Matthieu Binder’s website, litteraturefrancaise.net, and the pleasure of reading books

10 Tuesday Jun 2025

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Matthieu Binder’s website, litteraturefrancaise.net, and the pleasure of reading books

Tags

book-reviews, books, Claudia Moscovici, fiction, france, French culture, French literature, intellectual history, literary studies, literature, Litteraturefrancaise.net, Matthieu Binder, novels, poetry, writing

by Claudia Moscovici

Albert Einstein famously stated, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This standard of simplicity generally applies to Physics and high-level mathematics, fields that value “elegant proofs,” which are concise, intuitive, unifying, generalizable and original. But we can apply this principle, at least by analogy, to the arts and humanities, and above all to accessible fields such as literature. I say literature above all, because reading novels, poetry and plays is most of all about engaging in the incomparable escape and pleasure of imagination, which are universal. Anissa Trisdianty is quoted as saying “Reading is dreaming with your eyes open.” Indeed, literature occupies a unique place among the arts in awakening our imaginations, as its form of creativity depends on the active participation of the reader. The business of publishing, who writes books and for what purposes has changed dramatically over time. But one thing remains the same: we still love to read books for pleasure, not just for educational or pragmatic purposes. Whatever form they may take–paperback, hardcover, e-books or audio–books are here to stay. Here are some of the reasons why:

Why we love books

1. Entertainment. Books are still one of the best and most accessible form of entertainment. By reading, we can learn about any subject and travel in our imaginations to any place and time, even to alternative universes. Moreover, reading is a very flexible endeavor. We can do it in the privacy of our homes, online by joining virtual reading clubs, or with our friends and acquaintances in local book clubs. This is why reading books appeals to practically every personality type. Introverts, extroverts and everyone in between can enjoy reading, be it as a solitary or as a social activity.

2. Socializing. Which brings me to my next point. Even when we read by ourselves, we engage, indirectly, in an inherently social act. By reading, we connect with the literary canon of the past or with what is considered popular at the moment. Chances are that if we’ve heard of a book, it’s already been heavily marketed and promoted. Some of us join local book clubs, which become a welcome opportunity of catching up on our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives, enjoying time together not just books. Moreover, via review websites such as Librarything.com and Goodreads.com, readers can make new online acquaintances based on lively discussions and common interests.

3. Acquiring information or knowledge. We often read to learn about art or world history; how to diet and exercise; what is fashionable to wear; even how to parent our children. Anything and everything can be found in books. Although nowadays there are many convenient online sources of information, good books tend to provide a level of depth and detail that cannot be matched by brief articles or descriptions. The information we gather from books, in turn, can help us enjoy life on a deeper level. Generally speaking, the more informed we are about a given subject, the more we can appreciate it in real life. To offer one example out of many, just think about how much more we enjoy tourism when we have the relevant background about the history, culture, art and architecture of the place(s) we visit.

4. Enhancing our imagination and leading innumerable parallel lives. Most of us assume that we only have one life to live on this Earth. As we grow older, our lives narrow as a result of the choices–of lifestyle, partners, careers, family–we make. Each choice, be it good or bad, determines our direction and eliminates other potential paths in life. Reading is the easiest way to explore countless modes of existence practically risk free. Books carry us to places we’ve not even dreamt of before: different epochs, countries, cultures, or styles of life. Literature is in some ways even more liberating than film because readers fill in the blanks more so than viewers by bringing to life in their minds characters and situations described only through black and white symbols, or words. This is why reading novels is never a passive exercise. Like fiction writing itself, it is an inherently philosophical and liberating exercise of our imaginations. By envisioning various thought experiments–different characters, times, places and situations–reading represents one of the most accessible, inexpensive and creative ways of escaping the limitations of our lives. Even a lifetime of world excursions could not match it, as we cannot travel across centuries and even millennia, or inhabit other planets, except in our imaginations. Reading novels gives us the ontological freedom, and the Epicurean pleasure, which arguably no other activity can afford. Moreover, enjoying literature–be it through reading or writing–is an inherently aesthetic pleasure that is compatible with making good life decisions, being empathic and other-regarding to those who deserve our empathy, and having strong ethical boundaries. In other words, the almost infinite aesthetic (imaginary) exploration across cultures, time and space afforded by literature can coexist with the freedom, which every moral human being exercises, of making ethical choices. For these reasons and more, I believe that no matter what technical and economic transformations the publishing world will undergo, we will continue to love books.

Despite the liberating pleasure that reading affords, the presentation of literary works is rarely focused on the enjoyment books can offer. Literary criticism tends to approach novels through the prism of various specialized scholarly interpretations, such as Marxist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, postcolonial, semiotic, or Lacanian (and other psychoanalytic) readings, or serves pragmatic educational purposes, such as teaching students the basics of passing AP Literature tests in the United States, or the baccalaureate exam in France and other European countries. While such academic and didactic presentations are useful and valuable for both students and scholars, they have less appeal to a broad audience who reads literature to simply relax and enjoy books.

Matthieu Binder’s French literature blog, Littératurefrançaise.net

I say all this because, as a lifelong scholar of French literature, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature specializing in the French Enlightenment and Romanticism, I rarely found an introduction to literary works that emphasizes first and foremost the pleasure of reading without sacrificing rigor or depth. About a year ago, however, I was fortunate enough to run across Matthieu Binder’s website, https://litteraturefrancaise.net/fr/accueil/, which is all about the joy of reading. Upon learning more about Matthieu’s background from his online bio, it occurred to me that his approach to literature was so different from those of most other literary scholars precisely because his educational formation was not, originally, in the field. Matthieu Binder pursued a science baccalaureate, followed by a Masters in Philosophy and a degree in Political Science from the University of Lyon. What brought him to French literature was not an academic degree or scholarly pursuits in the field, but the sheer love and pleasure of reading books, which he desired to share with as many readers as possible. This is precisely what his internationally popular blog, https://litteraturefrancaise.net/fr/accueil/, which he started in 2020, is all about. His website offers readers different ways of approaching French literature: 1. Chronologically, via a timeline that begins with Medieval literature and ends with modern, twentieth-century literature; 2. Biographically, by offering the most salient details about the lives of the featured authors; 3. Historically, by exploring the ways in which context impacted those authors and vice versa, and 4. Thematically, by presenting the most relevant subjects broached by the authors.

A wide-ranging presentation of the most influential French authors

Beginning with the late medieval era, when the French language (Old French) was consolidated in courtly literature over Latin, Matthieu begins his literary introduction with the works of novelist, essayist and poet Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) and of the populist poet François Villon (1431-1463). Moving on to the Renaissance, he covers the works of satirist François Rabelais (1483-1553), the poet and playwright Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), the poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) and the philosophical essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), one of his all-time favorites. The seventeenth-century sees the bloom of French authors, often revolving around the royal court and the cultural salons led by influential and learned women, such as Madame de Rambouillet. Matthieu introduces readers to the playwright Pierre Corneille (1606-1680), the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), the extraordinarily popular comic playwright Molière (1622-1673), the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the epistolary writer Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696), the innovative novelist Madame de La Fayette (1634-1693); the tragic playwright Jean Racine (1639-1699) and the moralist Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696). He then traces the rise of Enlightenment thought, republican ideals and secular culture in the wide-ranging, and quite literally encyclopedic writings (given they coauthored the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1751-1772) of the philosophes and salonnières. Here Matthieu explores the works of Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1713-1784). He also presents the plays of Beaumarchais (1732-1799) and the intriguing psychological fiction of Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803). In the nineteenth-century, he traces the rise of Realism and Romanticism, the main literary movements of the era, in the works of the novelists François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), Stendhal (1783-1842), Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). He goes on to present the works of the poet, critic and essayist Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the fiction of the stylistically punctilious and exquisite novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the novels of the path-breaking and prolific writer George Sand (1804-1864), the imaginative fiction of Jules Verne (1828-1905), the naturalist novels of the prolific writer and essayist Emile Zola (1840-1902), as well the short stories of Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Not neglecting poetry, he presents the Symbolist works of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Arthur Rimbaud (1850-1893) and the Surrealist poems of Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870). Matthieu then proceeds to introduce readers to the literary giants of the twentieth century, starting with the fin de siècle innovative writer of psychological fiction Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and including, among others, the founders of existentialism in literature and philosophy, Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), the philosophical writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), and the politically controversial novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His literary presentations are not, nor do they claim to be, all-inclusive, but they are extremely informative, engaging and entertaining, giving readers a taste for French literature and culture.

Stendhal and George Sand

In an illuminating 2024 interview with Dr. Heiner Wittman, Matthieu expounds upon his multifaceted approach to French literary history. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejvskY3hg4) One of the first questions he is asked by Dr. Wittman is if he has a favorite author or movement. Matthieu avows that one of that one of his favorites is Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), a versatile novelist associated with both Romanticism and Realism who also wrote insightful essays on music, art, life and love (De l’amour, 1822). When asked how his presentations differ from the norm in subject, Matthieu indicates that he attempts to offer a widely accessible yet fresh perspective that may be missed by others. He offers as an example his introduction to the prolific and trailblazing writer George Sand (Amantine Lucie Aurore Dupin de Francueil, 1804-1876). Matthieu indicates that he focuses on the ways in which Sand paved the way for other women writers and for feminism in general through novels that critiqued gender norms and the restrictions imposed on women, such as Indiana (1832) and Consuelo (1842), rather than discussing her more popular “romans champêtres”, such as François le Champi (1847) and La Petite Fadette (1849), for which she is principally known (and taught) today.

Victor Hugo

Matthieu also pays special attention to one of the founders of the Romantic movement and one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth-century in particular, Victor Hugo (1802-1885), to illustrate how fiction impacts history. His presentation of Hugo explores not just the novelist’s popular literary works, but also the permeable boundaries and powerful mutual influences among the arts. Needless to say, Victor Hugo was, above all, a literary giant. By the end of his life, the author was so popular that when he succumbed to pneumonia in June 1885 at the ripe age of 83, the French President Jules Grévy gave him a state memorial service. Over two million people joined the funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe all the way to the Pantheon. To put the legendary writer’s popularity in perspective, the population of Paris at the time was approximately 2,135,000 people. Matthieu emphasizes that Victor Hugo gained such well-deserved renown because his contributions to literature and literary debates not only transformed that field and brought about the birth of French Romanticism, but also had an immense impact upon other arts. His internationally popular novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831), reawakened popular interest in gothic architecture and in the Medieval period in general. After reading the novel, tourists started flocking to the ramshackle cathedral, and Parisians rallied for its renovation. For decades, ever since it was ravaged by angry mobs and many of its statues were systematically dismantled during the French Revolution, the Notre Dame cathedral had fallen into disrepair. Even Napoleon I, who had his famous coronation there on December 2, 1804, preferred to cover Notre Dame’s dilapidated walls with expensive tapestries, rather than invest in its costly renovation. It took Victor Hugo’s bestseller to attract crowds to the neglected but still glorious cathedral, which in turn prompted the talented architect Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), a great admirer of both the novel and of medieval architecture, to begin its reconstruction. In a labor of love that took him about twenty-five years to complete, LeDuc not only renovated the Notre Dame cathedral according to its original blueprints, but also added a second, purely ornamental spire, and replaced many of its decapitated sculptures with new, phantasmagoric gargoyles inspired by Hugo’s novel, thus harmoniously blending the old gothic style with the new Romanticism. In fact, the Romantic movement is one of Matthieu Binder’s passions and a focal point of his presentation of French literature.

