International Art News

André VIGNOLES, Paysage

From October 12 to October 16, 2011 – Grand Palais
An international manifestation, fostering dialogue between artists from different horizons
The Salon d’Automne, which authored in 2009 a manifesto condemning the terrifying diktat of a single “aesthetic”, quickly became a welcoming haven for multidisciplinary creation, using all media and all languages. The arrival of a swarm of new exhibitors of all ages and the rich art program for 2011 attest to a renewed growth in popularity.

The first Salon d’Automne was held on October 31, 1903, in the Petit Palais, on the initiative of Frantz Jourdain (1847-1935)—a Belgian architect (the “La Samaritaine” department store), writer, great lover of art and the president of the art critics’ union—and friends, including architect Hector Guimard, painters Eugène Carrière, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard. Based on the “ethic of the brotherhood of the arts,” the Salon d’Automne sought to provide a platform for new artists and introduce the general public to the most innovative movements of the times: Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, School of Paris, Art Deco, Expressionism, Op Art, Abstraction. Strenghtened in 2004, the Salon d’Automne has pursued its personal path, far from the free-for-all battleground of some commercial fairs.

A permanent renewal
This year again, 550 professional artists from France and every corner of the world will show works of an extreme variety. Organized in different sections (from painting to sculpture and architecture, from mural art to engraving, from photography to artists’ books, from abstraction to figuration), the Salon d’Automne displays a large panorama of contemporary creation. It also includes debates, a fashion show, poetic interludes and various manifestations of urban art proposed by the Académie des Banlieues, as well as a concert-performance by Nima Sarkechik and Jérémie Dauliac, a hip-hop concert and a monumental graphic performance on cellophane.

CHEN Shu-Lin, Mémoire pour le prochain millénaire, 56x76 cm

A widening dialogue with the world
Since its first production in 1903, the Salon d’Automne has steadily welcomed foreign delegations while bringing its art to other European countries and, after 1970, to Japanese audiences, thanks to efforts by the painter François Baron Renouard (1918-2009). After showing in Beijing in 2003, the Salon d’Automne opened in Galicia (Spain), an event in which José Diaz Fuentes, the Galician sculptor, was a decisive influence. In November-December 2010, the Salon d’Automne travelled to Moscow. With its major contribution to the Cairo Art and Literature Biennial in 2009, the Salon d’Automne built a solid bridge between its exhibitors in France and Europe and the art community in the Near and Middle East. At a general meeting on May 10, 2011, in São Paulo, the creation of the France-Brazil Salon d’Automne was ratified. The first exhibition will be held in 2013 in São Paulo. The Salon d’Automne is also preparing future developments in China

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Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), River View (detail), oil on canvas, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Kress Collection © National Gallery of Art, Washington

9 March 2011 to 6 June 2011 – Grand Palais, Galeries nationales
More than eighty paintings and some thirty drawings from the Louvre and the Prado as well as many public and private collections present the most striking aspects of the history of landscape painting in the first half of the 17th century. The highlights are the diffusion of the works of Annibale Carracci; the assertion of Northern European naturalism; the development of neo-Venetian landscapes from the 1620s; the increasing number of painted views in genre scenes; the success of topographic landscapes and architectural caprices; and the extraordinary rendering of light and atmospheric effects.

Landscape painting started in earnest in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century. Before then, nature was not an independent genre in European painting and the capital of Christianity witnessed the birth and development of this new pictorial category which became immensely popular. Since antiquity, artists had gone to Rome to complete their training but at the end of the sixteenth century various factors combined to foster a new profane genre: the simultaneous presence of sometimes highly specialised artists from many different centres, especially Flanders; the attraction of the eternal city, reinvigorated by the recent transformation of its urban landscape; a growing taste for drawing from the motif and the use of these sketches in studio painting; the impact of printmaking on the circulation of images and an upsurge in art theories; the existence of large collections of works by the Renaissance masters; and the huge commercial success of landscape paintings among art lovers, especially in aristocratic and pontifical families.

A number of the greatest seventeenth-century artists contributed to the emergence of landscape painting, including Annibale Carracci, Adam Elsheimer, Pieter Paul Rubens, Paul Bril, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet. The exhibition seeks to show some of their most accomplished works, illustrating their share in the development of various types of representation of nature, from ideal views of the Roman countryside to seascapes, through architectural caprices and nostalgic antique scenes in which myths alternate with history.

