illustrations, which sometimes appears on post cards in Parisian paper shops. The theme is usually “les amoureux” with two lovers appearing in a variety of locations in a light-hearted scenarios, sometimes even akin to the floating style akin to Chagall.
Peynet (1908-1999) was born in Paris and became one of the most popular illustrators in France. He began his series of “Les amoureux” (the poet and his companion) in 1942, and later went on to draw over 6000 charming images in the series. The French singer/songwriter Georges Brassens even wrote a song inspired by the drawings, called “Les amoureux des banc publics” (”The Lovers of Public Benches”). There are two museums in France dedicated to the illustrator’s work. One in Brassac-les-Mines, and another in Antibes. The Picasso museum in Antibes (which I last visited in 2000) is closed for renovations until 2008, but the Peynet gives me a new reason to visit that Mediterranean town.
Below are some Peynet illustrations I found online, although I hope to photocopy and scan many of the ones I have found at the library. Note that, in the drawing of the gazebo, the woman is knitting! How can I not be one of the many “amoureux” of Peynet?
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