When asked by Dr. Wittman, in the same interview, to describe Romanticism, Matthieu once again does not offer a conventional textbook reply. He depicts the Romantic movement in a nuanced manner, as having fluid boundaries that were crystalized only in retrospect by literary critics as well as proposed contemporaneously by the authors associated with it. He indicates that nineteenth century authors such as Victor Hugo rallied around the concept of Romanticism, already popular in Germany since Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), both in a polemical manner, to rebel against the restrictions imposed by Neoclassical rules, and for promotional purposes, to underscore their own importance and originality. Matthieu regards Romanticism more as “un nouveau souffle”, or what we would call “a breath of fresh air”, rather than as a strictly defined, homogeneous literary movement. In fact, he shows that the concept of Romanticism was so permeable that it readily translated to other fields, revolutionizing the domains of philosophy, literature, art, architecture and music.

Matthieu’s elaborations of literary movements in context, as breathing, living exchanges of literary styles, themes and tropes, innovations and ideas proposed, which are debated and transformed by given authors, not only engages readers far more than rigid definitions, but also is in line with the best and most sophisticated scholarly accounts of literary movements. To offer an example, once again, from my own field of specialization, Matthieu’s characterization of Romanticism as “un nouveau souffle” conforms to the rigorous scholarly elaboration offered by M. H. Abrams, one of the most prestigious literary scholars of Romanticism, as well as to the innovative reading of Romantic emotion offered by noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

How Matthieu’s introduction to Romanticism aligns with the top scholarship on the subject

a) M. H. Abrams’s discussion of Romanticism in The Mirror and the Lamp

In The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953), which remains a classic in the study of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between a theory and an orientation. A theory begins with a set of assumptions that lead to a conclusion that follows logically from them. Romanticism lacks the internal consistency and rational structure of a theory. Nonetheless, the writing of the Romantics points to related ways of conveying human emotion. As Abrams explains referring to Wordsworth in particular, for the Romantics, “A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings” (22).

Clearly, Romanticism is not the expression of raw, subconscious impulses, as the Surrealists would later describe the automatism of their own art. If Abrams states that expressive Romantic theories comprise an orientation, it’s because they present different ways of processing emotions thoughtfully for artistic ends. As literary critics point out, the role of emotions differs vastly from author to author. Romantic texts engage intellectual history, leading us to wonder: Is emotion visceral and uncontrollable, as so many thinkers, from Plato to Kant, had maintained? Is it related in some fundamental way to what we know about the world, as the Stoics postulated? Is it tied to our ethical beliefs and tendencies, as Hume and Rousseau claimed in their partial defenses of sympathy? Is it induced by art, as Wordsworth and Baudelaire would declare? The difference in assumptions about emotion and its role in artistic creation contributes to the richness and versatility of Romantic literature and of the expressive models of art that underpin it. Romantic literature links emotion to art in ways that engage the big questions of almost every field of what we now call the humanities and social sciences, relating art to psychology, political theory and nearly every branch of philosophy.

b) Martha Nussbaum’s presentation of Romantic emotion in Upheavals of Thought

Given the diversity and wide-ranging intellectual implications of Romanticism, it’s difficult to limit it even to the boundaries of an orientation. Yet the question remains unavoidable, so let’s return to it: in what ways can we speak meaningfully of a Romantic orientation? Like Abrams, I believe that there is one, indeed. I think we’re in a better position to understand Romanticism by looking at its philosophical underpinnings and seeing how radically it has transformed the way we look at emotion in general and at passion in particular. For Romanticism was the most significant movement in Western culture to render passion and its artistic expression not an object of fear or ambivalence, but a highly desirable quality; one which is indispensable to human happiness. In Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Martha Nussbaum traces the most prominent philosophical arguments for and against emotion. The con side tends to win over the pro side. Nussbaum shows that even those philosophers who were generally sympathetic to the emotions—including Aristotle, the Stoics, Smith and Rousseau—warned against their uncontrollable nature and the danger they posed to reason (in the pursuit of knowledge) and to ethics (in the pursuit of the good life). Rousseau and Hume make some apologies for emotion in their study of sympathy, but even they exercise caution and qualify extensively.

Nussbaum considers in particular the Kantian argument against the emotions, which was very influential during the Enlightenment and which the Romantics had to contend with. Kant argues that emotions are too subjective, unreliable and volatile to provide an adequate basis for moral conduct. To address this objection, Nussbaum breaks it down into its component parts. First, such an argument tells us that emotions can be dangerous because they focus upon the individual and his or her personal goals or projects rather than the good of humanity. Second, the argument goes, emotions are associated with extremely close and intense attachments that may be “too partial or unbalanced” to lead to ethical decisions. (12) Third, it’s objected that even those emotions that we consider positive—such as love or compassion—are often inseparable from destructive emotions, such as jealousy, anger and hatred. Although Kant stated this argument most compellingly, many philosophers that Nussbaum examines in her book–including Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Descartes, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant himself –attempt to prove in one way or another that emotions are uncontrollable and destructive impulses (much of the same order as our bodily drives) that are unreliable motivations for morality. (13)

To detach emotion from the ethical standards and rationalist assumptions that were so inhospitable to it, Romantic authors first aestheticized it. Emotion, they illustrate, is above all related to the way we create and appreciate art. It’s not, as philosophers tended to argue, primarily related to how we regulate ourselves or respond ethically to other human beings. Most Romantics did not go so far as to say that art could never be judged by moral criteria. Even when the late-Romantic theory of art for art’s sake become all the rage in France in the 1830’s, art was still not regarded as immune to moral judgment. Nonetheless, the Romantics made it possible for us to see emotion as tied to creativity and meaning in a way that rendered moral responses secondary to aesthetic ones. Once they made this important shift in the link between art and ethical value, the Romantics could reconnect emotion to all other important human faculties (cognition, perception and rational thought) in new, refreshing and complex ways. Under their pens, emotion—and passion in particular–became the center of human existence, its most exalted state and a conduit to beauty and meaning.

Given my background in Romanticism, I have discussed here how Matthieu’s accessible and entertaining introduction to the “breath of fresh air” that the Romantic movement brought to literature, philosophy and the arts fits well with some of the most influential and rigorous scholarly discussions of the subject. However, as mentioned, Matthieu’s literary discussions span entire centuries and cover dozens of great writers, introducing readers to all of French literature, from Medieval times to modern days, with the same depth and in the same engaging manner as he presented the authors associated with Romanticism. Matthieu Binder’s popular literary blog Littératurefrançaise.net demonstrates that deeper knowledge of a field only enhances our pleasure and reminds us why our favorite relaxation, escape and pastime may still be, now and for a long time to come, reading (French) books.

La musique extraordinaire de Philippe Cohen Solal

23 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on La musique extraordinaire de Philippe Cohen Solal

Tags

blog, Claudia Moscovici, francais, france, french, poesie, tango

Claudia Moscovici

traduction en français par Matthieu Binder

En 1999, le musicien français Philippe Cohen Solal a cofondé le groupe de tango novateur Gotan Project, avec l’Argentin Eduardo Makaroff et le Suisse Christoph H. Muller. Ensemble, ils ont révolutionné la musique de tango argentin, la rendant fraîche et contemporaine grâce à des remixes électroniques, des dubbing, des beats, des breaks et de nombreuses collaborations fructueuses avec d’autres musiciens de premier plan. Le nom du groupe lui-même est une anagramme du mot « tango », dont l’ordre des deux syllabes a été inversé pour donner Gotan. Les albums de The Gotan Project, La Revancha del Tango (2001), Lunatico (2006) et Tango 3.0 (2010), ont atteint une renommée internationale et se sont vendus à plus de trois millions d’exemplaires.

Quelques-unes des meilleures chansons de ces trois albums, telles que « Diferente » (2006) et « La Gloria » (2010), sont parfaitement complétées par des vidéoclips artistiques, qui sont eux-mêmes des œuvres d’art. « Diferente » met en scène une rencontre amoureuse manquée entre une jeune femme et un jeune homme, que l’on voit parfois, habillés différemment, danser ensemble, comme dans une autre réalité — peut-être leur imagination. La touche surréaliste de la vidéo est amplifiée par un jeu de miroirs kaléidoscopiques, qui dédoublent le couple dans plusieurs scènes hypnotiques qui s’accordent à merveille avec la mélodie et les paroles lyriques de la chanson. Quelques séquences intercalées mettant en scène la jeune femme dans une robe rouge frappante se promenant dans la ville ajoutent une touche cinématographique supplémentaire.

Le vidéoclip de « La Gloria » incorpore également des tropes surréalistes, mais dans un style différent. Il met en scène un jeune athlète sur un ring de boxe, parfois doublé, qui exécute parfaitement une danse contemporaine. Des séquences de mouvements inversés, comme lorsque le jeune homme saisit une poignée de sable, qui semble se rassembler dans sa main, ajoutent une dimension onirique à la vidéo musicale. La musique du tango est parfaitement ponctuée par la voix du légendaire commentateur de football argentin Victor Hugo Morales, qui prononce les noms des membres du Gotan Project et s’exclame « Gooootan ! » au lieu de « Gooooal ! », comme s’il annonçait le début d’un match. En arrière-plan, une jeune femme vêtue d’une robe blanche lumineuse avec des ailes et portant une courte coiffure au carré, apparaît en trois exemplaires sur une balançoire, comme une vision obsédante d’une flapper angélique du passé. À la fin de la vidéo, les images éthérées des trois cofondateurs du Gotan Project, tous vêtus de costumes sombres à rayures et de chapeaux fedora, apparaissent brièvement pour se dissiper progressivement sous nos yeux.

Alors que peu de musiciens peuvent surpasser un tel succès mondial, la carrière musicale de Philippe Cohen Solal est devenue tout à fait extraordinaire depuis qu’il a quitté le Gotan Project en 2010, tant par sa qualité artistique, chaque album étant un joyau en soi, que par sa variété de styles et le large éventail de ses collaborations avec des musiciens internationaux de grand renom. S’éloignant le plus possible de la musique de tango associée au Gotan Project, Solal a travaillé en 2007 avec plusieurs musiciens américains à Nashville, dans le Tennessee, sur l’album de country et de bluegrass Moonshine Sessions. Ce disque authentique comprend des chansons de Jim Lauderdale, Lucas Reynolds, Shawn Camp, Sam Bush et Melonie Cannon ; la musique de Troy Johnson & The Bluegrass Band ; Ronnie Bowman ; une surprenante reprise country de l’emblématique « Dancing Queen » d’ABBA chantée par Melonie Cannon ; le jazz éclectique et la musique électronique de Ben Horn ; la musique country plus traditionnelle de Joy Lynn White, avec en point d’orgue une chanson idyllique et unique dédiée à sa fille, « Luna’s song », interprétée par Robag Verlan-Lanu, qui combine harmonieusement la saveur méridionale de la musique country avec un rythme tribal énergique et jeune.