By the mid seventeenth century, the new pictorial genre was no longer a minor art; its prestige for the aristocratic collections is shown by the huge paintings commissioned for Buen Retiro palace in Madrid. The most experienced artists participated in cycles of paintings in the European courts which were a source of inspiration for artists all over Europe for several centuries. Landscape became a category in its own right and henceforth an integral part of art history.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:
I – Annibale Carracci, Paul Bril and Adam Elsheimer in Rome
II – Changes in Bolognese landscapes: the presence of classical culture
III – Changes in Northern landscapes: the diversification of Flemish culture and types of landscape
IV – The early years of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin
V – The great landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin

About twenty of the most significant drawings that the artists made in Rome are displayed halfway through the exhibition. Sometimes drawn in the open air but recomposed in the studio, they illustrate the growing importance of such studies in the genesis of landscape painting.

Museum Hours

Claude Monet, Lady in the garden (detail), 1866, oil on panel, 82,3 x 101,5 cm, the Hermitage State Museum, St Petersburg © photographie : musée de l’Ermitage / Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets

From September 22nd to the the 24th of January 2011 – Galeries nationales, Grand Palais
Claude Monet painted without letting up for over sixty years, building up a body of work which incarnated Impressionism in its purest form and by the early twentieth century had laid the foundations of modern art. The exhibition at the Galeries Nationales reviews his entire fertile career. It is the most important exhibition on Claude Monet for nearly thirty years, following on from the major retrospective at the Galeries Nationales in 1980. Much research has been done on this artist in the intervening period, shedding light on little-known aspects of his work.
Organised along thematic and chronological lines, the exhibition covers Monet’s career from his beginnings in the 1860s to his last paintings related to the Water Lily cycle in the Musée de l’Orangerie.
As a young artist Monet chose fairly traditional subjects, forests and beaches. In the Normandy of his childhood where Boudin and then Jongkind had introduced him to plein air techniques, he painted seascapes and “snow effects”. Then in Paris and its suburbs, with special emphasis on Argenteuil, in the 1870s, his luminous colourful landscapes of the banks of the Seine reflect the flowering of Impressionism.
In the 1880s, sites in the north and west of France as well as time spent in Normandy and on the Mediterranean coast, at Belle Ile (1886) or in the Creuse (1889) gave him a wide range of motifs. He gradually constructed his approach to nature. His studies of light and atmosphere took a growing place in the development of his personality as a painter.
Although Monet is undeniably a landscapist, he often painted figures and still lifes. With Le déjeuner sur l’herbe or Femmes au jardin, he tackled the challenge of painting outdoors. These paintings have almost never left the Musee d’Orsay. For the first time they will be put alongside indoor and outdoor scenes from the same period, on loan from foreign collections, to make a unique ensemble.
Later, his figures or portraits were treated in a more evocative, decorative way. The characters blend into a world of efflorescence or vibrant colour, an ‘envelope’ which makes them rather unreal. The same change can be seen in his still lifes.
Powerful celebrations of a world full of vitality, the still lifes from the late 1890s translate a more meditative approach in which objects disintegrate in a swirl of colour and light.
In 1890, when he was already fifty, Monet established a garden on his property at Giverny, and took inspiration from the surrounding countryside, no longer so readily going to paint in other parts of France and abroad. He worked in a systematic way on paintings of the same motif, designed as series recording changes in light as the hours and seasons wore on.
Although notions of regularity and repetition are threaded throughout Monet’s career and show through forcefully in his painting, the exhibition takes another angle, showing how he thought along other lines: on several occasions he went back in time, calling on memory, dream and nostalgia.
The Grandes Décorations de Nymphéas cycle crowned Monet as a decorator. It was the culmination of research he had begun earlier in his career. He also painted decors for people he knew, such as the collector Ernest Hoschedé or his art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. From the 1890s, at a time when the decorative quality of paintings seemed to promise something new, Monet invented a personal style, reconciling a deep love of nature and the idea of a self-contained poetic world. So with Monet “the dream comes true” as his friend, the writer Octave Mirbeau aptly remarked.
Gathering nearly two hundred works, this retrospective will surprise, challenge and delight visitors with famous works and less well-known paintings but also with unaccustomed comparisons and new groupings of works seldom seen before. The exhibition also seeks to take a fresh look at a great artist who made the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Museum Hours