Philippe Cohen Solal a fait suivre cet album américain de l’album lyrique nettement plus français Paradis Artificiel(s) (2018). Pour la première fois dans sa carrière musicale, Solal chante ses propres chansons, traduisant en musique avec une facilité miraculeuse plusieurs des poèmes les plus célèbres de Charles Baudelaire tirés des Fleurs du Mal (1857) ainsi que le traité du poète sur les effets créatifs du haschisch et de l’opium, Les Paradis Artificiels (1860). En tant que spécialiste de la littérature et de la poésie françaises du XIXe siècle, je suis peut-être quelque peu partiale, mais je pense qu’il s’agit du meilleur album de Solal et de sa plus grande réussite créatrice. Il est en effet exceptionnellement difficile de traduire la poésie de Charles Baudelaire – et de lui rendre justice – dans n’importe quelle langue, en particulier dans la langue radicalement différente qu’est la musique. Baudelaire est l’un des plus grands poètes du XIXe siècle : il a modernisé la poésie romantique de Victor Hugo ou d’Alphone de Lamartine pour en faire une poésie moderne, mélodieuse et aux multiples facettes, qui reste tout à fait d’actualité, tout comme le personnage plus grand que nature qu’est ce poète lui-même. Solitaire mais flanneur et dandy ; timide et silencieux mais confiant dans son génie poétique ; souvent solipsiste mais aspirant à la compagnie d’autres écrivains, artistes, femmes et foules ; pécheur invétéré plongé dans les bas-fonds du Paris bohème mais esthète, Charles Baudelaire a incarné les contradictions de la modernité qu’il a dépeintes dans ses œuvres. Dans les poèmes de son chef-d’œuvre, Les Fleurs du Mal, rien n’est désuet ; chaque mot, analogie, symbole et phrase semblent si parfaitement choisis qu’ils sont pratiquement intraduisibles. Je crois que là où les traducteurs littéraires de la poésie de Baudelaire dans d’innombrables langues ont échoué, Philippe Cohen Solal a réussi musicalement dans son extraordinaire album lyrique, Paradis Artificiel(s).

Il commence par la chanson « Le club de hachichins », une référence, comme le titre de l’album lui-même, à l’œuvre non fictionnelle de Baudelaire Les Paradis Artificiels (1860), qui dépeint les cinq années d’exploration, avec l’aide du docteur Jacques-Joseph Moreau, des effets du haschisch consommé par lui et une coterie d’amis littéraires célèbres, parfois rejoints par leurs maîtresses, au « Club de Haschischins » situé dans l’hôtel de Lauzun à Paris. Parmi ses amis haschischins, on trouve un véritable Who’s Who des écrivains et poètes les plus célèbres du dix-neuvième siècle, dont Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Honoré de Balzac et Théophile Gautier. Dans ce livre, à l’instar du précurseur littéraire auquel il fait référence, les Confessions d’un mangeur d’opium anglais (1821) de Thomas De Quincey, Baudelaire vise à étudier les effets du haschisch et de l’opium sur la créativité humaine. Bien que l’auteur offre de nombreuses descriptions séduisantes et fantasmagoriques des multiples facettes de l’expérience de ces drogues et d’autres formes d’intoxication, comme Gautier et d’autres écrivains, il conclut finalement que l’expérience de l’influence des drogues (et de l’alcool) entrave l’autonomie et la lucidité nécessaires à l’expression artistique et littéraire la plus complète.

Tout en faisant une allusion évidente au club de Baudelaire, la première chanson de Solal sur l’album Paradis Artificiel(s), « Le club des hachichins », raconte l’histoire de l’ordre médiéval des Assassins ismaéliens Nizari (1090-1275), parfois appelé les Hashashins, fondé par Hasan al-Sabbah dans les montagnes de Perse. La légende veut qu’Al-Sabbah ait incité de jeunes hommes, en partie par l’intoxication au haschisch, à lui obéir sans réserve et à assassiner les dirigeants musulmans et chrétiens qu’il considérait comme une menace. Certains historiens contemporains ont récemment révisé ce récit, d’abord transmis par les croisés occidentaux, puis par Marco Polo (qui en a fourni la chronique la plus célèbre) et, quelques siècles plus tard, par les orientalistes du XIXe siècle (dont le baron Silvestre de Sacy, qui a souligné le lien étymologique entre « Haschisch » et « Assassins »). Certains historiens révisionnistes décrivent aujourd’hui le fondateur de l’ordre, Hasan al-Sabbah, non pas tant comme un chef de secte attirant de jeunes hommes vers le meurtre, mais comme un chef éclairé connaissant bien le Coran, les mathématiques et l’astronomie, qui rassemblait une armée de disciples au château d’Alamut et commandait des assassinats ciblés afin de protéger son groupe de ses ennemis et rivaux. (Voir une discussion intéressante à propos de cette historiographie révisée sur le subreddit Ask the Historian, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t30i5/how_efficacious_was_hassani_sabbahs_order_of/?rdt=61315). ).

Quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on adopte à ce sujet, la légende des Haschichins est tout à fait fascinante, et leur histoire intrigante est brillamment capturée par la chanson de Solal « Le club des hachichins », qui est partiellement parlée et envoûtante. Dans la deuxième chanson, « Le Parfum », Solal met en valeur son talent de chanteur dans une magnifique interprétation musicale de l’enivrant poème du même nom de Baudelaire. Dans la chanson suivante, il traduit littéralement en portugais le poème sensuel de Baudelaire, « Parfum Exotique », en collaboration avec le musicien canadien Samito qui interprète une version rythmée et pleine d’entrain du poème. La chanson « L’invitation au voyage », basée sur le poème le plus célèbre de Baudelaire, combine un chœur féminin séduisant avec une musique nostalgique et psychédélique, tout en synchronisant une expérience riche et multisensorielle.

L’album suivant de Solal, Mind Food (2020), a été longuement mûri, lancé vingt ans après sa conception initiale. À l’origine, il s’agissait de la musique d’un film imaginaire, lui-même inspiré par la superproduction populaire sur le monde de l’art, L’Affaire Thomas Crown, avec Steve McQueen et Faye Dunaway en 1969 et remaniée en 1999 avec Pierce Brosnan et Rene Russo. Deux décennies plus tard, ces chansons ont été rassemblées dans un album réfléchi et sincère. « Living’s worth loving », l’une de ses chansons les plus émouvantes, interprétée à l’origine par David et Robin Batteaux en 1973, est ici magnifiquement interprétée par Gabriela Arnon, une jeune chanteuse new-yorkaise installée à Paris. L’album comprend également une version instrumentale de cette chanson par le pianiste français Christophe Chassol, ainsi qu’une version jazz par Solal lui-même. La chanson « The Signs » fait également l’objet de plusieurs interprétations sur cet album. La première est une chanson entraînante et rétro interprétée par Nivo, suivie d’une version au piano interprétée à nouveau par Chassol, et d’une troisième par le musicien et auteur-compositeur gallois Green Gartside, qui chante également « Inverno ».

Philippe Cohen Solal n’est pas seulement un musicien de talent. Il est avant tout un artiste et un intellectuel aux dimensions multiples, qui puise son inspiration dans la poésie, la littérature, l’histoire, la philosophie et les arts visuels. Son album Outsider (2021) rend hommage à l’artiste « outsider » de Chicago Henry Darger (1892-1973), dont l’épopée illustrée sur un monde détruit par la guerre, The Story of the Vivian Girls (1972), n’a été découverte qu’après sa mort et donc publiée à titre posthume. Dans cette œuvre, Darger dépeint la vie de sept petites filles prises au milieu d’un violent conflit, inspiré de la guerre civile américaine (1861-65). L’artiste décrit visuellement la façon dont ces enfants innocents ont été réduits en esclavage et les souffrances qu’ils ont endurées en tant que victimes de la guerre. À la fin, le bien l’emporte sur le mal et les filles sont libérées. Dans cet album captivant aux accents rétro, Solal capture l’essence de l’art outsider de Darger, évoquant non seulement l’époque de la guerre civile, mais aussi, du moins à mes oreilles, certaines comédies musicales rock de la contre-culture des années 1960, telles que Hair (1968).

Son album solo de 2023, Tango Y Tango, renvoie aux années de collaboration avec Makaroff et Muller, en reprenant des chansons classiques de tango et en les rendant fraîches et contemporaines grâce aux rythmes électroniques qui caractérisent la musique du Gotan Project. L’album comprend la chanson mélancolique « Hasta Siempre Amor », magnifiquement interprétée par sa collaboratrice de longue date Cristina Vilallonga. À mon avis, la chanson qui se démarque le plus ici est « Non, Non (La Chanson de Jeanne) », interprétée par la chanteuse et actrice française Rebecca Marder, avec une musique instrumentale de tango en arrière-plan et des paroles sulfureuses, qui rappellent, dans leur désaveu des sentiments amoureux évidents, le célèbre « Je t’aime…moi non plus » (1969) de Serge Gainsbourg et Jane Birkin.

Le dernier album de Solal, 75010, est inspiré par la diversité ethnique et culturelle de l’endroit où il vit : le 10e arrondissement de Paris, un quartier artistique et cosmopolite. Il comprend un mélange hybride de chansons, allant du mélange de hip hop, de pop et de rap de « Soleil, Etoile », chanté par Jodie Coste, qui célèbre la tolérance et l’unité de l’humanité ainsi que la diversité culturelle, à l’exotique « Elmas », chanté dans sa langue maternelle par la pop star turque Uzay Hepari, à la position critique d’ « Ici, c’est comme ça », où le musicien franco-américain Charlelie Couture chante les aspects négatifs de la culture et de la bureaucratie françaises , à une fantastique reprise du classique «Kashmir» de Led Zeppelin , à la chanson « Dans la nuit », qui met en scène l’actrice française Judith Chemla, et qui se termine par l’air mélancolique « It’s time to say goodbye », interprété par le trio vocal français Alfa Martians. Pour moi, le point culminant de cet album est la chanson en persan « Zan Zendegi Azad », qui signifie « Femme, Vie, Liberté », d’une beauté envoûtante et inspirante, qui fait allusion aux courageuses manifestations féministes en Iran déclenchées par la mort de Mahsa Amini en 2022 et qui est interprétée de manière poignante par la chanteuse franco-iranienne Ariana Vafadari (de formation classique). Le mélange harmonieux de genres, de langues et de cultures aussi divers dans cet album offre un témoignage musical éloquent de l’énergie multiculturelle passionnante de Paris.

Pour avoir une telle envergure artistique et un immense succès musical dans sa carrière, il faut une grande curiosité intellectuelle, de la créativité, ainsi que le bénéfice d’une riche expérience de vie. Influencé par une multitude de cultures et trouvant force et inspiration dans sa vie familiale ainsi que dans son amour constant de la musique, Solal apporte à chaque album une passion créative profonde et intense. Sa carrière impressionnante et durable témoigne de sa capacité d’adaptation, de sa résilience et de son authenticité. Solal a commencé sa carrière dans les années 1980 et au début des années 1990 en tant que producteur de chansons commerciales, travaillant pour plusieurs grands studios de musique, notamment Polydor Records, où il a lancé l’album Raft qui s’est vendu à 650 000 exemplaires ; Mercury Music Studio, où il a lancé la carrière de la chanteuse pop Zazie, et Virgin Records, où il a été directeur musical. En fin de compte, ce parcours plus conventionnel ne l’a pas comblé. Après avoir quitté les grandes maisons de disques et s’être lancé dans une brève mais catastrophique collaboration avec un autre musicien, il a changé de direction. En 1995, il lance sa propre maison de disques, Ya Basta ! qui, par son nom même, signale de manière provocante qu’il n’est plus dirigé par d’autres et qu’il suivra désormais son propre chemin artistique dans la vie. Au cours de son extraordinaire parcours musical qui s’étend sur trois décennies, Philippe Cohen Solal a su mettre à profit sa liberté de création, sa curiosité inébranlable, ses collaborations fructueuses avec de grands musiciens internationaux et, surtout, son extraordinaire talent pour explorer des styles musicaux radicalement différents, faisant de chacun de ses albums un succès retentissant.

The Extraordinary Musical Journey of Philippe Cohen Solal

01 Tuesday Apr 2025

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in music

≈ Comments Off on The Extraordinary Musical Journey of Philippe Cohen Solal

Tags

art, Charles Baudelaire, Claudia Moscovici, French poetry, Gotan Project, Les fleurs du mal, music, new-music, news, Paradis Artificiels, Philippe Cohen Solal, poetry, reviews, tango

By Claudia Moscovici

The Extraordinary Musical Journey of Philippe Cohen Solal

By Claudia Moscovici

In 1999, the French musician Philippe Cohen Solal cofounded the innovative tango group Gotan Project, along with the Argentinian Eduardo Makaroff and the Swiss Christoph H. Muller. Together they revolutionized Argentine tango music, rendering it fresh and contemporary through electronic remixes, dubbing, beats, breaks as well as numerous fruitful collaborations with other stellar musicians. The name of the band itself is an anagram of the word “tango”, with the order of its two syllables reversed to Gotan. The Gotan Project’s albums, La Revancha del Tango (2001), Lunatico (2006), and Tango 3.0 (2010), achieved international fame, selling over three million records.

A few of the top songs from these three albums, such as “Diferente” (2006) and “La Gloria” (2010), are perfectly complemented by artistic music videos, which are themselves works of art. “Diferente” stages a missed romantic encounter between a young woman and a young man, who are sometimes shown, differently dressed, dancing together, as if in an alternative reality, perhaps their imaginations. The Surrealist touch of the video is amplified by a kaleidoscopic play of mirrors, which double the couple in several mesmerizing scenes that fit beautifully with the melody and evocative lyrics of the song. A few interspersed sequences featuring the young woman in a striking red dress walking throughout the city add an extra cinematic touch.

The music video for “La Gloria” also incorporates Surrealist tropes, but in a different style. It features a young athlete in a boxing ring, sometimes also shown in doubled scenes, flawlessly performing a contemporary dance. Reverse motion sequences, as the young man grabs a fistful of sand, which in reverse replay appears to gather back up into his hand, add a dreamlike dimension to the music video. The tango music is perfectly punctuated by the voice of the legendary Argentinian soccer commentator Victor Hugo Morales calling out the names of the Gotan Project members and exclaiming “Gooootan!” instead of “Gooooal!”, as if he were announcing the plays of a match. In the background, a young woman in a luminous white dress with wings, sporting a short bobbed hairstyle, appears in triplicate on a swing, like a haunting vision of an angelic flapper from the past. At the conclusion of the video, the ethereal images of the three cofounders of the Gotan Project, all sharply dressed in dark pinstripe suits and fedora hats, appear briefly only to gradually dissipate before our eyes.

While few musicians can outdo such massive worldwide success, Philippe Cohen Solal’s musical career since leaving the Gotan Project in 2010 has been quite extraordinary, both in its artistic quality, with each album a gem in itself, and in its variety of styles and wide range of collaborations with top international musicians. Arguably moving as far away as possible from the tango music associated with the Gotan Project, in 2007 Solal worked with several American musicians in Nashville, Tennessee on the country and bluegrass album Moonshine Sessions. This authentic record includes songs by Jim Lauderdale, Lucas Reynolds, Shawn Camp, Sam Bush and Melonie Cannon; the music of Troy Johnson & The Bluegrass Band; Ronnie Bowman; a surprising country cover of ABBA’s iconic “Dancing Queen”sung by Melonie Cannon; the eclectic jazz and electronic music of Ben Horn; the more traditional country music of Joy Lynn White; culminating in an idyllic and unique song dedicated to his daugher, “Luna’s song”, performed by Robag Verlan-Lanu, which harmoniously combines the Southern flavor of country music with an energetic and youthful tribal beat.

Philippe Cohen Solal followed up this American album with the distinctly French lyrical album Paradis Artificiel(s) (2018). For the first time in his musical career, Solal sings his own songs, translating into music with miraculous ease several of Charles Baudelaire’s most famous poems from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) as well as the poet’s treatise on the creative effects of hashish and opium, Les Paradis Artificiels (1860). As a nineteenth-century French literature and poetry scholar, I may be somewhat biased, but I believe this is Solal’s best album and greatest creative achievement. Here’s why. It is exceptionally difficult to translate Charles Baudelaire’s poetry–and do it justice–in any language, particularly in the radically different language of music. This is because Baudelaire is one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth-century, who modernized the Romantic poetry of say, Victor Hugo, or Alphone de Lamartine, into the melodious, multifaceted modern poetry that remains very much relevant today, as does the larger-than-life figure of the poet himself. A loner yet a flanneur and a dandy; timid and quiet yet confident of his poetic genius; often solipsistic yet yearning for the company of other writers, artists, women and the crowds; an unapologetic sinner immersed in the seedy underbelly of bohemian Paris yet an aesthetete, Charles Baudelaire embodied the very contradictions of modernity that he depicted in his works. Nothing about the poems in his masterpiece, Les Fleurs du Mal, reads dated; each word, analogy, symbol and phrase seem so perfectly selected that they are virtually untranslatable. Yet I believe that where literary translators of Baudelaire’s poetry in countless languages have fallen short, Philippe Cohen Solal has musically succeeded in his extraordinary lyrical album, Paradis Artificiel(s).

He begins with the song Le club de hachichins, a reference, like the title of the album itself, to Baudelaire’s nonfictional work Les Paradis Artificiels (1860), which depicts the poet’s five years of exploration, with the aid of Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau, of the effects of hashish consumed by him and a coterie of famous literary friends, sometimes joined by their mistresses, at the Club de Haschischins located in the Hotel de Lauzun in Paris. His fellow haschichins include a veritable Who’s Who of the most famous writers and poets of the nineteenth century, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Gerard de Nerval, Honore de Balzac and Theophile Gautier. In this book, much like the literary precursor he references, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Enlish Opium-Eater (1821), Baudelaire aims to study the effects of hashish and opium upon human creativity. Although the author offers many enticing, phantasmogoric depictions of the the multifaceted experience of these and other forms of intoxication, like Gautier and other writers, he ultimately concludes that the experience of being under the influence of drugs (and alcohol) impedes the autonomy and lucidity necessary for the fullest artistic and literary expression.

Solal’s first song on the album Paradis Artificiel(s), Le club des hachichins, while an obvious allusion to Baudelaire’s club, narrates the story of the medieval Nizari Ismaili Order of Assassins (1090-1275), sometimes referred to as the Hashashins, founded by Hasan al-Sabbah in the mountains of Persia. Legend has it that Al-Sabbah induced young men, partly through intoxication with hashish, to obey him unquestioningly and assassinate the Muslim and Christian leaders he perceived as a threat. Some contemporary historiographers have recently revised this account, initially passed on by Western Crusaders, then by Marco Polo (who provided the most famous chronicle) and, a few centuries later, by nineteenth-century Orientalists (including Baron Silvestre de Sacy, who pointed out the etymological connection between “Hashish” and “Assassins”). Some revisionist historians now depict the founder of the order, Hasan al-Sabbah, not so much as a cult leader luring young men to murder, but as an enlightened chief well-versed in the Quran, mathematics and astronomy, who gathered an army of followers to Alamut Castle and commanded targeted assassinations in order to protect their group from enemies and rivals. (See an interesting discussion of this revised historiography on the subreddit Ask the Historian, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t30i5/how_efficacious_was_hassani_sabbahs_order_of/?rdt=61315).

Regardless of one’s views on their history, the legend of the Haschichins is quite fascinating, and their intriguing tale is brilliantly captured by Solal’s partly spoken, mesmerizing song “Le club des hachichins”. In the second song, “Le Parfum”, Solal showcases his singing talent in a beautiful musical rendition of Baudelaire’s intoxicating poem by the same name. In the next song, he quite literally translates Baudelaire’s sensual and sensuous poem, “Parfum Exotique”, into Portuguese, collaborating with the Canadian musician Samito, who performs a rhythmic, spirited version of the verse. The song “L’invitation au voyage”, based on what is arguably Baudelaire’s most famous poem, combines an alluring female chorus with nostalgic, psychadelic music, synchronizing a rich and multisensory experience.

Solal’s next album, Mind Food (2020), was a long time in the making, launched twenty years after its initial conception. It was originally envisioned as a music score for an imaginary film, which in turn was inspired by the popular blockbuster about the artworld, The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in 1969 and remade in 1999 featuring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. Two decades later, these songs came together in a thoughtful and heartfelt album. One of its most soulful tunes, “Living’s worth loving”, originally performed by David and Robin Batteaux in 1973, is beautifully interpreted here by Gabriela Arnon, a young New York singer based in Paris. The album also includes an instrumental version of this song by the French pianist Christophe Chassol, as well as a jazz version by Solal himself. The song “The Signs” also has several renditions on this album. The first one is an upbeat tune with a retro feel performed by Nivo, followed by a piano version performed once again by Chassol, and a third by the Welsh musician and songwriter Green Gartside, who also sings “Inverno”.

Philippe Cohen Solal is not only a talented musician. He is, above all, a wide-ranging artist and intellectual, who finds inspiration for his music in poetry, literature, history, philosophy and the visual arts. His 2021 album Outsider offers homage to the “outsider” Chicago artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), whose illustrated epic about a world destroyed by war, The Story of the Vivian Girls (1972), was discovered only after his death and thus published posthumously. In this work, Darger depicts the lives of seven little girls caught in the midst of a violent conflict, inspired by the American Civil War (1861-65). The artist visually describes how these innocent children were enslaved and the suffering they experienced as victims of war. In the end, good prevails over evil and the girls are freed. In his engaging album with a retro feel, Solal captures the essence of Darger’s outsider art, calling to mind not only the Civil War era but also, at least to my ears, some of the 1960’s counterculture rock musicals, such as Hair (1968).

His 2023 solo record, Tango Y Tango, harks back to the years of collaboration with Makaroff and Muller, taking classic tango songs and rendering them fresh and contemporary with the electronic beats that characterize the music of the Gotan Project. The album includes the wistful song “Hasta Siempre Amor”, beautifully performed by his longtime collaborator Cristina Vilallonga. In my opinion, the song that most stands out most here is “Non, Non (La Chanson de Jeanne)”, performed by the French singer and actress Rebecca Marder, with tango instrumental music in the background and sultry lyrics, which are reminiscent in their disavowal of obvious feelings of love to Serge Gainsbourg’s and Jane’s Birkin famous “Je t’aime…moi nonplus”(1969).

Solal’s latest album, 75010, is inspired by the ethnically and culturally diverse place where he lives, the artsy and cosmopolitan 10^th Arrondissement of Paris. It includes a hybrid mix of songs, ranging from the melange of hip hop, pop and rap of “Soleil, Etoile”, sung by Jodie Coste, which celebrates tolerance and the unity of humanity as well as cultural diversity; to the exotic “Elmas”, sung in his native language by the Turkish pop star Uzay Hepari; to the critical stance of “Ici, c’est comme ca”, which features the French-American musician Charlelie Couture singing about the negative aspects of French culture and bureaucracy; to a fantastic cover of Led Zeppelin’s classic “Kashmir”; to the evocative song “Dans la nuit” featuring the French actress Judith Chemla, and concluding with the melancholy tune “It’s time to say goodbye” interpreted by the French vocal trio Alfa Martians. For me, the highlight of this stellar album is the hauntingly beautiful and inspiring song in Persian, “Zan Zendegi Azad”, meaning “Woman, Life, Freedom”, which alludes to the couragous feminist protests in Iran sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022 and is poignantly performed by the classically trained Franco-Iranian singer Ariana Vafadari. The harmonious melange of such diverse genres, languages and cultures in this album offers an eloquent musical testimony to the exciting multicultural energy of Paris.

To have such a broad artistic scope and immense musical success in one’s career requires a vast intellectual curiosity, creativity, as well as the benefit of a rich life experience. Influenced by a multitude of cultures and finding strength and inspiration in his family life as well as in his enduring love of music, Solal brings a deep and intense creative passion to each album. His impressive and enduring career speaks to his adaptability, resilience and authenticity. Solal began his career during the 1980’s and early 90’s as a successful music producer of commercial songs, working for several large music studios, including Polydor Records, where he launched the album Raft that sold 650,000 copies; Mercury Music Studio, where he lauched the career of the pop singer Zazie, and Virgin Records, where he was a music director. Ultimately, however, this more conventional career path did not fulfill him. After leaving the big record companies and embarking on a brief but catastrophic partnership with another musician, he had had enough. In 1995, he launched his own record label, Ya Basta!, which defiantly signals through its very name that he was done being directed by others and that, henceforth, he would follow his own artistic path in life. In his extraordinary musical journey spanning three decades, Philippe Cohen Solal took advantage of his creative freedom, unwavering curiosity, fruitful collaborations with other talented international musicians and, above all, extraordinary talent to explore radically different musical styles, making each one of his albums a standout success.

The Value of Art: From Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production to David B. Guenther’s The Art Dealer’s Apprentice

23 Thursday May 2024

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The Value of Art: From Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production to David B. Guenther’s The Art Dealer’s Apprentice

Tags

art, art history, artists, book review, Claudia Moscovici, creativity, culture, David B. Guenther, Pierre Bourdieu, The Art Dealer's Apprentice

By Claudia Moscovici

In September 2015 Willem de Kooning’s painting Interchange (1955) was bought by Kenneth C. Griffin from the Dmitry David Geffen Foundation via Christie’s New York for a record $300 million dollars (the equivalent of $386 million dollars in today’s currency), making it one of the highest sold artworks of all time. How does this mind-boggling phenomenon happen? The process that transforms an originally unknown artist into a canonized master and their works of art into fetishized commodities that command hundreds of millions of dollars has varied throughout history. One element, however, has remained constant: it is an astronomically rare and mystifying event.

Aesthetic philosophers and art critics have offered different theories that attempt to explain the value of art. Immanuel Kant’s subjective universal endows the artistic object with special aesthetic properties that all beings with good taste can subjectively agree upon. Value therefore lies in the artistic object itself, but only the few individuals with good taste can recognize it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, sociologist of culture Pierre Bourdieu explains how elites create class distinctions by endowing so-called “high” art and “classic” literature with enormous symbolic value, independently of the intrinsic properties of those works. Each aesthetic theory can explain certain aspects of the process of artistic creation and cultural consecration, but none of them, not even all of them put together, can fully elucidate these mysterious processes. There is no recipe for creating what is considered a “great” work of art, just as there is no formula for the vast artistic success achieved by Willem de Kooning. This may seem discouraging for struggling artists, many of whom seek success not just personal creative expression. Some modern artists, however, celebrate the enigmatic qualities of the realm of art. “The purpose of art is mystery,” famously said the Surrealist painter René Magritte.

Artistic trends, which are retroactively grouped together and labeled by artists and art critics (such as, for instance, “Impressionism”, “Surrealism” or “Abstract expressionism”), can be described based on shared traits, methods and philosophies. The process of artistic consecration itself, on the other hand, is far more mysterious than such classifications, if only because it is highly overdetermined and incredibly rare. It is neither rare nor difficult to paint in an Impressionist or Abstract expressionist style nowadays, but it is nearly impossible to gain the unique, giant stature of Claude Monet or Jackson Pollock. The joint efforts, connections, expertise, resourcefulness, originality and creativity of the artist, art dealers, art critics, museum directors, art academies, the public and wealthy buyers all need to come together, along with the ineffable and uncontrollable element of good fortune, in an almost magical manner to render an unknown creator (and, by extension, their works) famous among billions of works of art by millions of other artists. Because artistic canonization will always be, statistically speaking, wildly improbable, the process of artistic consecration will always remain irreducibly mysterious. The analogy of winning the lottery, often used to describe the odds of great artistic or literary success, is a huge understatement, since far more people win the lottery than achieve canonical artistic or literary status.

While for any given individual artist there is no formula for phenomenal success, I believe that, in general terms, the process of artistic consecration has been depicted in an illuminating fashion from a theoretical perspective by Pierre Bourdieu’s groundbreaking work, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature and, from a more pragmatic and personal perspective, by David Guenther’s new book The Art Dealer’s Apprentice (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2024). I’d like to begin with reviewing two of Bourdieu’s key concepts, cultural or symbolic capital and economic capital, which in my estimation capture quite well the general process of artistic consecration, then move on to discussing Guenther’s description of how art dealers help transform artistic value into economic capital in the murky process of buying and selling art.

In The Field of Cultural Production, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu states that the field of cultural production invests works of art and literature with symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is the prestige that the intellectual elite—critics, scholars, museum leaders, literary or art agents and publishers—endow a given artistic product, be it a work of art or literature. More generally, cultural capital depicts the education, knowledge and expertise of the elites that contribute to artistic and literary consecration. In Bourdieu’s analysis, as elaborated in this work as well as in his earlier book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1986), symbolic and cultural capital accentuate, and to some extent help create, class hierarchies and distinctions. Thus, symbolic and cultural capital tend to go together. The educated elites create as well as judge and give value to the artistic and literary canon.

Symbolic capital and economic capital, on the other hand, don’t necessarily converge. In fact, since the Romantic movement, “high art” artists and “classic” writers have tended to value symbolic capital while repudiating economic capital. They often regarded the notion of creating for the primary purpose of selling to the public or pleasing wealthy patrons as beneath them, rebelling against the “bourgeois values” and those that “sell out” by creating “pulp fiction” or “kitch art” with wide popular appeal and mass sales. Correlatively, since the modern period, in the field of high art and literature, cultural prestige counts more than economic profit. This opposition between symbolic and economic value has contributed to the ideal of the “creative genius” and its sadder counterpart, “the starving artist”. However, practically speaking, there is an inherent contradiction quite literally in the middle of this opposition. In reality, the mediators of the field of cultural production—the agents, publishers, wealthy collectors, auction houses and museum leaders—who make possible artistic and literary success certainly do their best to connect symbolic capital with economic capital, since they aim to make a considerable profit from works of art. As Bourdieu states:

“Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e., the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such […] So it has to take into account not only, as the social history of art usually does, the social conditions of the production of artists, art critics, dealers, patrons, etc., as revealed by indices such as social origin, education or qualifications, but also the social conditions of the production of a set of objects socially constituted as works of art, i.e., the conditions of production of the field of social agents (e.g. museums, galleries, academies, etc.) which help to define and produce the value of works of art.” (The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Columbia University Press, 1993, 37)

The transformation of cultural capital into economic capital often involves these mediators creating a kind of mysterious artistic fetishism of selected works by certain “genius” or “great” artists. According to Bourdieu,

“The establishment of an artistic field founded upon a belief in the quasi-magical powers attributed to the modern artist in the most advanced states of the field. It is not only a matter of exorcising what Benjamin called the ‘fetish of the name of the master’ in a simple sacrilegious and slightly childish inversion—and whether one wishes it or not, the name of the master is indeed a fetish. It is a question of describing the gradual emergence of the entire set of social conditions which make possible the character of the artist as a producer of the fetish which is the work of art.” (The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 259)

Only the most fetishized works of art, those created by the “great masters”, such as the paintings of Monet or Picasso, can combine in a spectacular fashion both forms of cultural value–symbolic and economic capital–commanding hundreds of millions of dollars for a single piece. To acquire a better practical understanding of how the process of cultural and economic consecration works, we must turn from Bourdieu’s abstract sociological theories to a more pragmatic book, such as David Guenther’s personal account of his experience as an art dealer’s assistant and, once promoted, gallery director during the late 1980’s in New York City.

Before attending the University of Michigan Law School and becoming an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell and later at Conlin, McKenney & Philbrick and a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the International Transactions Clinic at the University of Michigan, David B. Guenther was an assistant and, later, gallery director at Panicali Fine Art in New York City. From 1989 to 1992, he worked for Carla Panicali at her gallery in the Upper East Side. His boss was one of the most influential, well-respected and colorful art dealers in New York City. An Italian countess of origin, Carla Panicali was a strong, self-made woman in an era when there were very few influential women in the art world. She began her professional life in Italy by selling antiques and soon, due to her resourcefulness and connections, became a leading wheeler and dealer in the international art trade. Eventually, she became the Director of Marlborough Fine Art in Rome, which represented Italian artists as well as several notable foreign artists such as Mark Rothko, Henry Moore and Robert Motherwell. She subsequently expanded her business to the United States, establishing Panicali Fine Art in New York City, handling works by famous artists such as Joan Miro, Amedeo Mondigliani, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso. By all accounts a lover of art and culture, Ms. Panicali also had a sharp intuition for authentic art and good deals and—what Guenther appreciated most about her–a strong character, defined by a sense of loyalty to those who remained loyal to her. (See also “The story of a newbie who took on the New York art world—then left it all behind,” by Georgina Adam, The Art Newspaper, April 2, 2024).

David Guenther was a young Midwesterner when he started working for Carla Panicali. The toughest part of the job, he found, was assessing a work of art’s authenticity in a field dominated by fakes in both senses of the term: well-crafted artistic forgeries as well as people who made phony claims about works of art. To his dismay, the author found that there was no objective way to determine artwork’s authenticity. What counted most, by far, was the reputation of the sellers themselves rather than the features of the artistic object itself. The authenticity of art was assessed primarily in terms of the closeness of the connections to that work of art (be it the artists themselves, close family members, or respected dealers and foundations). It’s only when he left the art business and studied law, however, that Guenther fully realized the unique subjectivity of the art world, not only in determining what good art was—a matter of taste and trends–but also in establishing the economic value of art. As he recounts:

“Later in life I went to law school, and when I took securities regulation, I thought to myself, with a shock of recognition, I already knew that business: things with little or no intrinsic scrap value (paint on canvas or bronze), whose prices were set on exchanges (auction houses), in relation to which underwriters (dealers) negotiated private placements (private deals) or built the book for public offerings (gallery shows) of issuers (artists) to investors (collectors and museums) who amassed investment portfolios (collections), and whose value depended almost entirely on extrinsic information (authorship, provenance, exhibition history, and art historical reputation). The certificate [of authenticity] was just a piece of paper that had no value of its own, other than the claim it represented on the performance of the business enterprise that had issued it.” (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 26).

Since most art was authenticated by the reputations of the people around it, or as Guenther puts it, not only by the artists themselves, but also by “their surrounding spouses and foundations, and important dealers and experts”, access to those people made or broke an art dealer’s career. Without a great reputation and a network of important connections in the art world, an art dealer had no hope of surviving in the business, if only because they wouldn’t be able to acquire works of art. (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 27) Owning works of art, Guenther further explains, is crucial to being a successful art dealer. Without the connections and capital required to purchase reputable works of art, a dealer could be cut out of art sales, since buyers would no longer have any compelling reason to pay them a commission fee. Hence, “Important dealers were the ones who owned things.” (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 31)

Art dealers are key links in the business of art as well as in the more general process of cultural consecration. They buy and sell works of art, often directly from the artists. The most astute art dealers–those with a keen eye for artistic promise and market trends–can build an artist’s international reputation and vastly increase the economic value of their works. Like Carla Panicali and David Guenther, they travel internationally and frequent artists’ families and acquaintances, as well as studios, auctions and exhibitions, in search for new up-and-coming artists or undiscovered pieces by well-known artists. To offer one example Guenther mentions in his book to illustrate the complexities of authenticating works of art, he and Carla Panicali found a sculpture (head) by the renowned Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani and bought it at a decent price, planning to sell it at a profit. In attempting to assess its authenticity, rather than seeking similarity to other Modigliani heads to authenticate their finding, Panicali sought subtle differences in style (such as a different shape to the ears) because artists often deviate from their own patterns of creation while forgers strive to emulate them very strictly. As it turns out, however, the gallery never got the chance to sell the sculpture. They offered it to Klaus Perls, who most likely went around the Panicali gallery directly to Paul Quatrochi, another art dealer.

During the 1980s, Guenther witnessed the meteoric rise of elite auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which expanded their traditional role by acquiring and selling works directly from the artists. Thus, the author explains, “The distinctions between auction houses and dealers steadily eroded, until the auction houses had become more like super-dealers that happened to hold public auctions.” (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 69) The boom of the 80s also attracted a new brand of art collectors: a moneyed class that amassed wealth from the stock market “rather than old family fortunes; they were comfortable with risk. Half the people in the market now seemed to have been partners at Goldman Sachs. The art market boomed. More and more works were consigned, prices surged, and the auction houses grew dramatically,” Guenther recounts. (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 69)

By the end of the decade, however, after the market crash, art sales, naturally, also plummeted. Panicali Fine Art, however, managed to weather the hardship. By now an astute observer of the art market, Guenther noticed that while European art sold less, Latin American art rose in popularity and urged Carla Panicali to invest in it. She followed his advice and the gallery continued to thrive despite the harsher economic climate. Nonetheless, by the early 1990s Guenther saw less room for personal growth in his own career trajectory if he continued as an art gallery director. During his years in the business, he learned valuable lessons about life and about art dealing. The art world and its fetishized masterpieces revolved almost entirely upon human connections in a tiny, tight-knit yet highly competitive community, where practically everyone knew everyone. In this small world, he found, artists depended upon those who gave them the right connections, venues for sales and display, and critical praise to acquire the symbolic value that Bourdieu critiques and the economic capital that art dealers, investors, collectors and auction houses seek.

While this elucidates the process of art dealing in general, as originally mentioned, nobody can give any individual artist the recipe for success. Artistic fame is often explained retroactively. Once an artist becomes a celebrity, scholars see talent, originality, resourcefulness and brilliance in their works. While art historians tend to see artistic value in hindsight, successful art dealers have to spot talent prospectively. Their task is to identify quality art preferably before the artists make it big, so they can purchase their works at bargain prices and sell them at a considerably higher cost. Analogously, the task of art critics is to give visibility to the artists they believe show great talent and skill, particularly those they feel have not been given the credit they deserve. Thus, while art historians look back, art critics and art dealers tend to look forward, increasing in a complementary fashion the symbolic and economic capital of the artists they feel show most aptitude and promise. No doubt, Bourdieu is right to point out that these processes of cultural consecration contribute to creating social hierarchies and class distinctions. But, in my estimation, he downplays their far greater positive aspects, since art and literature add immeasurable creativity, meaning and beauty to human life. In the end, art is not only a hopelessly subjective field, nor just an ultimately vain process of cultural consecration that generates fame and fortune for the very few, but also a deep reflection of human talent, perceptions and relationships. This is probably the greatest lesson David Guenther drew from his years of experience as an art dealer, concluding his book on a philosophical note that underscores the irreducible importance of human connections and creativity to the world of art:

“I heard someone say once on the radio in connection with an art fair, and I came across the idea regularly in my readings thereafter, that ‘It’s in art, after all, that makes life worth living.’ That was completely backward; nothing could have been further from the truth. It wasn’t art that made life worth living; it was life that made art worth making. All the art I’d seen in the last three years was only a reflection, a manifestation, an embodiment of the people who had made it—the fakery, the genius, and everything in between. It was the people who had been alive; the artworks were just mementoes. It was the people who had mattered.” (The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, 210)

Alexandru Darida’s Dancer

01 Thursday Feb 2024

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in abstract expressionism, Alexandru Darida, art, Impressionism, painting, Reflections on Art and Culture

≈ Comments Off on Alexandru Darida’s Dancer

Tags

abstract expressionism, Alexandru Darida, art, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, Impressionism

The artist Alexandru Darida was born in 1955 in Romania. He benefited from an extensive international training. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the Liberal Academy of Art in Rome and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. His paintings have been featured in Municipal Galleries and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Formello-Rome International Prize for painting. Darida was born in Transylvania, the region best known in the West for its ruthless ruler, Vlad Tepes, and the myth of Dracula that served as inspiration for so much literature and film. Yet his is not a regional body of work, but one that recaptures the timeless and universal imagination of fairy tales. Although they often retain an Eastern European feel in both subject and style, his iconographic paintings transcend any particular place and time, just as the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm or the Romantic poetry of Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, did during the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, just as the Romantics sought inspiration in Medieval and Gothic literature, architecture and art, so Alexandru Darida’s paintings hark back to the radiance and mysticism of medieval illuminations. His mysterious, ethereal female figures seem transposed from a distant place and time; an era when femininity was associated with magic, mysticism and spirituality. Light, winged, golden and glowing like religious icons, embellished with flowers and crowns like classical goddesses, Darida’s women are allegorical phantasms that populate our childhood stories. His application of paint is both delicate and rough. Soft plays of light and shadow highlight the shimmering luminosity of gold. At the same time, the vitality of heavy, swirling and knife-edge application of paint endows his paintings with a modern feel, bringing down to earth, into our very lives, the lightness and elevation of his exquisite art.

My personal favorite among Alexandru Darida’s many beautiful paintings is Dancer, featured on the cover of my upcoming book, Reflections on Art and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2024). This work is a harmonious hybrid, combining a multitude of styles in an innovative fashion. The female dancer, shown in a long, colorful dress from behind engaged in graceful, flamenco-like movements, clearly belongs to the tradition of figurative art. Yet what is most striking about this stunning painting is its use of techniques borrowed from other artistic movements. The bodice of the young woman’s gown is composed of splashes of vibrant color: Blue, red, yellow, orange, black and purple paint drips in a perfect simulation of the dancer’s moving form, calling to mind the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. Action painting, as practiced by artists such as Jackson Pollock, conveys through almost randomly and energetically splashed streaks of paint on a canvas the artist’s creative force. In the case of Darida’s Dancer however, the creative energies, similarly expressed through colorful splashes of paint, are carefully controlled to conform to the shape and convey the gestures of the figure represented. This hybrid and innovative painting, at once realist and abstract, also alludes to the works of the Impressionists, who contrasted dabs of color that looked unnatural from up-close but appeared true to life once the human eye blended the colors from a distance. Yet Darida’s techniques show a marked difference from this artistic tradition as well. The splashes of colors of Dancer are so vibrant and strong that, even from afar, we first palpably perceive the energy of the dancer’s movement and only secondarily the beauty and realism of her form.

Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

02 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Buno Juillard

≈ Comments Off on Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

Tags

Alexandre Leforestier, art criticism, Art Explora, arts, Bruno Julliard, Claudia Moscovici, Frédéric Jousset, Google Art Project, Panodyssey, Valentin Bert

Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

By Claudia Moscovici

Frédéric Jousset has spanned the gamut in the arts during the course of his career. Raised in an artistic family—his mother, Marie-Laure Jousset was the Chief Curator at Beaubourg and his father, Hubert Jousset, was President of the École normale de musique de Paris—Jousset has played a key role in French culture. He began his career in the fields of marketing and finance, which he later relied upon to support and fund the arts. In 1994, he started working for L’Oréal (Kérastase) in several marketing roles, followed by managing private equity funds for the international investment firm Bain & Company. In 2000, he partnered with Olivier Duha to establish his own Internet search company, called Webhelp SA. The firm spread to over 40 countries, generating nearly 1.5 billion Euros in revenues in 2019 alone. While thriving as a businessman, Jousset did not forget his artistic heritage. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and as a member of the acquisitions committee of the Musée du Louvre (2007-2014). In this role, he developed the museum’s website and funded the purchase of a famous painting by Nicolas Poussin, La Fuite en Egypte (1657)

Beaux Arts Magazine and the Beaux-Arts System

Jousset eventually became an administrator of the Louvre. In 2016, he also became the CEO of the prestigious Beaux Arts Magazine, a monthly art journal founded in 1983, which covers the history of art in all fields from antiquity to today. The magazine is named after the Académie des Beaux-Arts founded in 1816, under the rule of Louis XVIII. This Academy, in turn, merged the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the Academy of Music, and the Academy of Architecture: all originally founded by Louis XIV’s First Minister of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still life paintings. Of course, aesthetic principles tend to be somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still life paintings were extremely popular and defended by notable art critics such as Denis Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of everyday subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier observed in his 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”
Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule is that the drawing of forms was considered to be more abstract because it was not already found in nature. It was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.
Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the eighteenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement upon nature, or capturing la belle nature.
Painting in the studio, as opposed to the outdoors, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the needs of the artist.
Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.
The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting, through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective, the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

By the mid- to late- nineteenth-century, the Impressionists would undo much of the Beaux-Arts system and its stringent rules with their plein air, quick brushstroke, blot of color paintings. Despite the increasing openness of aesthetic standards, the legacy of the Beaux-Arts system, and a strong institutional tradition of valuing the arts, continues in France to this day, a country whose top contribution remains art and culture and whose large tourist industry is centered around its invaluable artistic heritage and exquisite museums.

Art Explora: “Beauty will Save the World”

Building upon the time-tested tradition of France’s rich artistic heritage, Frédéric Jousset aims to broaden its reach to diverse communities throughout the world. In December 2019, he partnered with Bruno Julliard and launched Art Explora. Julliard, a former First Deputy to the Mayor of Paris, brings to the table his considerable administrative experience in the arts. Between 2014 and 2016, he was in charge of cultural institutions as well as assuming the role of Chairman of Paris Musées, comprised of 14 major Parisian museums, including the Louvre. He became the Director of the Foundation Art Explora. The goal of Art Explora is to make the arts more accessible to a greater number of people across the globe. As Jousset indicates on its website, “I am convinced that art is essential to everyone’s life but that the inequalities related to the access of its creation are still too deep. There is an urgent need for culture to come out of its comfort zone and reach a wider audience. I am creating Art Explora to take up this major challenge: sharing culture with as many people as possible” (https://artexplora.org/en/who-are-we/).

Art Explora adopts as its guiding principle Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, “Beauty will save the world.” But this new forum goes far beyond what the nineteenth-century might have considered beautiful. As Art Explora’s Manifesto elaborates, in the 21^st century “Culture can take many forms, opera or hip-hop battle, Munch’s Scream or Hitchcock’s Birds, it is a constant metamorphosis. It passes from one hand to the other, from one ear to the other, from one glance to the other and is transmitted by the power of the senses.” Art Explora aims to bring all of the arts to its diverse audiences, not only online but also through its international Art Explorer tours. Since about 60 percent of the world’s population lives close to coastlines, Art Explorer, “the largest catamaran in the world,” features immersive artistic events that can be attended by about 200 people per day. Art Explorer strives to include the local communities, hosting cultural events that welcome local artists and art lovers. The floating artistic exhibit, launched in 2023, is the largest such exhibit by boat in the world. Art Explora also has a rich digital and educational platform, collaborating with the prestigious Sorbonne and with the Cité internationale des arts à Montmartre to create courses in the history of art and host numerous artists in residence. It also offers several artistic prizes: 3 prizes of 50,000 Euros and a “public prize”, of 10,000 Euros, which empowers the viewing public to vote for their chosen artists. Mobile, versatile and innovative, Art Explora also launched a “truck-museum,” in collaboration with the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Massy, on June 25, 2023.

You can find updates on Art Explora‘s new ventures, exhibits and collaborations on its website, (https://artexplora.org/en/who-are-we/).

The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

14 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Nicolas Longo

≈ Comments Off on The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

Tags

Abstract art, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Cubism, Nicolas Longo, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian

The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

By Claudia Moscovici

I don’t know if Nicolas Longo likes to be compared to other artists. Many artists don’t, yet nobody lives in a cultural vacuum. As an art historian and art critic, I try to describe the innovations of new artists in terms of the legacies of the past. Nicolas Longo is a young Argentinian artist. He started painting Abstract art at the age of twelve, growing up in the age of digital art and the Internet. His geometric art seems to come to life: the abstract shapes pile up, one upon the other, in multiple dimensions and countless angles, beckoning to the viewer with their vivid colors.

In Longo’s art we can see traces of Piet Mondrian’s obsession with primary colors and simple geometric shapes, which the artist viewed as spiritual basics. As Mondrian famously stated in 1914: “Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art.” Perhaps echoing this idea, Longo observes: “I feel that the common trait in contemporary art is having nothing to say. I only focus on painting until my hands burn.”

While Longo’s artwork makes no claim to mirroring or expressing reality, it certainly evokes emotion. His vivid colors—bright reds, deep purples, and strident neon greens–clamor for our attention. Their geometric shapes burst unto the screen in a manner foretold but perhaps not fully imagined by Pablo Picasso’s Cubism, which depicted objects—and subjects—in terms of their underlying, simpler geometric shapes while allowing the viewer a fuller, richer three dimensional perspective from several angles. Multiply that Cubism by a hundred and you get Nicolas Longo’s dynamic Abstraction: a geometry bursting at the seams, moving with a mesmerizing force in a dance of color and form that overwhelms the senses and tantalizes the imagination.

Darida Paints Brancusi

22 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Darida Paints Brancusi

Tags

Alexandru Darida, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Constantin Brancusi, Darida paints Brancusi, postromanticism

Constantin Brancusi by Alexandru Darida

Darida Paints Brancusi

by Claudia Moscovici

Alexandru Darida was born in 1955 in Romania. He benefited from an extensive artistic training. He studied at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Romania, the Liberal Academy of Art in Rome and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. His work has been featured in Municipal Galleries and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania. It has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Formello-Rome International Prize for painting.

The artist was born in Transylvania, the region best known in the West for its ruthless ruler, Vlad Tepes, and the myth of Dracula that it later inspired. Yet his is not a regional work, but an art that recaptures the timeless magic and imagination of fairy tales. His iconographic paintings, though they retain an Eastern European feel, transcend any particular place and time, in the same way the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm did during the eighteenth-century and the Romantic poetry of Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, did during the nineteenth-century.

Just as the Romantics sought inspiration in medieval and gothic literature, architecture and art, so the postromantic art of Alexandru Darida harks back to the radiance of medieval illuminations. His mysterious, ethereal female figures seem transposed from a distant place and time; a time when femininity was associated with magic, mysticism and spirituality. Light, winged, golden and glowing like religious icons, embellished with flowers and crowns like classical goddesses, Darida’s women are allegorical phantasms that populate our childhood fantasies and dreams. His application of paint is both delicate and rough. Soft plays of light and shadow highlight the luminosity of gold. At the same time, the vitality of heavy, swirling and knife-edge application of paint endows his paintings with a modern feel: as if bringing down to earth, into our very lives, the lightness and elevation of his fairytale-like art.

Alexandru Darida is especially esteemed in his native Romania for keeping alive–and bringing to international attention–its most famous cultural figures. Darida has painted iconic portraits of some of Romania’s best-known writers, philosophers and artists: the absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu, the philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Darida’s portrait of Brancusi (above) captures the contemplative, mystical nature of the sculptor, his gaze directed downward, as well as the artist’s unique mixture of Romanian peasant garb (reflecting his humble origins) and Western intellectualism, as this simple man became one of the principal founders of European modernism. Brancusi’s legacy remains extremely important today, not only to Romanians but also abroad. In what follows, I’d like to analyze some of the reasons why we–still–love Brancusi.

Why we love Brancusi

Like his magnificent statues, for Romanians, the artist Constantin Brancusi(1876-1957) is a national monument. To extend the metaphor, he’s also one of the pillars of Modernism. A favorite in his host country, France, he even has, like his mentor Auguste Rodin, his own museum in Paris. Like many art lovers, I’m a big fan of Brancusi’s sculpture and, like many native Romanians, I also take a certain pride that one of my compatriots has made such a big impact on art and culture. It seems obvious why so many people appreciate Brancusi. But as an art critic and aesthetic philosopher, I’m tempted to examine in greater detail answers to the question: Why do we love Brancusi?

1) He’s got Fame

This question of why we love Brancusi might not even come up if people didn’t know about the sculptor and weren’t exposed to his art in museums, galleries, and books about Modernism and the history of art. One of the most famous Romanians—up there with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran (in philosophy and the history of ideas) and Eugen Ionesco (in drama), Constantin Brancusi is well known and much appreciated internationally. Almost every major museum in the world exhibits his art nowadays. But Brancusi achieved both fame and notoriety during his own lifetime.

He studied with the legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin but was smart enough to leave his famous teacher after only two months to seek recognition in his own right, famously stating: “Nothing can grow under big trees.” Soon he became one of the “big trees” himself, becoming known throughout the world for his sculptures The Kiss (1908), variations of Bird in Space (1928) and, of course, his chef d’oeuvre in Tirgu-Jiu, Endless Column (1938). Wealthy investors, including John Quinn, bought his sculptures. He exhibited his works in prestigious places, including the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and the Armory Show in New York.

One of the premier Modernist artists and a bohemian at heart, Brancusi kept company with some of the most influential artists, poets and writers of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Amedeo Modigliani, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Appollinaire, Henri Rousseau and Fernand Lèger. His list of acquaintances and friends reads like a Who’s Who of famous Modernist artists, poets and writers.

2) He’s got Personality

The artists that make it big often do so not only through their artistic accomplishments, but also through their magnetic personas and promotional antics. It’s difficult to say if Pablo Picasso would have had such an impact without being able to manipulate art deals and shape the public taste or if the Surrealist movement would have become so prominent without Salvador Dali’s zany antics, which weren’t completely random. For instance, to underscore the lobster motif in his art, Dali gave a talk in New York City with his foot in a bucket and a lobster on his head.

Similarly, Brancusi stood out from the crowd through his quirky combination of bohemianism (his free-spirited thirst for life, women and parties) and severe asceticism. The apparent contrast between his simple, Romanian peasant roots and his sophisticated tastes and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity (he was interested in mythology, art, craftsmanship, music and transcendental philosophy) also drew attention. Furthermore, sometimes retreating at the pinnacle of your success can be a good career move. After creating the monumental Endless Column—which marked the apex of his artistic career—the artist became reclusive and created very few works of art.

While prolific and sociable up to then, during the next 19 years of his life Brancusi created fewer than 20 works of art, all of them variations upon his previous works. The former bohemian socialite also retreated from public view, while, paradoxically, his fame continued to grow. In an article in Life Magazine(1956), the artist is described as an eccentric hermit: “Wearing white pajamas and a yellow gnomelike cap, Brancusi today hobbles about his studio tenderly caring for and communicating with the silent host of fish, birds, heads, and endless columns which he created.”

Years earlier, Brancusi also attracted attention through the shocking novelty of his art: particularly his sculpture called Princess X (1920), a phallic sculpture representing Princess Marie Bonaparte, which created such an uproar at the Salon of 1920 that it was eventually removed from the exhibit. In a clever and rather accurate pun, the art critic Anna Chave even suggested that it should have been named “Princess Sex” rather than “Princess X”.

Brancusi found himself again in the limelight in 1926, when he shipped a version of Bird in Space to the American photographer Edward Steichen. Not viewing the sculpture as a work of art, which would be duty-free, the customs officials imposed taxes upon the piece for its raw materials. Although both of these incidents got Brancusi international attention—or notoriety, depending upon your perspective–artistic magnetism goes beyond mere shock value or even publicity stunts.

Such magnetism is perhaps best described by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he urges every person to live his or her life as a work of art: “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” Artistic fame happens when both the artist and the art are able to intoxicate us, as Brancusi clearly does. A peasant and an erudite artist and intellectual; a bohemian and an almost saintly aesthete; a socialite circulating in Paris’s most elite artistic circles and a recluse, Brancusi’s paradoxical and enigmatic personality attracted almost as much attention as his truly innovative art. Which brings us to the next—and most important– factor: Brancusi’s talent.

3. He’s got Talent: Brancusi’s Originality, Exemplarity and Inimitability

a) Brancusi is Original.

Although this doesn’t always happen in the history of art, I’m not alone in believing that Brancusi’s fame is very well deserved and that he’s a very talented artist. However, it’s tough to dissect or explain talent philosophically: usually people say they know it when they see it. Sometimes we need to appeal to aesthetic philosophy to understand more closely the reasons behind something that seems obvious or intuitive. In this case, I believe that Immanuel Kant’s second aesthetic criterion from The Critique of Judgment(1790): namely, his definition of artistic “genius” (or what we would call today, somewhat more modestly, “talent”), offers us helpful ways of evaluating the merit of Constantin Brancusi’s art. This brief digression into Kant’s aesthetic philosophy will help us understand why Brancusi’s art is original, exemplary and inimitable or, simply put, why he’s got talent.

Kant defines artistic talent as “the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) In other words, talent is partly innate, not just acquired by training and practice. Moreover, producing a work of art is an inherently creative endeavor that requires talent. It’s never just generating a mirror image of reality, but rather a creative interpretation of that reality (or what he calls “nature”). Furthermore, Kant maintains, not all artistic creations are equal. Some stand head and shoulders above the rest, even generating new artistic movements. He offers three main criteria that distinguish artistic talent. First of all, for a work of art to show real talent, “originality must be its primary property” (The Critique of Judgment, 225).

Brancusi is, without a doubt, original. His first major work is The Prayer (1907), a minimalist sculpture that reflects the artist’s unique and eclectic mixture of influences: Romanian folkloric peasant carvings, classical sculpture, African figurines and Egyptian art. A very talented craftsman and woodcarver, Brancusi also innovates a new method of creating sculptures: carving them from wood or stone as opposed to modeling them from clay or plaster, as his mentor Auguste Rodin and many of his followers were doing at the time. Most likely deliberately named after Rodin’s The Kiss (1908), Brancusi’s second major sculpture (by the same name) effaces the realism of the lovers, as they embrace to form one rounded, harmonious monolith: quite literally, a monument to love. Years later, in Bird in Space (1928), the artist conveys movement, altitude, aerodynamics and flight rather than the external features of the bird itself. The pinnacle of his career and the logical conclusion of capturing feelings and concepts through essential forms, Endless Column (1938) represents the soaring spirit and heroism of the WWI Romanian civilians who fought against the German invasion. It’s a monument for which, incidentally, Brancusi refused to accept payment.

One of the most innovative aspects of Brancusi’s art is that his sculptures capture the essence rather than the form of objects. Relying upon the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of forms, the artist distinguishes his minimalismfrom abstraction. Brancusi protests: “There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.” For Plato, Forms are the original, essential perfect models—such as goodness, virtue or humanity–for concepts and objects. Aristotle transformed this Platonic notion of Forms, distinguishing between the essential and the contingent, or essence and accident. The essence of the object defines what it is no matter how much it changes its appearance or state. Relying upon this Aristotelian concept, Brancusi was one of the first and best known Modernist artists who sought to capture the essence of the emotions and objects he conveyed: be it love and sensuality or heroism and courage.

b) Brancusi is Exemplary

But originality–in the sense of producing an artifact without imitating other artifacts and without learning how to produce art–does not suffice to qualify an artist as a genius (or talented). An artist may create, as Kant puts it, “original nonsense” that nobody cares about or likes. Taking this possibility into consideration, Kant argues that, secondly, artistic objects must also be “exemplary; and, consequently, though not themselves be derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e. as a standard or rule of estimating.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) When one produces truly innovative works of art, other artists tend to follow suit. Brancusi set the standard for Modernist sculpture, influencing tens of thousands—if not millions–of artists, many of whom continue his tradition today.

c) Brancusi is Inimitable

Yet there is only one Brancusi. As an anonymous art critic writing for the art website Brain-Juice.com aptly states: “The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi blend simplicity and sophistication in such a unique way that they seem to defy imitation. Yet it is impossible to think of an artist who has been more influential in the twentieth century. Almost single-handedly, Brancusi revolutionized sculpture, invented modernism, and shaped the forms and concepts of industrial design as we know it today.” (Brain-Juice.com on Brancusi) This brings me to the third criterion of aesthetic value that Kant offers to explain artistic talent: inimitability. Although good art is exemplary—in motivating other artists to imitate it—it is also difficult to copy because each talented artist has his own unique style. Brancusi has a signature style that many may emulate, but nobody can replicate.

His host country, France, has long recognized his genius and set up an Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Many of us who love Brancusi’s monumental art are eagerly awaiting a Brancusi Museum in his native country, Romania, as well. In the meantime, we’ll continue to enjoy the Brancusi exhibits throughout the world and his newly restored Endless Column in Tirgu-Jiu.

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

27 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Claudia Moscovici Holocaust Memories, Paola Minekov Undercurrents, the Holocaust in Bulgaria, WWII

≈ Comments Off on Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

Tags

Claudia Moscovici Holocaust Memories, Paola Minekov, the Holocaust, the Holocaust in Bulgaria, Undercurrents by Paola Minekov

Undercurrents by Paola Minekov

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

I have chosen Paola Minekov’s painting Undercurrents as the cover for my book of reviews of Holocaust memoirs, fiction and films, Holocaust Memories. Paola is a Bulgarian-born Jewish artist living in London, England. The daughter of the notable Bulgarian sculptor Ivan Minekov (who is known, among other things, for a famous sculpture of the national leader during WWII Dimitar Peshev), Paola perpetuates her father’s legacy through her own art. Her native country, Bulgaria, was one of the few European states that didn’t give in to Hitler’s demands to send its Jewish population to the Nazi concentration camps. As is often the case, politics are quite complicated, especially morally. In March 1941, Bulgaria entered into a military alliance with Nazi Germany. Soon thereafter, Tsar Boris III enacted the Law for Protection of the Nation, a discriminatory decree against Jews modeled after the German Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In March 1943, the Bulgarian military and police deported over 13,000 non-Bulgarian Jews living in the country and its territories, handing them over to the Nazis. But as the tide of the war began changing, Tsar Boris III changed his country’s course as well. Under pressure from Dimitar Peshev, a leader of Parliament, and the Bulgarian Church, Tsar Boris III refused to deport the 48,000 native Jews that would have been threated with annihilation. Thus, despite its alliance with Nazi Germany, Bulgaria is one of the few European countries that didn’t doom its Jewish population.

Although not explicitly about the Holocaust, Paola’s painting fits this somber subject. Reminiscent of aspects of Picasso’s blue period, it is painted in a softer, more flowing, Cubist manner in shades of blue, a color associated with melancholia. The delicate figure in the painting’s foreground, hominid and feminine, her gaze lowered, her mouth reduced to a small sliver of silence, appears to contemplate a subject of unspeakable sadness. The man behind her looms large in darker shades of blue and grey; he is only a shadow. To my eyes, he is kept alive solely by her memory, her mourning and her sadness. To me, she represents survivors: not only the survivors of the Holocaust, but also us, the generations who live with the burden of the past. It is up to us, Jews and non-Jews alike, to learn and remember the past so that such acts of genocide are not repeated in the present and future.

Claudia Moscovici

Holocaust Memories

The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

Tags

art criticism, art history, Chris van Dijk, Claudia Moscovici, Impressionism, Romantic Impressionism, The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

By Claudia Moscovici

More than a style of art, Impressionism is a movement and a unique way of looking at the world that was shocking in its day and continues to have relevance to contemporary artists. Originally, the Impressionists were considered subversive. Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the violation of the official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. It is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. In fact, the works of the Impressionists were repeatedly rejected from the Salon run by the Academy of Fine Arts established by Colbert under the reign of the Louis XIV, which continued to rule the artworld for two hundred years. Because they were unconventional, the paintings of the Impressionists were relegated by Napolen III to the Salon de Refuses (the Salon of the Rejected) in 1863. Rather than accept defeat, many of the Impressionist artists—most notrably, Monet, Morisot, Pissaro, Sisley and Renoir—coalesced into an informal movement that convened in popular cafes in Montmatre. They created their own exhibit in 1874, called La Societe Anonyme (The Anonymous Society).

Even when they united, however, the Impressionists initially suffered critical derision. The critic Louis Leroy, who coined the term “Impressionists” based on Monet’s painting in the exhibit “Impression: Sunrise”, wrote dismissively: “Impression; I was certain of it. I was just thinking that I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it. And what freedom! What ease of handling! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more highly finished than this seascape.” Writing in the same derogatory vein, the critic Albert Wolf, from Le Figaro, charged that Renoir—today known as the painter of sensuality and women–didn’t know how to paint female nudes, making them look like putrid, decomposing corpses: “Try explaining to Mr. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a heap of rotting flesh, with green and purple patches, like a corpse in an advanced state of putrefaction.” Most art critics at the time, with the notable exception of the naturalist writer Emile Zola (who championed the art of Manet and the Impressionists), considered Impressionist artwork as unfinished, ugly and poorly executed. Which leads us to ask how and why did the works of the Impressionists strike critics and viewers as so different from other art of the time?

This notion of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives—but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.

Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective—the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it. Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals—but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals. The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings—where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters. The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system. Similarly, rather than de picting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives. This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Impressionism remains highly relevant in a historical sense, as an important artistic movement associated with innovation and modernity. But it is also alive today as a way of looking at the world that influences the vision of contemporary artists. To offer one notable example, the artist, art dealer, and gallery owner Chris van Dijk paints in a style influenced by Impressionism and by the Romantic movement, calling his work “Romantic Impressionism”. In 2002, he opened his own highly successful gallery in Dordogne, a beautiful area in Southwestern France between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees Mountains. His gallery features some of the most important artists working in the Realist, Romantic and Impressionist styles. Since 2013, Chris has also devoted his time to creating his own paintings, which, true to their Impressionist inspiration, focus on plein air scenes: at the beach, in the forest, or in the picturesque poppy fields of Dordogne. Like the works of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, the paintings of Chris van Dijk often feature women and children. The scenes look unposed, as if the subjects were caught unawares. Most of the time, they look away from the viewer, engrossed in their daily activities, such as playing in the sand, walking in the woods or picking wildflowers. They seem to be at home in their natural surroundings. Chris van Dijk’s paintings, like the works of the Impressionists, are a celebration of the beauty of nature and life. You can see many more of the artist’s paintings on his website, http://www.galleryfrance.com/chris-van-dijk.html.

Fineartebooks's Blog

~ Fine Art Blog

Matthieu Binder’s website, litteraturefrancaise.net, and the pleasure of reading books

La musique extraordinaire de Philippe Cohen Solal

The Extraordinary Musical Journey of Philippe Cohen Solal

By Claudia Moscovici

By Claudia Moscovici

The Value of Art: From Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production to David B. Guenther’s The Art Dealer’s Apprentice

Alexandru Darida’s Dancer

Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

Darida Paints Brancusi

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

Share this:

Share this:

By Claudia Moscovici

By Claudia Moscovici

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

Share this:

Share this: