4 JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT FROM MODENA TO LOS ANGELES
Jessica Beck addresses the artist’s 1982 trip to Italy, considering the effects of the country’s art and history on the young painter’s process and iconography.
6
Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude
Susan Davidson meets with Jeffrey Sturges, director of exhibitions for the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, and Gagosian director Jason Ysenburg to discuss the importance of Wesselmann’s series The Great American Nude
9
Derrick Adams: Super Nudes
10
A Day in Paris: A Meal for (Almost) Every Hour
12
Masterpieces from the Torlonia Collection
14
Maison Ancart
Novelist Francine Prose reports on Harold Ancart’s new paintings.
18 Eco-District
20 On Surrealism: Glenn Brown & Alexandria Smith
Glenn Brown and Alexandria Smith met to discuss the influence of Surrealism on their own practices.
22
Alice Notley: Prophecy is alive and well and living in Paris
Poets Alice Notley and Ariana Reines discuss what creating and reading poetry can do for the soul.
24
Astier de Villatte
Young Kim explores the enduring power of Parisian ceramics atelier Astier de Villatte.
26
Five Paris Cinemas
Gagosian Quarterly film writer Carlos Valladares lived in Paris last year while researching his dissertation on French auteur Jacques Demy. Here, he maps out five cinemas that brought him endless joy during this time, sharing a bit about the history and current repertory of each.
28 Museum Treasures
Curators from the Louvre and Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac select items from their institutions’ collections.
30
Longings in
Search
of an Echo: The Opera and Paris
Novelist Andrew Winer speaks with soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen about the affinities between the city of Paris and the art form of opera.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT FROM MODENA TO LOS ANGELES
Jessica Beck addresses Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 trip to Italy, considering the effects of the country’s art and history on the young painter’s process and iconography. She focuses in particular on the painting Untitled (1982), which will be on view at Gagosian, rue de Castiglione, Paris, starting October 16.
Most of the paintings have one or two paintings under them.
Jean-Michel Basquiat 1
Scholars, curators, artists, poets, and journalists have written extensively about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work, yet despite the great volumes of text on his brief nine-year career, there are still untold, or at least lesser-known, stories buried. The overwhelmingly dominant narrative casts him as a graffiti artist, working in New York, who suffered an untimely death. But the desire to locate and fix him in this way overlooks the importance of travel on his practice and the months out of each year that he spent working in destinations like Saint Moritz, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Modena. While his creative output was limited to just nine years, his production underwent dramatic shifts; across just a few months one can see his style mature, his hand grow more expressive, and his use of language, signs, and symbols become more sophisticated. With every trip and with the preparation for each exhibition, he collected new references and influences that he poured back into his work. In paintings made in Modena and Los Angeles less than a year apart, one can find the influence of the earlier group of works manifesting in the later one, for instance when gestural brushstrokes from canvases painted in Italy seem to reappear as underpaintings for a new series produced in California. In the summer of 1982, Basquiat was on his second stay in Modena at the invitation of the Italian collector and art dealer Emilio Mazzoli. He was twenty-one years old. It had been one year since his breakout moment in New York in Diego Cortez’s legendary exhibition New York / New Wave at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), which launched his career and positioned him as
part of a group of 118 artists from the burgeoning Lower East Side art scene. Even at this early stage, the twentytwo works that Basquiat submitted represented much of what would become the core imagery and concerns of his practice: the urban environment; sparse, gestural mark making (reminiscent of American painter Cy Twombly); angular forms (à la Picasso); an honoring of Black culture, history, and life; and the use of his signature crown to represent, in his own words, “royalty, heroism, and the streets.”2 The show caught the attention of several art dealers, including Mazzoli, Annina Nosei, and Bruno Bischofberger. Nosei offered Basquiat a studio in the basement of her SoHo gallery, and Mazzoli invited him to present his first-ever solo show in Modena. At this point in his career, Basquiat was still signing his paintings as SAMO, the street tag for his graffiti practice. He was self-taught and learning to navigate the wave of attention that came swiftly, offering him little time or mental space to prepare. Despite his momentum in New York, the first exhibition in Modena was a flop: few people attended the opening, and the works did not sell.3 The timing was too soon, perhaps, and the pressure and time frame unforgiving. One year later, after the roaring success of solo shows at Nosei’s gallery in New York and with Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, Basquiat was ready for another try and returned to Modena in June 1982 for a promised second solo show. With this new invitation to stay and paint in northern Italy, Basquiat traveled with his then-girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk. Before heading to Modena they stayed in Rome, where Basquiat painted in a large warehouse provided by Mazzoli. Subsequently, in Modena, he completed eight paintings in a matter of a few days that today are considered pivotal in his oeuvre.
The new Modena show never came to fruition due to infighting between Nosei and Mazzoli, and the eight paintings were sold to European collectors, never to be shown together until the Beyeler Foundation reunited them for the first time in forty-one years in spring 2023. 4 But even if Basquiat’s stay in Modena this time was plagued by disagreement, the paintings he made there are some of the most expressive and vivid of his career. They are unique within his practice for their momentum, bravado, and operatic emotion, and they also show how quickly and astutely he was maturing as a painter, building on his own systems and creating his own beat. With heavy, dripping brushstrokes and compositions dominated mostly by single figures, they give the impression of a musical narrative or opera in multiple acts, told through the characters of an angel, a devil, a prophet, a miser, a farmhand, and the goddess Venus. While the use of language is sparse, the gestures are impassioned and the paintings are ripe with ideas and complexity.
Basquiat was not the first to bring the passion and heat of an Italian summer to painting. Cy Twombly, an acknowledged influence on his work, was so moved by his trip to Italy with Robert Rauschenberg in 1957 that, three years later, he made it his permanent home and created some of the most celebrated paintings of his career there; these feature rich reds and pinks and a general intensity evocative of the heat and romance of his time in Rome. One can find clear compositional similarities between many of Basquiat’s 1981 works, especially Aaron I (1981), which is an homage to Hank Aaron, the African American baseball player, and the spare, gestural marks of Twombly’s early paintings. In fact, art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s description of Twombly’s compositions could easily apply to Basquiat’s: “Offhand impulsiveness and obsessive systems; the defiling urge toward what is base and the complementary love for lyric poetry and the grand legacy of high Western culture; written words, counting systems, geometry, ideographic signs, and abstract fingerwork with paint—all ask to be understood in concert.”5 In his 1982 Modena works, Basquiat expressed much of the sensuality and aggressive energy that can be found in Twombly’s celebrated Roman paintings from 1961, yet he expounds on these sensations with his own style. And his interpretation of the allure of Roman myth and antiquity is most apparent in the one painting in the group with a female protagonist: Untitled , what has more recently been referred to as the Venus painting.
In general, Basquiat in this period was fusing the gestural mark making of Neo-Expressionism with details plucked from art history, culture, and politics. For instance he incorporated details from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) into an Untitled triptych from 1983 and two 1982 paintings, Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant and Untitled (Detail of Maid from Olympia), that unpack political and racial elements from Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant blends references to Edgar Degas, another French Impressionist famous for his depictions of dancers and women bathing, while leaving out the central languishing white figure of Manet’s painting. In the sister canvas, Basquiat references the body of the white concubine with the word “FEET” and a squiggling outline of feet, but focuses mainly on the face of the Black maid, one of the most charged elements of Manet’s painting.
While women did not feature prominently in Basquiat’s work, when he did reference art historical depictions of women and beauty, he slyly challenged and deconstructed them. In a painting like the Venus completed in Modena, he sampled from the Italian Renaissance and inserted his own contemporary interpretation. The left side, with its dripping red brushstrokes, dense black shadows, and yellow numbers on a teal background, feels like an Abstract Expressionist painting. At the center of the canvas, a female figure with a black torso and pale, heavily made-up face with angular features reminiscent of a Picasso emerges from a black shadow. Her head is surrounded by a swirly mane of dark curls, and her black
torso and breasts are outlined in shades of pink. She shares this central region of the painting with a still life floating on a teal background. Her arm reaches toward the right side of the canvas, pointing to a solo headless female figure in a field of bright yellow. The figure recalls Roman sculpture, or perhaps the iconic anatomy drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The still life and the figure compete with the heavy, dripping shades of teal and yellow, which seem to blend all the components together into a vibrant Pop painting that joins references from Picasso and Roman antiquity with allusions to Mallouk, who was with him in Modena, and whom he often called “Venus” in notebooks and with friends due to her pale skin and dark hair.6 Here, Basquiat is freely sampling from many different references to create his own composition, his own score, his own beat.
Basquiat was brilliant at combining the principles of poetry, the politics of hip-hop, and the free associations of jazz in his painting process. His compositions are celebrated for their elliptical yet visceral references, and the Venus painting epitomizes his ability to mix styles and incorporate disparate elements, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method (which involved folding and cutting phrases from texts and piecing them together, and revolutionized modern poetry). But Basquiat’s sources ranged far and wide: he looked to African rock art, hobo signs found in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook (1972), and the anatomy drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, and blended them with influences from his upbringing in Brooklyn and his Puerto Rican and Haitian parentage.7
For this Venus painting, it is clear that he was sourcing images and references from his sojourn in Italy. While speaking with Henry Geldzahler for Interview magazine, he said he borrowed from Italian tour guides and condensed histories to make the Modena works. Surely Basquiat would have seen images of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485–86), a broadly reproduced and celebrated painting from the Italian Renaissance, in such a guide. In Botticelli’s version, the nude Venus is emerging from a clamshell and covering her body with her long, flowing hair, tendrils of which flutter in the gust of wind blown by Zephyr, who with Aura hovers on the left side of the painting. There is a similar relationship between the two figures in Basquiat’s Venus, but
his composition keeps the interpretation more openended, the narrative more unfixed. Its rich and varied references participate more broadly in the referential echo chamber of art history.
While the figures in Basquiat’s Modena paintings are complex and compelling, the great strength of the series lies in the use of color and the heavy, flowing paint that joins the disparate elements into a single score. Similar Neo-Expressionist brushwork reappeared six months later in works that Basquiat painted during his stay in Los Angeles between the fall of 1982 and 1983. In Hollywood Africans (1983), the personal references are to his friends Rammellzee and Toxic, the geography he was exploring around Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, and his latest interests: hip-hop, movies, celebrities, and friendship. But while one might think the bright yellow and blue abstract underpainting in Hollywood Africans references the blue skies and sand of Venice Beach, looking at the works chronologically reveals that Basquiat had in fact been using this color combination in his Venus painting. In another painting from Los Angeles, Museum Security Broadway Meltdown (1983), the heavy dripping black paint in the background echoes the swirling dark cloud engulfing the female figure in his Venus painting from 1982. Just as the Modena canvases worked together as a score or theatrical narrative, in Los Angeles Basquiat created a large installation of seven eighty-four-inchsquare canvases that are heavy with text and symbols, retain the intense palette and abstract brushwork of the Modena series, and likewise “read” together, in this case like a long scroll.8
In Untitled , Basquiat was certainly sampling and lifting specific styles and influences from his immediate surroundings, but he was also building directly on his own earlier work, referencing his established style, palette, and lexicon. The Modena paintings are unique within Basquiat’s practice for their undeniable momentum, bravado, and operatic emotion. But they also show how quickly and astutely he was maturing as a painter, building on his own practice and creating his own beat.
1 Jean-Michel Basquiat interviewed by Henry Geldzahler, “Art: From the Subways to SoHo,” Interview January 1983, 46.
2 Basquiat and Geldzahler, “Art: From the Subways to SoHo,” 46.
3 Iris Hasler, “Jean-Michel Basquiat in Modena,” in Basquiat: The Modena Paintings , ed. Sam Keller and Iris Hasler (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023), 23.
4 Sam Keller and Iris Hasler, “Foreword,” in Basquiat: The Modena Paintings , 13.
5 Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 10.
6 For a discussion of Suzanne Mallouk’s place in Basquiat’s work see Jordana Moore Saggese, “Untitled (Woman with Roman Torso [Venus]),” in Basquiat: The Modena Paintings , 65; Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story (New York: Crown, 2014), 29. See also Basquiat’s words to Geldzahler in “Art: From the Subways to SoHo”: “There was a woman I went out with. . . . I didn’t like her after a while of course, so I started painting her as Olympia. At the very end I cut the maid off” (46).
7 See Richard Marshall, “Repelling Ghosts,” in Jean-Michael Basquiat (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 23.
8 For a full discussion of the influence of Los Angeles on Basquiat’s work see Larry Gagosian and Fred Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street (Beverly Hills, CA: Gagosian, 2024).
Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 94 7 8 × 165 ¼ inches (241 × 419.7 cm) © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
TOM WESSELMANN GREAT AMERICAN NUDE
Starting October 17, Fondation Louis Vuitton is staging Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann &…, which explores the artist’s legacy through a comprehensive survey of his artworks presented alongside those by thirty-five artists of different generations and nationalities, from the 1920s to the present day. Also this winter, the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, Gagosian, and Almine Rech are releasing a monograph dedicated to the artist’s formative series, The Great American Nude . Here, the book’s editor and lead author Susan Davidson meets with Jeffrey Sturges, director of exhibitions for the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, and Gagosian director Jason Ysenburg, to discuss the importance of this series.
This page: Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #50, 1963, paint, printed reproductions, fabric, working radio and plastic bottle and fruit on wooden shelf, with electrical outlet on board, 48 × 36 × 3 inches (121.9 × 91.4 × 7.6 cm)
Opposite: Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #53, 1964, oil and printed reproductions on canvas, in 2 parts, overall: 120 × 96 inches (304.8 × 243.8 cm)
JASON YSENBURG What was happening in the world when Wesselmann first initiated the Great American Nude series? Is there anything about the moment in history that connects to the origin of these works?
JEFFREY STURGES There was an important cultural shift that took place in the 1960s. Wesselmann was born in 1931, a child of the Depression, in a middle-class family from the suburbs of Cincinnati. He was a young adult in the era of the very conservative 1950s. The 1960s benefited from new ways of thinking about society and sexuality in particular. The contraceptive pill became available, new psychological research advocated for a more frank and open discussion of sexuality, and censorship was being challenged.
SUSAN DAVIDSON Yes, he very much was a product of the postwar boom in America and the freedom of expression that occurred among artists of the earlier generation, namely the Abstract Expressionists. He is one of the defining members of the Pop generation, who were looking to consumerism for inspiration. But in Wesselmann’s case, he looked more toward the tenets of art history to establish his subject matter, which is why we’re here today, to discuss his Great American Nudes
JY He focused on the nude in relationship to these social ideas that were being discussed at the time. There was a real openness to things that hadn’t been discussed before and it does seem like these paintings were a way of exploring this new-found optimism, openness, and acceptance.
SD True, and it was also a personal expression for him that represented freedom and maturity about his own sexuality.
JS He goes through a big life change at this moment. After arriving in New York, his first marriage to his college sweetheart ends in divorce. But at Cooper Union,
he meets Claire [Wesselmann née Selley], a fellow student at Cooper Union and begins a new relationship that inspires this series—informed by these new ideas of acceptance and exploration in the culture at large—
SD And to be able to record it in his art was really important for him.
JS It seems like a tribute to this relationship.
SD Absolutely. And that continues to be important as the series advances because even though the work (and its motivation) is very personal, there was an anonymity to how he depicted the nude. This is a critical point about the works in general: they’re not depictions of an individual even though they have been inspired by an individual.
JY How does the series evolve over the decade?
SD It’s not a full decade. He starts in 1961, and by 1969 they’re pretty much finished. After a brief hiatus he creates Great American Nude #100 [1970–73], as almost a mission to complete the series. In any case, by 1965 there is a visual shift in how the works look. They’re no longer collaged; instead, they become slicker and more painterly.
JY Why make a book focused exclusively on this one series? And what does it demonstrate about Wesselmann as a painter?
JS By looking so closely at this one series, we learn about the origins of what will come to define the rest of his career. All of the elements that are so much a part of those first paintings then become expanded or elaborated on in the following decades, in all of the series that come afterward.
SD For me that was challenging. Because when I began, I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to look at one hundred paintings executed sequentially.” But in fact, I had to take so many detours to examine how Wesselmann was developing as an artist. As other series come forward, you can start to see him cropping out particular aspects of the Great American Nude and placing various elements in, say, the Mouth or Smoker paintings
JY Could you discuss a few of the pivotal works in this series?
SD Well, there are pivotal works and then there are favorites.
JY You can tell me your favorites and they become pivotal because of your argument.
SD Great American Nude #50 [1963] is certainly one of them. For one thing, it’s the halfway point, but there are other formal and stylistic changes. She’s not a nude, which I think is interesting, that at the halfway point he chooses to represent a clothed woman. She is a printed reproduction so it’s not as if he’s painted her, but she’s so perfectly Doris Day–like in a way, reading her book and smoking.
JY Yes, and the radio’s there and there’s a drink, there are the symbols that will then appear more predominantly in other series.
SD And it’s interesting, too, because the cigarette becomes very prominent much later in the series, as well as in other bodies of work, and that very much is a sexual reference, even if this Great American Nude isn’t actually nude.
JY What contribution did Wesselmann make to the study of the nude in art and how did he transform it?
SD He modernizes the subject.
JY While utilizing historical references—like Great American Nude #50, with the Renoir painting in the background. He is putting this modern woman in an art-historical context.
SD He’s putting himself in that history, too, and paying homage to it, whether it’s Matisse’s The Romanian Blouse [1940], Modigliani, Renoir, or any number of other art historical paintings that he places by way of collage into the background. They’re like witnesses invited into the studio.
JS He’s very self-aware, and I think he’s placing these other paintings in his own work as a test, also. His painting has to stand up to this historical work. He’s saying to himself, “Am I this good?” And at the same time, he’s saying, “I am this good. I am at this level.”
JY “I’m in that same context.”
JS Exactly. “I am in this continuum and I’m taking my place in the line.”
JY Jeffrey, do you have other favorites?
JS I think Great American Nude #1 [1961] is a pivotal work. It’s the moment where he shifts the scale of his works from something that’s four or five inches that he’s painting or making as a collage on his lap to something that’s on the wall. And he’s really declaring, “This is a great American nude. This is a painting of the scale and the level of the art historical paintings that I want to measure myself against.”
Another important work for me is Great American Nude #48 [1963], which I think is the pinnacle of his collage work because he’s not only including pictures of objects, but he’s including real objects and real space. This is a work that has a rug on the floor in front of the painting with objects on the rug. So as a viewer, you’re almost, but not quite, included into the pictorial space because there’s the implication that you could walk on the rug, if only he let you.
SD These assemblage examples, of which there aren’t too many, are particularly strong and indicative of what was happening in 1963 to ’64, when Wesselmann starts to make them. They create the domestic environment for the nude to occupy. As I reached the end of the series in writing about them, I realized how he was moving the nude into different settings, almost to where she appears outdoors, like with Great American Nude #83 [1966].
JS One of the things that these works also bring up is the whole notion of reality, because you have a real table, but underneath the real table there is a rectangular box
with a radio that’s drawn on it. And even the window— it’s a real windowsill, but the view out the window is a printed reproduction. As a viewer, you’re trying to negotiate what’s real in this picture, you’re destabilized, and I think it does make you start to question what’s being depicted. It brings this series to an important point about what’s being depicted: What is the great American nude? Is it real? Is it an illusion? I think all those questions start to sharpen in focus in a work like this.
JY Let’s discuss the making of the monograph. Jeffrey, Susan, how did this all begin?
JS We were very fortunate to work with Susan on other projects before and during research on the Great American Nude series. Susan and I worked together on an exhibition of Wesselmann’s last group of paintings, which date from 2002 to 2004. Since then, we have discussed how Wesselmann was inspired by Matisse and the numerous paintings in his career that reference the elder artist in form, palette, or image. This lifelong engagement with the works of Matisse began with the 1959 pastiche, After Matisse , and continued to his final Sunset Nude paintings.
SD I’ve been interested in Wesselmann’s artwork for a long time. When I was a museum curator, I wanted the 2012 retrospective [Beyond Pop: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective , organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Estate of Tom Wesselmann] to come to the institution I worked for, but that wasn’t possible. To be honest, I was completely shocked
when the artist’s estate proposed writing this book. I naively said, “Oh sure, why not?” I didn’t fully understand what the very deep dive into these one hundred paintings would entail. I benefited, in a sense, from the pandemic lockdowns, because that quiet time allowed me to study the group as a whole. When I started writing, I organized the text by year, which helped me handle the complexities of the series. I think the challenge was that there were several other bodies of work that needed to be woven into the story before I could think through the series properly. I benefited immensely from coming to the studio and talking with Jeffrey and everyone there about Tom’s process and exploration of different themes, and I hope that we have been able to capture that.
JS Wesselmann made these works in the 1960s, in a very different cultural context compared to ours today. In his own time, Wesselmann felt the need to address both the historical tradition of the painted nude and his own understanding of what that image meant to him. We felt it was important to acknowledge this complexity by asking a writer to address these issues with the hindsight we have today. Rachel Middleman is well-versed in the discussions of gender that concerned artists in the 1960s, as well as the history of women artists who exhibited alongside Wesselmann in important early Pop exhibitions. She was able to provide an important context for understanding Wesselmann’s work outside of the familiar accounts of the history of Pop art.
Lauren Mahony prepared a chronology focused on this first decade of Wesselmann’s career, highlighting important exhibitions and events crucial to the development of Pop art. Having already published a chronology focused on the Standing Still Life paintings, Lauren was well-prepared to present the birth of Wesselmann’s career, adding to her previous research with the goal of a completed chronology that covers the development of the Great American Nudes , from 1958 to 1973.
JY Speaking of, a few years ago research began in the preparation for a Tom Wesselmann catalogue raisonné. Did that effort help with the research for this book?
JS In 2020, the WPI [Wildenstein Plattner Institute] announced their Tom Wesselmann digital catalogue raisonné. This would be a new approach to catalogue raisonné research and presentation. Prior to the announcement, the estate shared the artist’s records as the basis for this catalogue raisonné. Wesselmann was a meticulous recordkeeper with a systematic approach to the titling and recording of his artworks. Every painting, study, and drawing was given a unique registration number with a description of its size, date, and media, as well as exhibitions and sales. With this wealth of information recorded by the artist in real time, the WPI was given a very reliable foundation for their research so that they could focus on filling in those missing details of provenance and exhibition history—to describe the life of the artwork after it left the studio. It also allowed them to publish an exhaustive listing of the artworks Wesselmann produced in his forty-five-year career not long after this announcement. The Great American Nude monograph and the catalogue raisonné have been developing side by side, but each with a very different focus. The catalogue raisonné project covers the entire career while the Great American Nude monograph is an exhaustive recounting of the history of Tom’s first and most celebrated series. For the estate, the catalogue raisonné project gave a context for such a close examination of a single series. While studying this first series, we could make associations to works that were made decades later and understand the development of Wesselmann’s career. Susan’s elaborate recounting of the beginning of Tom’s career, the circumstances and choices that brought Tom to New York and to painting, help us understand the motivations that pushed him to create this unique series of paintings. There was some urgency in embarking
on these projects now. As time passes, we lose access to the direct sources that give us an accurate picture of this time. The oral history project at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, for example, includes interviews with people who knew Tom during those early years. These firsthand accounts help us understand what these paintings may have meant at the time he made them. The WPI project shows the full breadth of the career. On their website, a scholar can click through an entire series and see how it develops.
SD It was very useful to have the digital corpus online. I could be anywhere in the world and check and confirm data.
JY What do you hope readers will take away from this book? What’s the before-and-after situation?
SD The before is not knowing and the after is, “My god, what a fantastic artist.” [laughter ]
JS That’s high praise coming from you, Susan, especially with your understanding of the decade that precedes Tom’s work. I mean, I’ve learned so much working on the book with you and alongside the catalogue raisonné project. And I think you do see how intelligent an artist he really was.
This page: Tom Wesselmann in his studio at 175 Bleecker Street, New York, showing, from left: Great American Nude #17 (1961) and Great American Nude #21 (1961; in progress).
Artworks © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/ VAGA, New York
Fondation Louis Vuitton commissioned Derrick Adams, Tomokazu Matsuyama, and Mickalene Thomas to respond to the work of Tom Wesselmann for their exhibition Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann &… (October 17, 2024–February 24, 2025). Here, Derrick Adams speaks with the Journal ’s Wyatt Allgeier about the origin of his Super Nudes series and its investigations of humor, power, and vulnerability.
DERRICK ADAMS SUPER NUDES
WYATT ALLGEIER Derrick, were you familiar with Tom Wesselmann’s work before embarking on this project?
DERRICK ADAMS Yes—actually, about two years prior to this invitation from Fondation Louis Vuitton, I had connected with the Wesselmann Estate. I reached out to them out of curiosity about the Great American Nude series in particular. I wanted to understand the historical framework around Wesselmann more generally, and their records and team were great. The more I considered the complexity and challenges of Wesselmann’s series, the more I wanted to engage in some sort of visual dialogue with it. As I’ve pondered those works, I’ve spoken with so many different people about them, and Pop art more generally. Of course, questions around accountability, the representation and disembodiment of the female body through the male gaze, and the transformation of the nude into almost a logo of America—these are all things I thought through as I approached my own series. It was important for me to shift from “depicting” toward a mirroring. It’s connected to me in a way that is not personal, but reflective.
What I’m working toward is, in a way, the opposite of Wesselmann’s subject. His series is, primarily, white women painted in a particular palette in a particular historical moment. Looking at his work makes me think about the idea of whiteness not just as a racial construct, but also as a formal color scheme constructed through the red, white, and blue flag. The colors are key. I wanted to respond to it with a variation: the Black male nude, enveloped in the colors of the Black liberation flag, as made iconic by David Hammons, of course.
WA You’ve taken the flag and transformed it into a superhero cape. How did this element develop?
DA Thinking about the mainstream iconography that American culture produces, superheroes are huge. They’re so prominent in contemporary entertainment. But the phenomenon also reaches into the past—to African mythology, Greek mythology. I wanted to extend that framework within the language of my art making. The cape became an important formal element—it makes up the backdrop. There’s very little atmosphere beyond the figure and the cape. Everything else is pretty much dark, and the cape sets the stage, where the viewer is invited in. While they’re called Super Nudes —and they do have a really strong presence—they aren’t actually doing any superhero-like action. They are in repose.
WA The figures are ever so slightly censored.
DA There is often a seriocomic nature to my work. It has a humorous element, but it’s a serious humor. Here, that humor comes in with the starburst that slightly obscures the crotch. Thinking about the contemporary nude, I wanted to bring in the language of social media, where so many bodies are on display. You know, when people are being provocative but not explicit, they’ll pop on a star or an eggplant or a peach or whatever. That provocativeness with humor, and skirting censorship, still has a certain level of eroticism to it. This was really interesting to deploy in the context of this work. I want it to be provocative enough that it can be shared socially without being censored, but still have the same profound impact on the viewer’s visual experience.
WA Do you have anxieties about how the work will be received?
DA This is definitely more provocative than my usual! But it’s more than that, and I hope that the audience will experience it as I intend. I’m always less interested in literal depictions of things, and with the nude, I wanted to figure out how to complicate the experience of the viewer and create an image that can in no way be rejected as perverse. I was thinking about the conservatism of America as I was trying to present the figure in a way that’s seductive but not graphic. I don’t want to talk about the size of the superhero’s penis per se; it’s really more about the tonality of the figure and the vulnerability of being nude. These figures, they have power in their vulnerability. That’s what the work is fundamentally about.
Derrick Adams, Super Nude 3, acrylic, latex paint, and fabric collage on panel, in artist’s frame,
A DAY IN PARIS A MEAL FOR (ALMOST) EVERY HOUR
Paris-born novelist and cookbook author Sanaë Lemoine recommends delightful dishes across the city’s right bank.
Breakfast at Recoin
Coffee (and a pastry) break at Dreamin’ Man
Tarte au citron (lemon tart) at Sébastien Gaudard
Lunch at Pontochoux
Chou vanille at Mamiche
Dinner at Amarante
Breakfast at Recoin
On the corner of a small, curved street, steps away from the wide boulevard Beaumarchais and the Marais, is Recoin. As its name suggests—recoin translates to “a quiet, dark corner”—the all-day restaurant feels like a tuckedaway secret. Open from 9 am until past midnight, it operates as a coffee and breakfast spot in the morning, has a terrific lunch menu for €24, and becomes a wine bar in the evening, always serving seasonal fare. A Parisian friend who loves to eat out brought me there in 2022, just after it had opened, and I was immediately charmed by the space: tall windows that allow plenty of daylight to filter through, dark wooden tables simply adorned with glass vases and market flowers, a beautiful blue-tiled floor. Two years later, I happened to be staying in an apartment a short walk from Recoin and I returned day after day in the mornings. It’s quiet and secluded, and as you take a table by the window and sip on a coffee (perhaps with a book), you’ll feel the restaurant waking as you do— food deliveries coming through and the chef prepping in the narrow kitchen. Regulars stop by and stand at the bar, downing an espresso before being on their way. You can order a croissant, but my preference is the œuf à la coque et mouillettes (aka eggs and soldiers; mouiller means “to wet or dip”). You’ll be given a soft-boiled egg, a small mound of fleur de sel , and generously buttered long strips of baguette. The bread isn’t toasted—it’s fresh enough that you’ll welcome the slight chew of crust— while the yolk is runny and the white around it barely set. Because I’m never ravenous first thing in the day, and there’s so much more I’ll want to eat later, I appreciate the single egg.
60 rue Saint-Sabin, 11th arrondissement
Coffee (and a pastry) break at Dreamin’ Man
A ten-minute walk north from Recoin is my favorite coffee shop in Paris. It’s so small you might not see it if customers weren’t spilling out onto the street, as they often do, crouching around stools and tiny round tables. (There are three tables inside.) With its low ceiling, wooden floors, and crumbling exposed plaster on the walls, entering Dreamin’ Man feels like stepping into a cave. There’s something so cozy and welcoming about the space: the whirring of coffee being ground, a case overflowing with freshly baked pastries, and an eclectic assortment of books and trinkets. Behind the counter, you’ll usually find owner and coffee wizard Yuichiro Sugiyama and his partner, Yui Matsuzaki, who bakes some of the best pastries in Paris. The coffee and sweet treats are served on ceramics from France and Japan, reminding me of my Japanese mother’s kitchen. Although tourists wander in and out—because Sugiyama’s coffee is truly excellent, you’ll slowly sip on his concoction as though it’s liquid gold—this is also decidedly a neighborhood spot, with friends streaming in, saying hello, and perching at a narrow counter that feels more like a shelf than a place to sit. Once you’ve ordered a coffee, let’s hope you’ve saved room for one of Yui’s pastries. She makes them daily with ingredients from the market. I still dream of her rhubarb almond tart from when I was last there in the spring. Toasted almond shards, a thick piece of roasted rhubarb on top, frangipane and rhubarb jam hidden inside—all of it held by a golden pastry shell.
140 rue Amelot, 11th arrondissement
Lunch at Pontochoux
Now we cross over into the Marais for Japanese curry, or kare raisu , at Pontochoux, playfully named after the phonetic spelling of its address, rue du Pont aux Choux. A bowl of Japanese curry with rice is my ultimate comfort food, and I hope it can also be yours. I love this one because it’s fragrant and nourishing and not too heavy. It’s just the right amount of food to fill your stomach and leave a sliver of space for dessert (more on that below). Order the curry with seasonal vegetables and karaage (fried chicken). It arrives in a silver oval plate: a velvety aromatic curry with its mild heat, a few pieces of lightly battered fried chicken, sweet potato, pickled eggplant, radishes . . . all on a bed of Japanese rice, each grain glistening. This is another pocket-size space; if the weather allows, take one of the little tables outside. Once you’ve cleaned the plate with your spoon, hop over next door to the sister coffee shop, Pontochoux Café, for an exquisite treat prepared by pastry chef Akira Takahashi. These are the most elegant preparations I’ve seen in a while, and they will leave you wanting more, as a lunch dessert should. Depending on your appetite, you could take a financier to go, or sit on a bench by the floor-to-ceiling windows for a plated dessert, such as the hojicha panna cotta , which is served in a coupe. It certainly deserves its own little pedestal. The roasted green tea custard bathes in kuromitsu (black sugar syrup) and is dusted with kinako (soybean powder).
18 rue du Pont aux Choux, 3rd arrondissement
Two afternoon treats:
Tarte au citron (lemon tart) at Sébastien Gaudard
I have a confession: I don’t like lemon desserts. Often, they’re cloyingly sweet or too tart and acidic for my taste. You can imagine how skeptical I was before my first bite of Sébastien Gaudard’s iconic lemon tart. I stand corrected, and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, as he trained with the legendary Pierre Hermé at Fauchon. The tart is exceptional, an exercise in restraint and simplicity. The lemon cream filling achieves a divine balance of sweet and tart. It’s so smooth it dissolves on your tongue, while the buttery pâte sablée is perfectly crisp, not the slightest bit damp. A thin layer of transparent glaze protects the lemon cream and lends a beautiful mirror shine—thank God there’s no meringue. In the middle, just a small cluster of candied citrus peel. With good reason, I call this the one and only tarte au citron
Several locations, though I love the first location opened in Paris at 22 rue des Martyrs, 9th arrondissement
Chou vanille at Mamiche
Mamiche’s chou vanille (vanilla cream puff) is the ultimate to-go snack. Earlier this year, the woman-owned bakery raised its price from €1 to €1.50 to reflect the increase in cost of its ingredients, but it’s still a tremendous bargain considering its generous size and how darn delicious it is. (They’ve kept the baguette at €1.) The chou pastry is darkly burnished and flecked with crunchy sugar pearls that have melted onto its surface. Inside you’ll find vanilla whipped cream. And there’s a lot of cream, enough to coat your mouth with every bite. You will eat the entire chou on the street, licking cream from your fingers and wondering whether you should stand in line again for more. The answer is yes.
Several locations
Dinner at Amarante
This is a restaurant you share with your closest friends and hope they’ll go right away because you cannot wait to talk to them about it, just as when you’ve fallen in love with a book or movie. It was first recommended to me by a dear friend who discovered it via her chef friend who swears that Amarante is his favorite spot in Paris. I had strict orders from my friend to get the cervelle de veau (calf brain; “don’t think about it too much,” she said, “it’s so soft inside and crisp on the outside”), the bœuf de Charolles AOP with mashed potatoes (€99 steak for two; “ridiculously expensive, but worth every penny”), the fermented chocolate dessert (“trust me, the best dessert ever”), and a glass of red wine (“there’s only one and it’s great”). My first time at Amarante, I did exactly as my friend said, and in my subsequent visits, although I’ve tried other dishes, I always order the steak and potatoes and a dessert.
Picture a nondescript restaurant awning on a sleepy street in the 12th arrondissement, not far from Bastille, so dimly lit you might miss it if you didn’t know where you were going. Inside, you’ll find ten tables—no tablecloths, nothing fancy, one server, and one chef in a small but very clean kitchen in the back. There’s only one seating for lunch or dinner (twenty-one covers), so you’ll enjoy a leisurely meal, no one will press you to leave, and you’ll be grateful for this as most of the dishes are laced with fat, the portions not for the faint of heart. There’s a nostalgic quality about the menu—lots of meats and potatoes, not many vegetables—that makes me wish I could bring my father. With his penchant for salted butter, offal, and rich foods from a childhood spent in Brittany, I know he would love it.
The chef, Christophe Philippe, spins dish after dish of the most delectable food. Sometimes he wanders out of the kitchen. His life’s passion is cooking—he’s been doing it professionally since the age of fourteen, and he radiates a relaxed vibe, seems genuinely content in the restaurant. One can taste it in the food. Pleasure in the ingredients, carefully chosen from the market; pleasure in the preparation, everything cooked to perfection. You will think the steak is almost too rare, but trust the chef, because every bite will astound you with deep flavor. (It’s dry aged for at least sixty days and comes from a butcher in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.) The mashed potatoes don’t look like much but close your eyes and their natural sweetness, rounded out by butter and salt, will have you scraping the bowl. I like to order a seasonal vegetable: beefsteak tomatoes, white asparagus, shelled peas. . . . Often the vegetable is sliced or simply dressed with a house-made sauce, allowing the ingredient to shine. Because Philippe really understands ingredients—one notices this reverence in how each one is considered. It is perhaps most obvious with the desserts. All of them are “not too sweet,” which is all I ever desire from a dessert. And indeed, I’ve tried the fondant 100percent cacao (a warm chocolate cake made with fermented fèves that has the texture of mousse), the vanilla ice cream (flecked with vanilla bean, churned for a minute), and the citron (a lemon cream, very acidic, with a caramelized top). Somehow, like a magician, he adds just enough sugar to coax out the ingredients’ essence. Although the fondant is 100-percent cacao, there’s no bitterness, just a lovely, smooth richness, and the faintest hint of sweetness as you dive in for another spoonful. When you finally rouse yourself from the table and stumble out into the dark street, you will be flooded by a strange and familiar warmth. This is not typical restaurant food—it is stepping into a chef’s home and being fed a part of their soul.
4 rue Biscornet, 12th arrondissement
Illustrations by Teresa Mathew
MASTERPIECES FROM THE TORLONIA COLLECTION
The largest-ever private collection of ancient Roman sculptures, assembled across the nineteenth century by the Torlonia princes in Rome, is being shown to the public for the first time since the mid-twentieth century in a series of special exhibitions. The Louvre is currently exhibiting the Torlonia marbles in their first-ever presentation outside Italy in the freshly renovated summer apartments of Anne of Austria, home to the museum’s permanent collection of ancient sculpture. The collection will be on view through November 11, 2024. Here, Carlotta Loverini Botta, director of the Torlonia Foundation, highlights the history of the marbles and underscores the importance of their presentation in Paris.
The exhibition at the Louvre Museum is based on a single concept: excellence. At its origin is the gesture of the sculptor, who brings matter to life and—in the case of each work in the Torlonia collection—creates works of extraordinary quality. These are gathered today in a collection that would not have come into being without the passion for art of several generations of the Torlonia family. The imposing figure of Hestia Giustiniani, an extraordinary series of sarcophagi, imperial busts, and more will unfold all their evocative charm. At the heart of the Louvre, precisely where the museum’s archaeological collections have been displayed since 1798, the Torlonia marbles will re-create a significant fragment of history. No place is more appropriate to highlight the connections and parallels between these two “sister collections”: the Torlonia collection and the Louvre’s.
A precise and scholarly narration by curators Cécile Giroire, Martin Szewczyk, Salvatore Settis, and Carlo Gasparri intertwines with the grandeur of the imperial apartments featuring a selection of more than seventy exceptional works. At the core of the exhibition are sixtytwo highly representative works from the most important private collection of ancient Roman sculptures in the world, meticulously restored in the Laboratori Torlonia after a scrupulous study, thanks to the support of maison Bulgari. The exhibition will focus on the most emblematic genres of Roman sculpture, with its rich and varied artistic styles. Portraits, copies of famous Greek originals, works inspired by classical or archaic Greek art, thiasos (groups or processions of worshippers), satyrs and maenads, and allegories make up the repertoire of images and forms that give Roman art its potency.
The Torlonia princely family followed in the aristocratic traditions of papal Rome, developing a passion for ancient sculpture that led to the assembly of this magnificent collection. The Museo Torlonia, which opened in the 1870s, was designed with the great public institutions of the time in mind—the Vatican, the Capitoline museums, the Louvre. Alessandro Torlonia’s museum closed in the mid-twentieth century in the wake of World War II, but the Torlonia marbles remained famous. Since 2020, these masterpieces have been on public display once more thanks to a series of special exhibition events. The ones held in Rome and Milan, curated by Salvatore Settis of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and Carlo Gasparri of Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples, took visitors on a journey through the history of the collection. In Paris, thanks to close and collegial cooperation with the Italian ministry of culture, the Torlonia marbles are being revealed to a foreign audience for the first time.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Torlonia princes acquired the busts and reliefs, statues and sarcophagi, thanks to a series of acquisitions from other important Roman collections as well as from excavations carried out on lands belonging to the family. This makes the Torlonia collection more than an accumulation of ancient sculptures of exceptional quality; it is also a collection of historic collections. In the words of Settis, it epitomizes “a sociocultural practice that began in Italy and particularly in Rome, triggering a vast process that was to lead to the founding of grandiose sovereign collections such as those of the popes and the kings of
France, and, later on, to the creation of a new institution, that of the public museum, which first saw the light in Rome when, in 1734, Clement XII founded the world’s first public museum at the Campidoglio.”
The first set of ancient Roman works to enter the Torlonia collection at the start of the nineteenth century previously belonged to the famed sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716–1799); other early acquisitions included the collection of the prestigious Galleria of Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, amassed in the seventeenth century, including masterpieces such as the renowned Hestia Giustiniani. Works subsequently acquired by the Torlonia princes included archaeological discoveries uncovered from the grounds of the family estate, which had some overlap with ancient residences from the Imperial age, for instance the Fanciulla Torlonia (Young Torlonia Girl) and the Rilievo con scena di porto (Relief Depicting a Port Scene), during the restoration of which unexpected traces of color emerged. Other archaeological finds were unearthed in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and made their way into the Torlonia holdings in the centuries that followed. An exceptional piece that was already quite famous in the seventeenth century is Il Caprone (The Resting Goat), restored by Gian Lorenzo Bernini himself.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the collection now encompassing an extraordinary number of ancient marbles, a project emerged, promoted by Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1800–1886), to establish the Museo Torlonia, reusing some old granary spaces along Via della Lungara in which to display the works before small groups of visitors. It opened in 1875, and an exceptional testimony of this work is the 1884–85 catalogue curated by C. L. Visconti. An avant-garde volume for its time in both concept and typographic technique, it reproduced the entire collection in a truly modern manner, delineating its contours and establishing its place in history. Alessandro Torlonia’s inspiration to take an innovative step by creating a museum where the category of artworks known as antiquities could be shown to the public was influenced by his passion for collecting and aristocratic taste, but also reflected a new historical moment: the birth of archaeology as a field of study in its own right.
The Paris exhibition, as envisioned by the curators, presents the history of the collection and illustrates how it was shaped by the circumstances under which it was assembled. The distinctive Torlonia collection—at once the last princely collection in Rome and a museum focused on the future—was founded on the principles of critical selection and scholarly presentation. At the Louvre, visitors will encounter a reunification of two works that were once displayed together in the Villa Albani, home to the Torlonia collection: the magnificent Prisoner King , sculpted from very rare Egyptian marble and now in the collection of the Louvre, purchased by Cardinal Albani from the Villa Medici in the eighteenth century, and a large vase, also sculpted from rare Egyptian marble, from the Torlonia collection.
The heritage of the Museum Torlonia, a pioneering idea that has passed down an exceptional legacy to future generations, has been furthered over a century later by the family foundation established at the behest of Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1925–2017). The Torlonia Foundation promotes the study and conservation of the Torlonia collection and the Villa Albani Torlonia, one of the highest expressions of eighteenth-century taste, of which the Torlonia family became owners in 1866. The classicist dream of Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), who promoted the burgeoning neoclassical movement through the Villa Albani, involved talents such as Giovanni Battista Nolli (1701–1756), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). The Villa Albani organizes the antiquities collections according to a harmonious plan, nestled among the various buildings and gardens. Rising like a vast architectural complex, these elements provide a choral understanding of environments, landscapes, and works of art that “live” here, as if eternally waiting to be rediscovered.
The Torlonia collection and Villa Albani Torlonia are two extraordinary artistic heritages whose destinies have intertwined, preserved under the aegis of the same family. Together, they reflect key moments in the histories of collecting, archaeology, restoration, and Western civilization; indeed, they are part of the family’s cultural heritage for humanity, to be passed on to future generations. The Torlonia Foundation has devoted significant attention to a fundamental conservation effort, thanks to the support of its partners, employing the most advanced technologies to fulfill its mission. It also aims to promote and widely disseminate its work through publications and by exhibiting the works to encourage further studies, research, and initiatives. In doing so, it continues the academic and educational ambitions of Prince Alessandro Torlonia in the cosmopolitan spirit that has always characterized the collection of antiquities.
This spread: Installation views, Masterpieces from the Torlonia Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris, June 26 – November 11, 2024 © Fondazione Torlonia. Photos: Agostino Osio
MAISON ANCART
Novelist Francine Prose visited Harold Ancart’s Brooklyn studio this past spring. Here, she reports on the paintings she encountered there—works debuting this October at Gagosian, Paris—and ponders the medium’s power to take us outside of ourselves.
This page: Harold Ancart in his studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2024. Photo: Dianna Agron Opposite:
It’s easy to lose yourself in one of Harold Ancart’s paintings. They’re disorienting, in all the ways in which you want art to alter your perceptions and orientation. An Ancart landscape draws you in, though it’s not like any landscape you know, or have imagined, or have seen on a wall. And is it even a landscape? It’s an invitation to travel to a world made entirely of paint marks on a canvas.
The mood of these works is dreamlike, spanning the wide range of moods and information that a dream can provide. But it’s not a dream you’ve ever had, nor, we suspect, is it the artist’s dream. Signposts help us get our bearings—water, earth, sky, horizon, plants—but these elements can appear in unexpected locations or combinations, and sometimes all alone. And what exactly are we looking at when we see that tree growing up in the middle of a canvas? Is it a cypress, or a mountain peak cloaked in vegetation, or a stationary ghost of the trees that caught Van Gogh’s eye in Arles? We more or less recognize a flower or plant, but we never imagined that it existed in such a wild range of crazy colors! The bright orange furry lollipop tree takes us back to the first time we experienced the marvel of the leaves turning in autumn.
Blossoms scattered across a network of branches evoke the giddiness of spring and at the same time the austere simplicity of Japanese art. Ancart, who is Belgian, has traveled to (and written a book about) Japan, and has clearly looked at a lot of ukiyo-e prints. The range of his sources, inspirations, and influences is subtle and broad. There’s a shimmer of Monet, a nod to Cézanne. When the landscape (rocky cliffs, shore, orange sun) is compressed to fit within the confines of a perfect circle, it’s a tip of the hat to the Tintin comics, of which Ancart is a lifelong fan. What we see in that circle is (Ancart laughs
when he says this) what a pirate captain in Tintin sees when he scans the horizon through his spyglass.
The word “destiny” doesn’t appear often in Ancart’s vocabulary, but you sense that he believes in it. He understands that the art he wanted to make—the art that wanted him to make it—took him out of Brussels, where he grew up, and where his father was a dealer in antiquities. It steered him to art school (a pursuit that his family considered impractical) and helped him resist the trends of the era—a time when young artists were being encouraged to make work that was minimal, cerebral, and conceptual. Art brought him to New York, where, after lean years and rough patches, he has continued to thrive.
In conversation, Ancart—a tall, friendly, voluble, energetic man in his midforties—keeps tracking back to the thing that artists understand, the open secret that keeps them grabbing the pen, or the camera, or, in Ancart’s case, the oil-paint stick. For all I know, some artists may look at a blank canvas or page and see little videos of themselves getting the Nobel Prize. But Ancart is talking about something else, something different, something that seems very familiar to me: the moment when you become so involved in your work that it’s as if you are no longer there. The ego ceases to exist. The work is no longer about you —the person who has disappeared into your work.
“Time vanishes,” Ancart says. “Time collapses. Things start flowing. You’re in the zone.”
It’s an exalted and precious state. “The work is telling you what to do. You make a mark and somehow you know what the next one needs to be.”
There’s a great Philip Guston quote that I am always quoting and probably misquoting, about how, when you—the artist—go into the studio to work, there are all
these people and voices in your head: your wife, kids, dealer, critics, audience, et cetera. As you work, those presences leave the room, one by one, until finally, if you’re really working, you leave the room.
I’ve always thought of that state as taking dictation from a character who starts to speak in my mind, but for Ancart to reach that zone of guidedness and self-obliteration, the marching orders seem to come at least partly from color. Concerning that moment when the will disappears and something more mystical occurs, I think Ancart would say that it’s color, telling him what to do. His work reminds us of how many moods color can convey—mystery, solemnity, joy, fear. Color makes things new. You might think red flowers had been claimed—by Van Gogh, Matisse, more recently Andy Warhol—but Ancart’s red creates a new species of flower: unreal, surreal, essential. More jungly than the poppy, more like coral, or roses gone rogue. And there, under a Venetian sky, is a verdant patch of landscape not unlike the slivers of blue-green countryside we glimpse beyond the window in a Netherlandish Annunciation.
In another large painting the mood is at once apocalyptic and festive. Pillars reflected in water multiply the divisions between light and darkness. The way everything hovers on the border of celebration and doom, stasis and storm, suggests an improbable but interesting conversation between John Singer Sargent and Lars von Trier. The painting shares with the rest of Ancart’s work the virtue of making you keep looking, as if something could be figured out, even though you know that what you want is the strangeness, the ambiguity, the casual but steady resistance to the rational and explicable.
Working in a large industrial loft, a former metalstorage warehouse smack in the middle of Bushwick’s
IT’S EASY TO LOSE YOURSELF IN ONE OF HAROLD ANCART’S PAINTINGS. THEY’RE DISORIENTING, IN ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH YOU WANT ART TO ALTER YOUR PERCEPTIONS AND ORIENTATION.
– Francine Prose
exuberantly tagged metal doors and honking doubleparked trucks, Ancart has created his own natural world, though he would need to walk quite a ways to see an actual living tree. It doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t matter. When Ancart is painting he might be anywhere. He’s in the painting. The zone. On one canvas, a small spray of poppies blooms—insisting on its right to exist— beside a bare whitewashed wall with darkened windows. Nature coexists with an unfamiliar space, as it does in the studio.
His show, which will be up in Paris from October 14 to December 20, is titled Maison Ancart . On the day I visited, many of the paintings for it were hanging in the studio. Underneath these works is a love for French landscape. Ancart talks eloquently about the moment when he fully got the true genius of Cézanne. His take on the natural world can bring to mind the hyperactive foliage of the Douanier Rousseau, or something more sun drenched, like Richard Diebenkorn, or Ellsworth Kelly’s gorgeous drawings of plants.
You can see art history in these paintings but they aren’t like any others. Who knows how Cézanne would have painted if he’d watched a lot of films? Some of Ancart’s landscapes can look like sets for movies that will never be made. Maybe it’s his references to “the zone” that make me think of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the moody, slightly smudged, semihallucinatory way in which one image flows into another, the settings that combine memory and fantasy, desolation and overgrowth.
Ancart likes the idea that his oil-paint sticks—with which he works exclusively—have a mind of their own. It’s as if the medium had the power to turn the hand of the artist into something like a planchette moving over the Ouija board. He talks about paint sticks almost like collaborators, steering him from point to point. He lists the medium’s advantages: directness, immediacy, physical force, a pressure toward the abstract, rather than toward the microdetail that the tiny brush lives for.
Paint sticks encourage the accidents that aren’t accidental but suggestions, directions, provocations to do something unplanned and unexpected. Every mark (and the process of marking) is consequential. Possibly paint sticks provide the most immediate shortcut to a memory Ancart describes: his first childhood experience of drawing, of grabbing a pencil or crayon and seeing something or someone materialize on paper. The paint stick is the closest of any medium (except for pencil and finger paint, I guess) that connects the artist to that first burst of joy in color and form—the magic of the primal crayon. I’ve heard several artists say, as Ancart does, that they can remember how it felt, the first time they drew something, and knew: This is it. They were hooked.
Twice during our relatively brief visit, Ancart brings up what seems to have been a formative moment, the end of a prelapsarian innocence in which he hadn’t heard that there was a right and a wrong way to draw, a correct and incorrect way to represent the figure. Someone pedantic and annoyed—a parent? a teacher?— reprimanded him: A hand has five fingers! Each time Ancart tells the story, you can watch him reliving the surprise of being told that you had to get things right. You couldn’t just make up the number of digits. A hand has five fingers! (Presumably, the adult had never looked too closely at Mickey and Minnie Mouse.) You can’t help thinking about how much of Ancart’s work has been a response. Let’s pick up the paint stick and make that first mark—and then let’s see how many fingers the hand is going to have. You can imagine Ancart following his oil sticks back to an Eden so sublime that the imaginary garden takes over everything else.
I began by talking about disappearance, and I want to end with it. One of the things that’s so remarkable about painting—that is, about the paintings we love—is that they let us leave our minds and bodies and enter the world of the painting. I once mysteriously lost two entire hours in front of Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony in a museum in Lisbon. I remember, when I was a child, believing that the border between the two- and the three-
dimensional was narrower and more porous than I think it is now. I remember a book of Sienese painting I found in our attic; I believed that concentrated contemplation— staring—could teleport me inside those towns and castles, those crenellated pink and lime-green walls.
Being in Ancart’s studio made me think how remarkable it is that the experience of the artist—the sense of vanishing, of disappearing into the work—can, in a very different form, be reproduced in the viewer. You’re in a contemporary art space in Brooklyn—and then you’re somewhere else, submerged in a boggy landscape, staring up at craggy mountains, moving closer for a better look at those improbably dark trees.
ECO-DISTRICT
Photographer, artist, and curator Paul Clemence reports on the recently developed Clichy-Batignolles eco-district, an expansive project that looks to set the model for sustainable urban development.
There certainly exists a Parisian dream that is still alive and is constantly renewed, a mirage that reverberates among the books and in the collective imaginary.
—Federico Castigliano in Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris
The thought of Paris will forever hold in our mind’s eye romantic images of the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, its historic bridges, the Louvre, and, of course, the Haussmann boulevards with their elegant, distinctive architectural style. But cities are living organisms, and if they are to thrive, inspire, and remain relevant (escaping the Venetian destiny of becoming a “city museum”), they must then evolve, keep up with the changing needs of the times. In the 17th arrondissement, a cutting-edge urban development project is showing that the City of Light is doing just that, investing thought and resources in creating a new paradigm for sustainable urban living.
A couple metro stops from the Gare Saint-Lazare, in the northwest part of the city, the recently developed
Clichy-Batignolles eco-district is bringing Paris to the heart of the contemporary urban and architecture conversation, injecting the city with fresh approaches to urban planning and buildings and landscape design.
A joint public and private partnership covering an area of 54 hectares (133 acres) on what was formerly a freight yard for France’s national railway company (and the site of the proposed Olympic Village for the Paris 2012 bid), the project is one of the largest amid the new urban mixeduse developments in Paris. Divided into nine lots, it features a comprehensive program that includes housing, office spaces, retail, childcare, and sports, recreational, and cultural facilities.
Planning for the eco-district started in 2002, and since the very beginning the standards and goals of the climate and biodiversity plans put forth by the city of Paris were the guiding factor: energy efficiency, reduction of greenhouse gases, water management, and social diversity and inclusion. It was a unique opportunity to combine forward-thinking energy strategies with urban planning at the root of the project.
“We are changing how we organize the public and green space, and the density, to try to answer the environmental question,” says Catherine Centlivre, urban planner and operations manager at Paris & Métropole Aménagement, the agency responsible for developing and managing the project.
To ensure a healthy variety of conceptual proposals, the city set up an international call for submissions and decided to award each lot to not one but a pair of architecture offices (one established and one emerging), fostering a rich exchange of ideas and concepts. Taking the conversation further, workshops were organized to bring together all the participants involved: the designers, city officials, the developers, service providers, and community members. Together they discussed the potential for shared resources, individual design subtleties, and the contextual impact of each project and the interrelationships between them, making sure that each piece of architecture would fit seamlessly with the district’s bigger picture.
“Each workshop was organized around a theme, such as volume, silhouette, streetscape, uses and environment, formal language and materiality, and landscape,” explains Nicholas Gilliland, architect and founding partner at Tolila + Gilliland Atelier d’Architecture, one of the firms involved in the project.
The negative space between buildings that is so essential in defining the urban experience—sidewalks, open spaces, squares, recesses—was given as much thought (and discussion) as the buildings themselves.
One of the main features of the district’s ambitious master plan—developed by architect and urban planner François Grether, landscape architect Jacqueline Osty, and the architecture and planning firm Omnium General d’Ingénierie—was an area of 10 hectares (25 acres), to be allocated for a green park. This would be the structural axis for the district, both geographically and symbolically, pointing to the leading role played by green areas in the integration of the district with the surrounding neighborhoods. The landscape design was a starting point, as intrinsically relevant as the overall infrastructure, rather than just a late-stage cosmetic beautification of the grounds. Thus, the park’s alleys and walkways were thought of as sensible extensions to the existing street grid leading to the area instead of interruptions on that grid.
“The landscape of the park continues the urban framework,” Osty explains. “The framework of the paths extends that of the streets and reinforces the perspectives from one to the other; it crosses Paris toward the suburbs and from middle-class neighborhoods to more workingclass neighborhoods.”
Completed before any of the adjacent buildings were finished, what is now known as Martin Luther King Park features 600 plant species, carefully selected for their ecological benefits as much as for their seasonal character and blooming timeline.
“The park is near the Square des Batignolles, which was the first Parisian public garden created under Baron Haussmann,” Osty explains. “That square accommodates many uses in a romantic landscape setting: rock garden, grotto, waterfall, stream, pond, lawn, grove of trees.” The challenge she took up for herself was to represent these natural elements in the city “in a contemporary way,” she says.
A pivotal moment for the project was the decision to relocate the Tribunal de Paris (Paris Courthouse) just north of the district. Given the narrow lot, the building would have to go vertical. And so a new, 160-meter tower, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), was added to the master plan, bringing with it a new energy to the development.
“In the beginning the ambition was to create a new ecodistrict integrated into the density of the arrondissement,
with new, decarbonized mixed housing and office buildings and facilities around a huge green park,” says Centlivre. “Then, with the addition of the Renzo Piano Tribunal de Paris, it suddenly gave the project a new, metropolitan scale, a new dimension with the Métro Line 14, and a modernity with the design of the high tower.”
Speaking of the tower design, Bernard Plattner, the RPBW partner in charge of the project, talks about the relevance of creating “an emblem, a signal, within the Parisian cityscape of today.” In an area otherwise devoid of significant urban references, the tower becomes a landmark. “It becomes a symbol for the renewal of urban activities in Paris, signaling somehow a new openness, a new era of potential urban development,” Plattner continues. Beyond the building being a physical reference, he draws attention to the activity that happens inside it, in the 90 courts nestled within, stimulating the district’s organic growth.
Altogether, the district features 3,400 residential units (50 percent subsidized housing, 30 percent privately owned, and 20 percent rent-controlled units) and 140,000 square meters of office space. Among the residential projects, Lot o8 sums up much of the district’s ambitions and DNA.
Located centrally, adjacent to the northern part of the park, the triangular Lot o8 was given to Paris-based architectural firms TVK and the aforementioned Tolila + Gilliland to develop jointly. The plan, distributed across three separate buildings, was to combine all three different housing categories required by the city, retail shops, an entertainment center, a concert hall, and a sevenscreen cinema.
Gilliland explains how that collaborative experience unfolded: “Each project was developed by a team of the two offices. For example, the ‘cultural hub’ on the north end of Martin Luther King Park was a codesign by our office and TVK team. We combined our teams in one shared space, all the way from sketch phase to permit, assuring that this very complex hybrid block was coherent in its whole.” Highlighting the virtues of such teamwork, Gilliland continues: “It was an incredibly rich experience, and the project certainly benefited from the debates and diverse points of view. It makes a lot of sense in complex projects such as this.”
Beyond the usual elements found in carbon-neutral structures—renewable energy efficiency, broad use of photovoltaic panels, rainwater management and reuse— the district also features two firsts for Paris: the city’s first smart grid and its first pneumatic waste collection. (Garbage bags are tossed in receptacles in each building that are then vacuumed via subterranean pipes to a nearby treatment center, eliminating in this way the noisy and cumbersome traffic of waste collection trucks.)
Attesting to the project’s success, the eco-district has won several prestigious design and environmental awards. “The eco-district introduced the notion of major urban developments such as this being able to take on environmental and social challenges at a scale that goes far beyond standard—and often already-ambitious—city and state regulations,” Gilliland says.
Paris has had its share of urban redevelopment plans. There was the grandiose renovation of the 1800s, put forth by Haussmann under the direction of Emperor Napoleon III, that gave us the celebrated, postcard-perfect Paris we all know. Then there was Le Corbusier’s radical Plan Voisin, which although unrealized would go on to be a source of inspiration for modernist urban utopias all over the world; some say it even inspired another of Paris’s large-scale urban projects, the controversial business district of La Défense. But what distinguishes the mostly completed eco-district, beyond the obvious environmental sensibilities, is that it was a vision developed with the participation of all stakeholders, not from the top down, conceived collaboratively rather than coming from an individual’s egocentric vision. The result is a rich urban setting of varied scales, spatial experiences, materials, shapes, and textures that feels like an organic city rather than a planned development.
“I am all for this way of doing things and believe it expresses something that was already important some time ago, that is, a culture of diversification,” says Grether, the architect responsible for the project’s master plan. “Diversity of thoughts, tastes, colors, subjectivities. This pluralism is a singularity of the times. I feel it is perfectly legitimate for the urban form to reflect this contemporary spirit.”
Yes, like Bogart famously said, “We’ll always have Paris.” Just not necessarily the Paris of yesterday.
Opposite page: Martin Luther King Park, ClichyBatignolles, Paris. Design: François Grether, Jacqueline Osty, and Omnium General d’Ingénierie
This page, from top: Plot o2 – Unic, Clichy-Batignolles, Paris. Architects: Biecher + MAD; developer: Emerige
Plot e4, Clichy-Batignolles, Paris. Architect: Philéas K Architecte; developer: RIVP
Plot o3, Clichy-Batignolles, Paris. Architects: Gaëtan Le Penhuel & Associés + Saison Menu + Sud Architectes; developers: BPD Marignan + Groupe Financière Duval
Photos: Paul Clemence
ON SURREALISM GLENN BROWN & ALEXANDRIA SMITH
This year marks the centennial of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.” In its honor, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, staged the exhibition IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism , which will be traveling to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, before closing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To mark the occasion and the exhibition, artists Glenn Brown and Alexandria Smith met to discuss the influence of the movement on their own practices.
GLENN BROWN I thought IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism was an important show, in part because it included artists who were not known to be connected to the Surrealist movement, especially a number of women artists who were historically excluded from the “Surrealist Manifesto” and André Breton’s idea of Surrealism. And honestly, including works made by these artists just makes Surrealism look a lot better. It is important to mention that the exhibition’s other great concept is that Surrealism started in the 1870s with Symbolism and Symbolist arts, and of course Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and all of his writings on the importance of the unconscious mind. One could argue that it was really Freud who kick-started Surrealism, way before André Breton introduced the idea in 1924.
Your work is full of references to Surrealism. You aren’t necessarily trying to make it look like Surrealist art,
ars haven’t talked about it. I am absolutely drawing on Surrealist symbolism. A lot of what I read is inspired by Surrealism, or magical realism, as the literary genre is called. You and I both allow that sensibility to infuse our work. I’m curious to hear your perspective as well. We’re from two different generations, so your introduction to Surrealism and its context was likely different from mine. Over the decades, many artists have brought the surreal into their work without it being addressed, especially when it comes to artists of color. Caribbean Afro-Surrealist artists and writers, for instance, have been erased from the conversation. Just think about how much time Suzanne and Aimé Césaire spent with André Breton. They were all working together to resist colonization and trying to find ways through Surrealism toward revolution and emancipation, even though they were in different parts of the world, namely the Caribbean and Europe.
GB Lately I’ve been thinking about Sun Ra as a mix of
images from the past to comment on the future.
AS How are you doing that? How are you mining the past with an eye toward the future?
GB I tend to make work for an imagined future audience. My paintings can take several years, so in a fastmoving world I can’t be absolutely contemporary, but how it feels to be human is fairly consistent. I have this idea that people from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries and people today have similar emotions—hopes and dreams that are extraordinarily alike. I lift portraits from the past and transpose them to the present day or the future by altering the way they’re painted, especially the color rationale.
AS In my work, the color becomes its own character. It’s another subject in the composition.
GB Where do you get your colors from? The real world? Because you use color beautifully, and not just in terms of push-pull and composition. You often use very gray
different color palette than work from before I moved to London. I’m drawing color from my emotional state, but also from the present moment, wherever I am in the world geographically. I think about color as a way of collectively imagining and relating to one another.
GB When you say “internal,” do you mean emotionally internal or physically internal?
AS Emotionally internal. Physically internal—sometimes that comes out, but it’s rare. The characters in my work are usually avatars or stand-ins for emotional states of being. The grays, blues, and cool colors, they came about when I moved to London.
GB The grays from London!
AS Yeah, London hit me over the head with that. [laughter ] I didn’t have much of a choice but to embrace it.
GB Do you ever wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night with a great idea for a composition or a subject for a painting? Because your work has a sense of the dream state.
AS For sure, there are times when I wake up with an idea, or I see something right before I go to sleep and need to write it down or sketch out the idea, however roughly. Sometimes it happens in meetings. When I’m supposed to be paying attention, I’m daydreaming about new compositions.
GB I get my best painting ideas very late in the evening, when I’m not asleep but my brain is starting to go into that mode. My thoughts are free and I get wilder, more interesting ideas.
AS That happens to me a lot in airplanes. Or when I’m driving. When my body’s in transition or on the move.
GB Why do you think that is?
AS I attribute it to habit. Doing something routine, something I’m used to doing, allows my imagination to get activated.
GB The unconscious can kick in.
AS I’ve heard that from writers especially. A lot of writers I know get ideas when they’re in transit.
GB That’s definitely not the case for me. I tend to be in the studio when ideas occur. But then again, I come up with paintings in a very different way. My works are all based on other artists’ works. I have a huge library of books, so I constantly refer to images or cross-reference things. Put one painting next to another to see what happens when I mix the two together. My dreaming is done in terms of the way I play with images.
AS You’re a collagist and a DJ. Actually, I think we can both own those titles. [laughs ] We’re constantly remixing things. I’m remixing language when I’m coming up with titles, but I’m mostly remixing my own work. I’m pulling from iconography of the past and remixing it to create something new, as in collage—a key practice in Surrealism. And you’re doing something like that with other artists’ work, as well as your own.
GB I do refer to my own work an awful lot when I’m making a painting.
AS Your titles are very unique and unexpected, like The Hurdy-Gurdy
GB That’s a sculpture. A hurdy-gurdy is a very basic machine for making music. You turn a handle, sort of like a mechanized accordion. Street musicians used to play them for money. I liked that the title would refer to sound and a poor street entertainer. Another sculpture I’ve done is titled Hey Nonny Nonny / The Busker’s Empty Cap
“Hey nonny nonny” refers to Shakespeare; it’s a nonsense rhyme he used for his singers. He wrote “Hey nonny nonny,” and the performers could swap in their own lines if they wanted. Adding the busker’s empty cap alludes to the idea that the street performer is failing to entertain, since the cap is empty of money. Performance and failure—it’s a comic idea of what it’s like to be an artist. It’s a way to create pathos.
AS Then you’ve got Bikini
GB There are two ways of looking at that title. You can see it as conjuring a swimsuit and a beautiful sunlit beach. But I think more of the French designer who, in 1946, cut out the middle of a one-piece swimsuit and observed, “Oh, it’s like splitting the atom.” He named it after Bikini Atoll, the islands where the United States was holding
nuclear bomb tests. Those beautiful islands were destroyed by nuclear testing. Nobody can live there now. So you’re meant to think about a swimsuit and being on a beach and a nuclear holocaust all at the same time.
AS Those polarities!
GB Marcel Duchamp said that adding a title to a work gives the artist an opportunity to add an invisible color. How do you come up with your titles? They’re very powerful; you must consider them carefully.
AS Thank you. Yes, they’re another part of the work for me. They’re really important—a way to bring another layer of meaning, another element of depth and iconography. They usually come to me after the work is done. I’m always grabbing snippets of phrases from books, book titles, poetry, overheard conversations.
GB Where did you get a title like Heft of the Lumens ?
AS Initially it wasn’t Heft of the Lumens , it was just The Lumens . I was thinking about the figures with their concentric circles, or the orb of light around the eyeballs. They’ve evolved over the years through different bodies of work. But for Heft of the Lumens , I was thinking about weight and gravity. The figures look like they’re swimming, but they could be drowning or getting pulled down. Then there is a shadow—you’re not sure if there are three figures or two, or perhaps one figure and a shadow. I like to play with those dualities. And I wanted the title to literally reflect the weight. So The Lumens didn’t feel complete.
GB It’s a beautiful metaphor for the way you make a painting, because heft involves weight, and light has no weight at all. You put these incongruous elements together, and you get this resonance—or perhaps rather dissonance, because it doesn’t make sense. That’s what images can do; they can make sense of nonsensical elements.
AS Definitely. You use line in your work to do something similar. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that, like how you arrived at an approach to painting that feels very much like drawing.
GB One of the nice things about drawing is that you can make an object out of lines that feels absolutely solid but translucent at the same time. It allows me to have one image overlaid with another, and it challenges your brain to make sense of something that shouldn’t be sensible. Line drawing became very important to me because it gave me freedom to make images which could be free-floating. I like the idea of escaping gravity, and I think you do as well.
AS Definitely, we have that in common.
GB I suppose that comes from the dream world too, that you could be free somewhere that you’d normally
be weighed down.
AS I think about the in between of things, of spaces, of time, and how that has so much weight, but also the idea of being in flux or a liminal space, when you’re not solidly in one place or another.
GB When you say “in between,” what do you mean?
AS Meaning, you can physically inhabit one space but also psychologically or spiritually inhabit another. I think the spiritual or the subconscious is that in-between state.
GB It’s a state of reverie, which you want to be in sometimes. It’s not between good and bad, light and dark, up or down, necessarily. Or maybe it’s between all of those things at once. Between heaven and hell.
AS It’s hard to articulate, but it’s something like that. People have such binary ways of thinking. Everything has to be either/or, never both/and.
GB I think it’s quite important to tell people that you can have both sides of a story, and both can be right.
AS It provokes deep thought. Thinking about the in-between state of things slows you down. That’s what we’re doing in our work by bringing in Surrealism— hopefully igniting thought, feeling, and emotion, but also slowing people down.
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
ALICE NOTLEY PROPHECY IS
The poet Alice Notley moved to Paris in 1992 with her husband, the poet Douglas Oliver. The city has remained her home ever since, and its characteristics and landscape have worked their way into her poetry, in books like Disobedience (2001) and Being Reflected Upon (2024). Notley met with fellow poet Ariana Reines this past summer to discuss her latest book, her rejection of hierarchies, and what creating and reading poetry can do for the soul.
ARIANA REINES I want to talk with you about your books and also your collages and drawings. I’ve also brought a few quotations from your newest book, Being Reflected Upon , that I want to present to you as a game. It feels a little Georges Perec: “Pity and compassion still disgust me though love doesn’t.”
ALICE NOTLEY Well, don’t pity and compassion disgust you?
AR Completely.
AN Pity and compassion imply that the person who is experiencing them is better than the person to whom they’re directed. There’s no equality in pity and compassion, whereas there’s equality in love. Probably. Or, there should be. But that’s the implication. That’s early Christianity.
AR Another line about love that I adore, which also feels like a remark on bad tendencies in contemporary poetry: “I knew I was supposed to be supportive as if marching / but the best I could do was love everyone.”
AN In that poem I’m responding to a particular time within the last decade when every little thing that anyone did or said, every gesture, was a point of hatred, something to march about. It was difficult to separate things that were really important from things that weren’t. I have no activism in me. I can’t do things in a group. I can’t do things that imply that I know better
than everybody else. But I would ideally like to love. I can’t always love. But I do go through a lot of contortions and turmoil, so it’s probably love.
AR I’m finding myself wanting to ask related questions about communal activity or group activity, because the firmament of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, which you were involved with in the 1970s—it’s still so powerful. A lot of us are still living on the energies that were generated by you and your family and your friends in a certain time and space. But I also think that that kind of collectivity gets idealized, and maybe a lot of annoying theories are generated about just how and why it’s been so powerful.
AN Yeah? You have some?
AR I have fantasies, but not theories.
AN What do you want to know?
AR I suppose I want to know if it’s possible for you personally to love anyone who isn’t a poet.
AN Oh, yes. All the members of my family who weren’t and aren’t poets, I love them so much. I love my parents so much. My mother, my father, my siblings—I have this incredible love for them that’s expressed in all my poetry.
AR I had this dumb fantasy that everyone in your family is or was a poet.
AN Oh, no. No, no. I had all these aunts and uncles, who are dead now. Many cousins, some of whom are still alive. There were and are a lot of large families in the family constellation that I’m part of. There’s a constellation that has to do with my stepson David, who is not a poet, although he’s written some poems. There’s a constellation around my stepdaughters, who are Doug’s daughters, and they’re not poets.
AR The debris and cobwebs are being cleared from my consciousness as you speak, which is also how I feel when reading your poems. If I have one stupid theory, it’s that sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as a public. Or if all art is always made for other artists.
AN It’s not made for other artists. It never is. Sometimes they’re the only people who are your audience in the now, but actually you are talking to everyone who ever existed and will exist and whatever planets and nonplanets there are outside of this planet. You’re talking to everything. Poets just have to trust the future.
AR You write variations—or, perhaps better to say, your writing emanates variations on lines about changing the universe and correcting the perception in the reader that a false world is real. Can you talk to me about changing the universe?
AN I don’t know if I can. I’m very shy to. And I don’t think I have good words that aren’t in the poems. I don’t think about it in words. When you think in poems, you think in the proper way. Not everyone should read my poetry, but if they do, then the changing of the universe will commence or continue. Because if you’re reading my poetry, you’re not doing any of the bad things that are bringing the world to its possible conclusion. You’re just reading poetry. You’re not going out into the world of terrible machines and pollution and violence and aggression.
AR I can personally attest to the changing of the universe that your poems accomplish. One of their qualities, and this has been true of your work from the beginning, is that when I’m reading you, there’s a pervading sense that this is the most important thing in the world
AN That’s how I feel about it! [laughter ] I don’t see anything that’s more important than what I’m doing in my poetry, or what anyone might be doing in their poetry.
But there are a lot of other people in the world who don’t feel the same way. I find them puzzling.
AR They are very peculiar, those people. What I mean is, your work has a corrective or a medicinal effect. It sets the rest of life into a different proportion.
AN We’re all being this. What I’m making is a place for all of us to see that we’re all being this, that we’re all being this intense and light-filled existing. That we’re all poetry.
AR It feels very connected to the work of the Sibyls.
AN They didn’t write very well.
AR Or is it that the priests translating them weren’t writing very well? [laughter ]
AN I don’t know much about the prophets. I don’t know how they wrote their prophecies. But I think one supposes that they were poets.
AR There’s a poem in which you’re talking to Allen Ginsberg, and he says, “I was not reborn . . . your system is / correct.”
AN Which poem is that?
AR It’s called “To Remake It w/ Microtones.” It’s a poem I love.
AN Yeah, he wasn’t reincarnated.
AR Will you tell me more about that?
AN No, it’s obvious! He told me he wasn’t reincarnated. I knew he wasn’t reincarnated. I can’t believe that anyone believes in the caste system and reincarnation. How can anything be transcendental and arranged into levels based on some social system that existed a long time ago?
AR People are obsessed with hierarchy.
AN They are. And they’re wrong. Simone Weil was, and she was wrong.
AR Tell me more about how wrong Simone Weil was.
AN She was only wrong about that. For a while there I kept trying to read L’Enracinement (1949), but toward the beginning I would get to this page where she listed the number of things that people needed, and one of them was hierarchy. I would look at that and think, “I don’t believe it. I can’t read this book.”
AR The French are obsessed with management and hierarchy.
AN They just like things that are clear, very clear, and they like to have philosophical discussions. In order to graduate from high school with a baccalaureate you have to answer a three-hour question on a philosophical topic.
AR The society is organized on the basis of this test. I’m half a product of the French system, and I’m fascinated that you brought up Weil, because she has this negativity, which is different to the Keatsean negative capacity. It’s founded in her obsession with what she believed to be her brother’s intellectual superiority over her. I’m thinking of your book Negativity’s Kiss (2013) here, but nowhere in your work have I found anything like Weil’s “de-creation,” or (to be reductive) her low self-esteem.
AN Oh, no, I don’t have that.
AR You don’t suffer from that.
AN The way I was brought up did not allow that. I had a very, very good upbringing. I don’t know how to describe it. It was obviously very hard in some ways on my brother, because there were expectations of us. I don’t have the words to discuss it with anyone who didn’t know us, because I loved him and my parents loved him and I can’t talk about it as if it’s an object.
AR I understand. I have a brother too, and one of the peculiar things about my brother, whom I adore, is that he was in Rockland, that same hospital you reference in “To Remake It w/Microtones.”
ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
AN “Am I or am I not / with you in Rockland.” Allen’s line.
AR Allen’s line. We can’t really talk about prophecy, I accept that, but there’s a way in which poetry is sort of always prophetic. It’s always holding the future. When you’re reading it, it’s holding you, and you find that your life is being held by this poem that was written for you without knowing you, or having precisely needed you. “Prophecy” isn’t really the word for it, whatever “it” is. Poetry’s the word for “it.”
AN It’s about the odd points of connection in a life. There are times when you look back, and everything that was back there rushes up here. And poets can be engaged with that process. It’s part of what makes them poets. It’s something that happens inside poetic stress: you get to this point where it’s like this black hole, and then everything just comes in, past and future.
AR I’m going to step away from magic and the paranormal for a moment and read you some lines of yours about Paris: “I’m trying to remember when I started to like it here / maybe after about my fifteenth year in this building.”
AN When I came here, I had intense culture shock that lasted for about three years. I was living in Montmartre, and it was very touristy. I didn’t know how to be there. I didn’t know how to be in Paris. I didn’t speak French. When we moved into this building in 1995, I started to feel a little better. It was kind of like living near 14th Street [in New York]. This neighborhood’s very mixed. It’s kind of working class. I liked all of that. But then Doug died, and I felt terrible. Then I got hepatitis C, and I felt really terrible. And then the virus got cured and I started to feel better again. I started to gradually be here, but it took a very long time.
AR One of the things that electrified me about New York School poetry as a teenager is that it’s funny. When I think about your books, for instance when I read Disobedience (2001), from earlier in your Paris time, it’s so funny. What you do with the epic and with language is all extremely serious and important, as if the entire universe depends on it. And it’s also hilarious. What you do by smashing the epic mode with French noir—there’s a lot of joy in it.
AN I wrote it right after I moved into this apartment, and it’s based on a project to try to understand Frenchness in some way. I was trying to live here and feel around inside of it. But in the middle of it, there was this enormous public strike, so the middle section is the strike—la grève . I detail all these people and what they are and the kinds of things they’re saying and I’m dreaming about them and none of them exist anymore. None of them are alive. There’s one French person who has written about the book, but most people here don’t know about it.
AR The French are funny about poetry. For them, poetry existed in the nineteenth century. Or it ended with Arthur Rimbaud. Or the Surrealists.
AN There’s a new generation now, and they’re different But it existed here until the war, and then it kind of stopped. Everything stopped and became philosophical. Everybody was so traumatized by what happened—by the Holocaust, by the war. It wasn’t that they shouldn’t write about it, but they couldn’t
AR Right, it’s not Theodor Adorno forbidding it.
AN No, it’s not Adorno. He was wrong. It was so painful, so dolorous, so shocking, that, well, anyone can write anything at any time, but you had to approach it in
another way. But I have this feeling that it’s coming back. I notice that certain elements have been reintroduced: conversation or description or the sense of people on the street.
AR Thinking about shock and trauma in the language of French poetry and how it’s shifting, I also think about the way that Being Reflected Upon is chronicling a time of terrorism. It’s everywhere in the book.
AN It’s everywhere in my life. There’s a poem about the terror attack in San Bernardino. I couldn’t believe it. I had this San Bernardino County blanket that had Needles on it—the town I grew up in. It was on my bed when I was reading about this terrorist attack that took place at a center for people with disabilities.
I was away during the big attack in Paris in 2015. I was in Milwaukee giving a reading at Woodland Pattern. I had to give this big reading at a gala while people were still being held at the Bataclan theater. Finally, by the end of the evening, it was over. I came back two days later. I walked into Charles de Gaulle airport just as a minute of silence was being called over the speaker system. We all stopped. I was pushing my luggage and we all stopped. It’s making me cry right now. It was horrible.
AR One of the things that I found really marvelous in your book is the way that this terror that keeps showing up just keeps showing up in the poems. It’s like that sobering, traumatized silence in French poetry after the war that you were talking about. There are certain things that, as with love, cannot be said but somehow simply show up. And we respond accordingly.
AN It’s part of the fabric of life. Most of the things I write about are part of a fabric. That’s something that comes out of being part of the New York School when I was young and learning from Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler and so on. I’m giving a picture of my times, and thereby giving a picture of myself.
AR And chronicling the times as a soul, more than anything.
AN I’m trying to speak to people about what one has to go through, how one might approach having to be a person in their time. Perhaps one person’s time is not very special in the end, but it is their time, and it’s what they have to talk about while they’re alive.
AR It’s special to us because we’re living through it.
AN It’s what there is. It’s the vocabulary.
AR I want to ask about a workshop you taught. I heard that you had the participants make tarot cards?
AN I did that at a couple different places. One was the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. It wasn’t precisely a workshop. You could do whatever you wanted, however you wanted to. We went every day. It was all women. Everybody became really bonded. The people in the other workshops called us “the coven.” We made a little tarot deck there, and I also did one in New York at Poets House. I did one of those master classes, and there were people I knew in the class: Edwin Torres, Jennifer Firestone, people like that. I said we could either use the Major Arcana as given or make up our own. Rachel Zucker was there, and she insisted that there had to be The Hermit. She was dying to be alone. She wanted a card for being alone. I insisted there should be a card for immigration and nobody knew why. But I knew.
AR Maybe this is a good segue into your drawings and collages. I’m curious if you’ve been doing that lately?
AN I’m back to working on collages, but I’ve had this problem since I’ve been in Paris that I can’t get enough
materials. In New York I could always get things out of the garbage, or people would give me things. Jane DalrympleHollo gave me this stack of things.
AR Do you want me to get some poets to collect trash for you?
AN No, you have to know what I like. I think it has to happen in such a way that it’s a personal transaction.
AR I’m the sort of person that people give trash to. They give me rocks, sticks.
AN I have a lot of rocks.
AR Me too.
AN Anne Waldman has been giving me cheap jewelry, and I’ve been putting it in collages. She doesn’t know that.
AR Okay, we won’t print that.
AN She probably wouldn’t mind if she did know.
AR Here’s a line I love: “To hold it all together, a linguistic energy.” There’s the sense that the impulse of the voice is holding the world, even the universe, together.
AN I think it is. I think that when we die, we talk to one another and thereby hold the cosmos together. The only possible thing that’s holding everything together is communication—as Anselm Hollo and I say in the Anselm Hollo poem. We were both saying that as he was dying. That’s all there is. And obviously you don’t disappear, because there’s nowhere to go. There’s no nothing to go to because there’s no nothing. And it’s obvious there’s no nothing. So we become communication.
AR One last thing. Here’s a line from early in the book: “I used to be a pacifist but now I’m nothing but soul.” We were talking about the weird obsession with hierarchy that pervades people’s minds on Earth. In France, it shows up in mystical literature sometimes. This is a thought-form that obsesses people.
AN People think that there is another thing that’s better than you. I don’t think that.
AR On account of your excellent upbringing.
AN On account of my experience of myself as a soul. I don’t have to think like that. I don’t have to find it by clinging to something outside of myself.
To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly
Opposite: Alice Notley
ASTIER DE VILLATTE
Young Kim explores the enduring power of Parisian ceramic workshop Astier de Villatte.
“That’s where they make white dishes for stupid rich people,” said a musician friend, waving dismissively at Paris’s Chinatown in the 13th arrondissement as he drove me and my boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren, away from the squat in Ivry Sur Seine where his studio was. I quietly smiled. I was one of those stupid people. He was talking about the new ceramic company Astier de Villatte, though I didn’t know they were new at the time—I wasn’t sure if it was an old brand that had been revitalized, or one recently launched. There was something enigmatic about the ceramics. They seemed antique with a whiff of the flea market, yet despite the old-fashioned medallions, scallops, and pompoms, the rather stark, almost blank pieces had an odd contemporariness. And they definitely had soul, and a human touch. Whatever it was, I was utterly crazy about them. By 2003, I’d acquired more than a few pieces and treasured each one.
Astier de Villatte started in 1996, and by 2000 had opened their first shop on rue St. Honoré at a site which was formerly Biennais, the official orfèvrerie of Napoleon. Cofounder Benoît Astier de Villatte has the perfect way of describing their world: “a past that never existed.”
The pieces are utterly simple—elegance in austerity. Yet they are not quite minimalist thanks to the little bits of decoration, even unexpected splashes of color. They remind me of the original Paris shops of designer Martin Margiela, where everything was painted in a crude matte white or covered in plain white muslin. Maybe it’s the imperfect milkiness of the white glaze that somehow tricks you into thinking it’s matte that (to me) invokes Margiela. The pieces aren’t cheap, but once you know how they’re made, the price is abundantly justified. I love gazing at them, holding them, and of course using them. They give me endless pleasure. As John Keats put it: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
I think of Keats every morning when I drink my coffee from one of their cups. There are two that I rotate. One is the plainest, simplest ceramic cup called the Marguerite (daisy) chocolate cup, which sits on its saucer, Daisy. Both are delicate, chaste, ghostly white with rounded, flounced edges as a nod to their namesake. There’s an organic irregularity—the surface is not perfectly smooth, and at times the dark, nearly black, appropriately named terre noire clay peeps through from under its cloak of white.
The other is a mug—also very simple, with the faintest line of gold around the top rim, but where the handle should be is a thick, dull-gold ring to pass a finger through, studded with the reddest of passionate red hearts iced in gold and white along the edges like a frilly valentine. This one is called Heart Cup Ring.
Over the years, I’ve seen Astier de Villatte go from their first exquisite boutique on rue St. Honoré to a second jewel box, a former bookshop on rue de Tournon, near the Luxembourg Gardens with a stained-glass window by Pierre Carron. They’ve hosted delightful events amid the bric-a-brac at the Clignancourt flea market and at their romantic salon, the last home of the playwright Molière, on the eponymous rue Molière near the Palais Royal. Everything they do is of the utmost taste, mixing old and new and sometimes new that appears old (hence my initial confusion). Nothing is ever flashy, and everything is always executed to the highest standards, following Coco Chanel’s ideal of pauvreté de luxe discreet luxury of quality and elegance. Nearly everything they produce is made by the hands of artisans. This extends from the ceramics to the fragrances, incense
and candles, notebooks, and even their own guidebook to Paris, Ma Vie à Paris , full of all their secret Parisian addresses (recently released in its fourth edition) and printed by letterpress in their own letterpress workshop.
Astier de Villatte was founded by two artists with intertwined pasts: Ivan Pericoli and Benoît Astier de Villatte, the latter born Benoît Carron but subsequently taking his mother’s name. Benoît was born in Rome, the third of five children, and spent the first few years of his life there. His father, Pierre Carron, was an artist in residence along with the sculptor Georges Jeanclos when the Villa Medici was under the directorship of Balthus. When they returned to France, Carron and Jeanclos both ended up teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Benoît eventually studied there, especially under Jeanclos.
Ivan Pericoli left Italy for Paris at the age of thirteen, when his mother died, to live with his father. Through classmates, he got to know Benoît and his siblings, and some years later he entered the École des Beaux-Arts with the goal of becoming a painter. He also studied under Jeanclos and became closer to Benoît when Pierre Carron took him under his wing. Carron liked the Italian connection, as did his wife, and the two more or less adopted Ivan into their large family.
In a natural, messy, organic way, Ivan and Benoît, their friends, and the other Carron siblings all studied and experimented on projects together using the facilities of the Beaux-Arts and Pierre Carron’s kiln. Jeanclos taught them sculpture, and the estampage technique using terre noire collected from the banks of the Seine, which would become the invaluable raw material for the Astier de Villatte ceramics. They eventually formed a kind of loose collective, making furniture and, to complement those pieces, ceramics. The furniture proved difficult to sell, but the ceramics quickly became successful. A few pieces in a shop window led to an article in Marie Claire , which encouraged them to exhibit at the new design fair Maison&Objet—and they were off. Ivan was having success as a painter but found he had no time to paint, he was so busy running the business. At the time, the late 1990s, artists in France generally disapproved of commerce, but Ivan decided to commit to it, investing the money he had inherited from his mother, and continuing primarily with Benoît. Members of Benoît’s family are still involved in the company, including Alexandre Carron, who oversees production.
The atelier, in the 13th arrondissement, is a rare and inspiring place to visit, as it is so human. Benoît and Ivan create the designs, jointly or individually (“There is no ego in ceramics,” remarks Ivan), and create the molds. Then the designs are handed over to the craftspeople who make each piece, from the beginning to the firing stage, and stamp it with their initials along with the Astier de Villatte mark. Their initial training takes six months. I wanted to join in as, one day in the atelier, I watched each artisan flatten a ball of dark clay with a rolling pin, just like a pie crust, then drape it over a mold, carefully pressing the clay into it—estampage . They then release the clay from the mold by injecting air. The more complicated designs can involve several elements in separate molds that are stuck together. Once the piece is complete, it leaves the hands of the original artisan and is left to dry naturally. This can take anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the design. Because each artisan has a different touch, each piece is unique. (This explains why one plate I bought after an initial set was thicker than the others.)
Once the piece is completely dry, it is sanded and scored by hand, then dusted and fired in the kiln. It is now called bisque. The bisque is sanded and dusted and dipped in a vat of the special white glaze, which dries overnight. The next morning it is examined for imperfections, which are corrected in a process called gommage . The glazed piece is fired, and any items that need to be waterproof are filled with water and tested overnight. If any decorative decals are to be affixed or if painting is necessary, it is done at this stage, and the piece is fired again. Different paints—for example, metallics versus regular colors— require different firing temperatures, and thus may call
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for multiple passes of painting and firing. The last stage is poncage , the sanding away of any imperfections. Some three thousand pieces are made a week, of which only two thousand survive. Once I learned all this, I understood why I had instinctively loved them at first sight. They are created by artists, more for the purposes of art than commerce. Ivan and Benoît give their artisans one instruction: “Make a beautiful objet d’art!”
I was intrigued to learn that most of the craftspeople— there are more than eighty of them—are Tibetans. The signs are in French and Tibetan! It all started with one Tibetan monk who came to work for them, and over the years, more and more of his friends joined. Benoît and Ivan have a special interest in Tibet, and Astier de Villatte also produces divine incense. It is all made by artisans on Japan’s Awaji Island, under the supervision of an incense master. In 2015, Astier de Villatte’s dedication to preserving artisans and artisanal work led them to acquire SAIG, the last linotype printing press in France. Besides their passion for artisanship, Astier de Villatte values collaborations with friends like decoupagist and designer John Derian, one of their champions from the moment he discovered them at the Maison&Objet show. Bringing things full circle, since 2013 they have collaborated with Balthus’s widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, who has her own studio within the workshop. (She recalls meeting baby Benoît at the Villa Medici.) Astier de Villatte also produces a lamp designed by Balthus during his time at the Villa Medici, and published in 2018 a reprint edition of Balthus’s book Mitsou (1921). Another collaborator is Serena Carone, who designed the heart mug I love so much; the artist Eva Jospin, a family friend who helped out at their Maison&Objet booth when she was a student; and Lou Doillon, their first collaborator who was
not a friend or acquaintance. They discovered Doillon’s drawings, which decorate some of the ceramics, on her Instagram account.
Astier de Villatte now operates a shop in Seoul with partners, and will open another this fall in Tokyo. And just this past spring, the firm returned to its Italian roots and opened its first international flagship in Milan’s Brera district during Salone. This shop sells not only furniture and decorative household objects by John Derian, Anke Drechsel, and Diane De Clercq, but gourmet delicacies like Poilâne biscuits and wild honey. It also features a gallery space, whose inaugural exhibition is by Eva Jospin. To commemorate their long friendship, Eva chose to include a portrait of herself as a ten-year-old child painted by Pierre Carron.
This Milan shop looks like an elaboration of the Parisian Astier de Villatte universe and sounds absolutely magical. I can’t wait to go! But in the meantime, there is always Paris.
Opposite: Astier de Villatte boutique, Paris. Photo: © Francesco Dolfo
Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli. Photo: © Sophie Delaporte
FIVE PARIS CINEMAS
Gagosian Quarterly film writer Carlos Valladares lived in Paris last year while researching his dissertation on French auteur Jacques Demy. Here, he maps out five cinemas that brought him endless joy during this time, sharing a bit about the history and current repertory of each.
Le Louxor
My go-to cinema, at 170 boulevard de Magenta. Built between 1919 and 1921 as an opulent silent-movie palace to entertain the working-class community in Barbès in the 18th arrondissement, the theater is ten minutes down the street from where I used to live, on boulevard Barbès. The architect, Henri Zipcy, wanted to cash in on the Egyptian vogue inspired by the now-lost 1917 feature Cleopatra starring Theda Bara, so the auditorium is decked out in eagles and zigzagging serpents. For a good while in the twentieth century, Le Louxor made its profit by showing Bollywood movies, North African melodramas, and midnight pornos. In the Mitterrand ’80s, it was, briefly, a gay nightclub: Megatown, “ la plus grand boîte gay de France .” That era lasted only, tragically, a single calendar year, 1987 to 1988, but it was just long enough for Megatown to be preserved on film in the club scenes of the Jesús Franco slasher film Les Prédateurs de la nuit, or Faceless (1988), in which mad doctor Frank Flamand (played by Helmut Berger, Luchino Visconti’s muse) and his sexy assistant (Brigitte Lahaie, star of such classic pornos as Je suis une belle salope [1977] and Couple cherche esclave sexuel [1979]) kidnap and murder party girls with nice skin in order to restore the face of the doctor’s disfigured sister. The theater was closed for many years, and then restored to its former glory in 2013. When I went to the ex-Megatown, there were no crazy doctors or club rats. Nor, as Le Louxor Redux, did they screen Faceless. Hélas! Missed opportunity. But they did show Charlie Chaplin comedies, to the delight of innocent eightyear-olds, Aki Kaurismäki’s gorgeous Fallen Leaves (2023), and, for three months, Jacques Demy musicals on Sunday mornings. Every Sunday at 10, no matter how late I’d stayed out the night before, I’d roll out of bed in pajamas, text whomever was around, and berate them to join me in my ten-minute trudge, in the perpetual rain, down the boulevard Barbès to rewatch the glowing Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in my favorite film, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). Those Sundays were reserved for romance, and pining, and good skin.
Max Linder Panorama
Another sumptuous movie palace in the vein of Le Louxor but located within the 9th arrondissement at 24 boulevard Poissonnière. One of its earliest owners was the titular Linder, the French Charlie Chaplin, who exclusively screened his popular two-reel comedies at the cinema. A group of ardent cinephiles restored the palace in 1987, preserving its Art Deco grandeur. The orchestra pit contains 264 seats, the second-floor mezzanine holds 185, and the third-floor balcony (my vantage point of choice) seats 108. I came often during their Martin Scorsese retrospective leading up to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). The balcony was the perfect cavernous whirlpool of silence in which to get lost and experience on the big screen, and for my first time, Hugo (2011), Shutter Island (2010), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). And the opportunity to immerse myself within Scorsese’s 225-minute history of Hollywood—A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995)—within a decadent work of art that, in the States, would surely have been ruthlessly transformed into a Ticketmaster-approved concert venue, is nothing to be sneezed at.
Illustrations by Teresa Mathew
Christine / Écoles Cinema Club
Some of the most adventurous, and fun, repertory film programming happens at the Paris Cinéma Club, something of a French Film Forum, a Gallic New Beverly. It is divided into two cinemas, about a fifteen-minute walk from each other in the 5 th arrondissement: the Christine at 4 rue Christine (right across the street from No. 5, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived in Stein’s final days), and the Écoles Cinéma Club at 23 rue des Écoles. The theaters are owned by Ronald Chammah, producer, director, and longtime partner of Isabelle Huppert, and are programmed by Huppert’s and Chammah’s son Lorenzo. Great restoration runs of forgotten masterpieces have screened at the Christine, including Lindsey Vickers’s uncanny British thriller The Appointment (1981), Michael Roemer’s Vengeance Is Mine (1984), and the films of Ida Lupino. Huppert herself appears regularly at Écoles to talk about her own films, such as Malina (1991) and The Flood (1993). The series ideas are, as I say, fun. One summer, the Christine mounted a thirtyfilm festival called “Women.” Not “Women Directors.” No. Even better, and more deranged: films whose title is the name of a woman: Angel (1937), Sandra (1965), Wanda (1970), Fedora (1978). The program was a hit, and was revived the following summer. At Écoles, I’ll never forget the experience of watching Coup de foudre à Notting Hill , or Notting Hill (1999), for the first time among a sea of French millennials; it was clear they knew every line of the script because they’d squeal in anticipation of some, even reciting them out loud. Relatedly, I can’t forget a sold-out Tuesday 2 pm screening, whose audience consisted solely of elder and infirm French folk, of Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955), which is apparently a cult classic here. And it was at the Christine where I was properly hazed into French cinema culture: watching John Cassavetes’s New Yawk–loud Gloria (1980) in the “Women” series, I took out a pen to record a beautiful line in my journal. I was then violently shushed by a pencil-necked thirtysomething for having the audacity to . . . write. When I didn’t stop writing the line, he groaned loudly—louder than even my pen, if you can believe it—and provoked everyone to turn and look at him as he clambered, Jerry Lewis–style, out of the cinema in a drama-queen huff. He did not return. Here was the line I wrote: “You’re my mother, you’re my father, you’re my mother, you’re my whole family. You’re even my friend, Gloria. You’re my girlfriend too.”
Rue Champollion Cinema
Unofficially Cinema Row, rue Champollion in the 5 th arrondissement is dotted with three theaters—including the oldest repertory cinema in the city, Le Champo Espace Jacques Tati, as well as La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin and the Reflet Médicis. A cheap and good bistro, Café le Reflet, sits between them, if you want to get a bite before or after the movie. Two filmmakers seem to constantly be showing on rue Champollion: Yasujiro Ozu and John Cassavetes. All big-city cinemas should have Ozu and Cassavetes playing around the clock. Ozu matinees were a treasured part of my time in Paris; The Only Son (1936), Tokyo Story (1953), Good Morning (or Bonjour, 1959), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962) were reliable standbys to be shown at noon on weekends. They came and went as regularly as the weather in Ozu’s films: always sunny, always clear, whether the season is early spring or late summer. Shadows (1959) and A Woman under the Influence (1974) were perpetually showing, and La Filmothèque mounted a spectacular run last year of a restored Husbands (1970). Again, the film was greeted with stone faces among the French youth in the audience—this, for a selfbilled “comedy about life, death, and freedom,” perhaps Cassavetes’s funniest—and most brutal—picture.
Cinéma du Panthéon
The oldest continuously running cinema in the city is Cinéma du Panthéon, at 13 rue Victor Cousin in the student-oriented 5 th arrondissement. Formerly a gymnasium, it was converted into a silent cinema in 1907. Jean-Paul Sartre watched movies there as a child. For most of the twentieth century it was owned by Pierre Braunberger, who pioneered the screening of foreign films in their original languages (this was before subtitles had been invented) and who produced films by François Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) and Jean-Luc Godard (Vivre sa vie, 1962). Agnès Varda showed her first film, La Pointe Courte , there in 1955. I remember seeing Ken Loach’s last film The Old Oak (2023) at the Panthéon and being grateful they had a balcony, so that no one could watch me ugly cry at Loach’s social-realist melodramatics for the umpteenth time. But arguably a bigger draw is Le Salon on the top floor, designed by Christian Sapet and none other than Catherine Deneuve herself, with its wide space, comfortable seating, tart pear crumble, a vast and bilingual film reference library, good light, and its bizarro decoration: an Op-art photograph of Deneuve where she appears cross-eyed from every angle, a terrifying poster of Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984) who looks as if she were trapped inside a milky, blurry Paris Instagram filter. There’s also a marvelous bookstore next door, where I bought the screenplay to Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) and the autobiography of Bulle Ogier. Ethan Hawke’s rare 1996 novel The Hottest State remains waiting for a lucky reader to snatch up.
MUSEUM TREASURES
In the heart of Paris, where art and history converge, two curators explore the profound narratives behind exceptional works from their museums’ collections. Côme Fabre, from the Musée du Louvre’s department of painting, delves into Johann Richard Seel’s evocative Portrait of the Bloem Sisters (1841), revealing the historical and formal strength of this lesser-known painting. Meanwhile, Sarah Frioux-Salgas, from the Musée du Quai Branly –Jacques Chirac, presents an edition of The Crisis (May 1929), the emblematic publication founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, featuring a cover by Aaron Douglas that celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the NAACP.
MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY JACQUES CHIRAC
Sarah Frioux-Salgas, exhibition curator and archivist at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and editor at Ròt-Bò-Krik.
The Crisis , May 1929
The head of a woman, almost certainly of African origin, is in profile. She is framed by high-rise buildings— symbols of modernity. In the background, borne by the rays of the sun, shine the initials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Crisis , founded in 1910 by the African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, is the NAACP’s official publication.
I am a historian of Africa, and have been an archivist and exhibition curator at the Musée du Quai Branly –Jacques Chirac since 2003. I discovered Du Bois when I was researching the cultural and political history of the Black diaspora of the twentieth century, and in particular the transnational exchanges that illuminate it. In Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept , published in 1940, Du Bois wrote: “With the combined aid of these workers and many others, we could, through The Crisis . . . place consistently and continuously before the country a clear-cut statement of the legitimate aims of the American Negro and the facts concerning his condition. We began to organize his political power and make it influential and we started a campaign against lynching.”
The Crisis was both an African American and a panAfrican publication, distributed throughout the world. This splendid issue was acquired by the librarians of the Musée d’Éthnographie du Torcadéro (predecessor of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac) as soon as it appeared in print in 1929. Today, the museum also holds other important publications documenting Black internationalism of the 1930s, such as the Nardal sisters’ La Revue du monde noir (1931–32) and Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology (1934).
Aaron Douglas illustrated the covers for several issues of The Crisis, including this one; he also illustrated covers
for novels by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, two major authors of the New Negro movement. This intellectual movement, part of the larger Harlem Renaissance, was first named in the 1920s by an early proponent, the African American intellectual Alain Locke. For Locke, the term encompassed all the forms of expression (poetry, literature, art, sociology, history, and more) used by its participants. The movement’s actors took pride in their own unique positionality, making clear their desire to be part of American culture while also affirming their African origins.
The cover of this issue of The Crisis —a special edition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the NAACP—resembles a political poster, and it brings together all of the artistic, intellectual, and political challenges and commitments that Locke identified. Its powerful image resonates strongly with a passage from the essay “Criteria of Negro Art” that Du Bois had published in the magazine in 1926: “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand and . . . say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
As I was preparing my first exhibition, devoted to the history of the publishing house Présence Africaine— Présence Africaine: A Forum, a Movement, a Network , on view at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in 2009, and then at the library of the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, in 2011—I discovered this magnificent issue of The Crisis in the museum’s collection. I decided to show it as a work of art in its own right.
MUSÉE DU LOUVRE
Côme Fabre, curator at the Musée du Louvre’s Department of Painting.
Johann Richard Seel, Portrait of the Bloem Sisters , 1841
Discovered at the 2024 edition of TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation), this double portrait has just made its entrance at the Musée du Louvre. Hanging alongside landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Lessing in the only room in the museum devoted to German painting of the nineteenth century, the painting radiates a strange, cold, severe beauty.
It was not an obvious move for the Louvre to acquire a work by Johann Richard Seel (1819–1875), an artist unknown even to most Germans. But a museum’s vocation is not solely to buy “names.” It must be receptive to the appeal of great works that are rich in meaning, with perfect material integrity, that are representative of a certain spirit of their times but perhaps also transgressing those times’ dominant norms. This is how the field of knowledge is extended, and how tomorrow’s masterpieces find their way toward recognition.
These qualities are immediately apparent when one first comes across the Bloem sisters. These two young women from Düsseldorf were the daughters of a Prussian high civil servant who was open to progressive ideas. Their brothers were to be lawyers, members of parliament, with a role in the failed revolution of 1848–49 in Germany. Today, we know next to nothing about Friderike Bloem (born in 1823), but we do know that Betty Bloem (1824–1905) wrote short novels, and that thanks to a chance meeting brought about by summer holidays spent away, she became friendly with Jenny von Westphalen when she was engaged to the philosopher Karl Marx. Many years later, Betty would publish the story of her visit to the Marx family, then living in exile in London.
When they posed for Seel in 1841, Friderike and Betty were eighteen and seventeen years old—on the threshold of their adult lives. Many clues suggest that they nourished
ambitions far different from the motherly duties assigned to them by their social class. This is not a traditional “status portrait.” To begin with, the sisters are positioned in an imaginary space that seems neither interior nor exterior, and the light is as unreal as it is intense. Behind them, the pillars of a loggia in a curious Gothic-Moorish style open onto a vast, mountainous, uninhabited landscape punctuated by a few ruins. With their backs turned to that immensity, the two sisters occupy a space hemmed in by plants whose disproportionate size draws our attention. To this writer’s eye, the arresting vegetal sculptures do not threaten the sisters but represent, rather, their alter egos. The white calyx of the giant calla lily echoes the inner lining of the seated woman’s dress. Around her neck hangs a shell necklace with a Latin cross pendant. Her silver-and-jet jewelry contrasts with the gold pieces worn by her sister. The standing sister’s crimson dress echoes the pink camellias blooming to her side.
The standing figure looks directly at us, while the seated one avoids our gaze. Indeed, the young women seem to have quite different personalities, recalling a long line of rival sisters: the biblical parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the story of Martha and Mary, or the allegories of Sacred and Profane Love. The seated sister who avoids our gaze and displays her devotion on her bodice is the same one whose fingers play with the cord in front of her genitals, and her arms are uncovered, while her sister covers her own arms with her long sleeves, and one hand is gloved. That said, impressions of
complementarity—of fusion, almost—are also discernible. The bodies are held fast together; the hands touch and interlace. The sinuous lines of the young women’s arms echo the curling leaves enveloping them.
Given what clues are provided, certainties become unstable, and ambiguity reigns: we are unsure which of the two is the elder versus the younger. Our disquiet grows when we recall that the painter was only twentytwo years old when he made this portrait, no doubt his first original creation after his training at the Düsseldorf Academy. As a very young man painting women just a few years younger than himself, we imagine mutual desires crackling in the air.
This magical portrait calls up a multitude of impressions, mixing frustration and sensuality, confinement and vitality, materialism and imagination. To me it evokes certain scenes in Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (1999), the best 1930s portraits by Christian Schad, and the first lines of one of Richard Wagner’s most beautiful compositions, Im Treibhaus (In The Hothouse): “High-arching crowns of leaves / canopies of emerald / you children from far-off climes / tell me, why do you grieve?” Those words were authored by a woman, Mathilde Wesendonck (1828–1902), at the time three years younger than the Bloem sisters, born in the same city as Seel and having grown up, like the other three, in Düsseldorf.
Left: The Crisis, May 1929, Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Right: Johann Richard Seel, Portrait of the Bloem Sisters, 1841, oil on canvas, 42 ½ × 34 ¼ inches (108 × 87 cm), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Frank Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York
LONGINGS IN SEARCH OF AN ECHO THE OPERA AND PARIS
Novelist Andrew Winer speaks with soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen about affinities between the city of Paris and the art form of opera.
If you refuse opera, consider this: Why do you like Paris? After all, if you refuse something that is designed to please you, you risk choosing your longings over what could be their echo. And our longings are deprived of an echo most of the time. It’s why people fly from all over the world to visit Paris. It’s also why people—some people— go to the opera.
Am I positing a special kinship between opera and Paris? You bet. I believe that opera, our experiencing of it, is qualitatively different in Paris than in other cities— a difference, I wager, that is built literally into the place and figuratively and temperamentally into its inhabitants. Recently, during her triumphant return to the LA Opera in La Traviata , I had a chance to run this theory by Rachel Willis-Sørensen, who has sung in Paris on numerous occasions, and will sing the lead in La Traviata there on December 8 at the Philharmonie de Paris. WillisSørensen has received the impossible from the French press: high praise. She belongs to that rare breed of song builders —singers capable of involving the audience not only in the emotional effects of a song, but in its construction. When this happens, the walls come down. For singer and audience alike, the song becomes our longings, and its effects their echo.
But what are our longings? I pose the question to WillisSørensen in her dressing room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after LA Opera’s music director, James Conlon, has come in to congratulate her on another breathtaking performance. “Well, we want something higher, better,” Willis-Sørensen answers, and I concur. Those who go to the opera go with a heart that is open to and honest about the nature of art. They seek order, and order requires hierarchy. Look at what’s valued: the best singing, wonderful staging, great directing. As with art, so with Paris,
a city often called “great,” “wonderful,” and “the best,” not without reason. While its long historical obsession with justice perhaps renders it a little conflicted, inwardly, about hierarchical values, outwardly Paris enjoys an unambiguous loyalty to exaltation, elevation, laudation, glory, and, obviously, manners. I share these impressions with Willis-Sørensen. “Maybe,” she replies. “The French have no shame about pleasure seeking. But they’re so moderate about it. Pleasure is something to be enjoyed without shame, but not to excess. In my culture, you have to berate yourself for eating a cookie. In France, you just eat a cookie.”
Pleasure. Isn’t that another thing we long for? She nods. “In Paris, they express pleasure at the end. It’s more jovial than in Eastern Europe, where clapping is very quiet and super-weirdly long—golf clapping for forty-five minutes. In Vienna they take opera very seriously, but there isn’t that special Parisian atmosphere of pleasure without shame. Still, the French are more demure than people in the States, where clapping is very loud and very short. In Paris, it’s: This is part of my day. My life . If you disappoint them, it will be very apparent.”
How, I ask, can she tell when they aren’t disappointed? Willis-Sørensen insists that she can gauge by the number of people who meet her at the stage door afterward. “Parisians are very loyal to the artists they know. When I made my house debut at the Bastille with The Tales of Hoffmann , I was an unknown factor. But they were weeping at my door. That really surprised me—the makeup-stained faces, young and old.” Sighingly, she adds: “It only lasts for a second.”
I reply, “Great moments —also something we long for.”
“I have them while singing. But afterward, in most cities, I jump into an Uber and am driven through some
ugly mishmash of a downtown with human filth on the sidewalks and buildings that don’t make sense. Whereas in Paris, I exit the theater and the city seems to validate my heightened moments.”
“For a moment,” I note.
She laughs. “Yes. Singers don’t leave traces in the material world.”
With that I must disagree. I like to imagine that a trace is left in a city each time a singer sings there. You walk out after the opera and feel notes and voices clinging to your clothes. “Especially in Paris,” I argue, “where the radiance opera seeks can illuminate the evening, the river. When I walk through Paris, I catch tiny traces of past performances on the wind.”
“That’s very beautiful,” Willis-Sørensen concedes.
“Another thing we can’t ignore—beauty,” I suggest. “Clearly everyone longs for it, and they find it in Paris, where beauty is a permanent thing.”
“But not in opera,” she answers peremptorily, as if cautioning me against rendering the comparison facile. “You’re there for two hours and then it’s gone. So you have to revisit it, again and again. It’s almost a spiritual thing, to re-see something many times. Re-hear it. Re-feel it. Re-embody it. And, for me, re-sing it. By revisiting anything over and over, you practice an orientation toward important things. You keep adjusting to a song, a place. Keep trying to make room for them in your life and end up creating a history of meaning for yourself. Look how many times I’ve been to Paris or sung the Four Last Songs, a city and a work that were once utterly foreign to me. Now I feel I’ve known them all my life.”
Paris is nevertheless capable of feeling uncongenial and intimidating to me, I confess to her. Almost tyrannical. Its reality can feel stronger than I am, what with its
unalloyed beauty, its stony surfaces, its walled exclusions, its many long-established perfections. “What does anything I could do matter or mean in the face of that?” I ask her. “It’s easy for me to become overwhelmed even by the city’s collective love for itself.”
“The whole world is in love with Paris,” she corrects me. “I didn’t know this until I dated someone from there and was trying to prove him wrong, saying, ‘You’re fine, but it’s not that great.’ The Paris snobbery thing. The idea that it’s the birthplace of art, of all good ideas. He thought this without guile.” Suddenly, she breaks into an imitation of the man’s French accent: “‘But Paris is the best place on Earth. Everyone knows this.’ I laughed in scorn. ‘Are you stupid?’ But then I realized, Oh, it’s actually not untrue. They have everything. Who isn’t obsessed with Paris? If you were to ask me now where would I want to live, I would fight it—I would name somewhere weird, like Madagascar. But the truth is, I would want to live in the 11th arrondissement of Paris.” She giggles. “I would build a life for myself there. I would go to the florist every week and buy a bouquet of roses to put on my table.”
Now she is identifying the same problem, I tell her, that plagues opera. The prettiness. The formal playingup of surface things with heightened, self-conscious manners. The pretense that the old, established order is still in effect. All these things have sometimes closed Paris off to me, have sometimes prevented me from opening myself to opera. Albert Camus, writing about what he thought was “hateful” in Paris, identified it as “a hideous sentimentality that sees everything beautiful as pretty and everything pretty as beautiful.”
Willis-Sørensen replies that it’s on the singer, mainly, to mount a rearguard action on such sentimentality. Contemporary audiences misunderstand opera’s use of exaggeration. In the same way that Paris’s loftiest limits mask its lower—the way the ornate flourishes of its central arrondissements conceal a surrounding situation of social anomie and inadequacy—opera’s ravishments, its over-the-top-ness, its sets, its stylizations, its enormous amount of talk and song, conceal whole microcosms of colliding, messy truths.
“No opera is ever as absurd as its summarized story. It’s my job to represent opera as if it weren’t weird. Yes , what we’re doing is weird. In real life no one sings what they want to say. So I almost want people not to notice my singing, but instead that the thing I’m saying is so significant, it has to exist as song. I’m trying to normalize it for people. If you do it wrong, it looks like you’re singing opera. Then they’re watching this weird, halting thing on stage where a bunch of people exaggerate emotions in ways that are too stilted for our era. That’s why I have to be inside my acting, for example, which is really hard because the timing isn’t natural—it’s prescripted by the composer. Trying to make it seem like the tempo it’s written in is the same as the tempo I would say it as speech, making it take up all the space but nevertheless remaining committed to the meaning of the words— that’s the difficulty.”
She checks her watch—she has a dinner to attend and stands up, my cue to do the same. “It’s similar to conversing with Parisians,” she says. “I’m the one with the responsibility to them. I don’t like it when a singer appears too keen for people’s approval. Dial down the ego, and you dial up the value of the creation. And it’s not healthy for the voice to go outward. In France, they talk about singing in the mask. I don’t slam people into their seats with what I’m saying. I’m not stabbing them with it. It has to go into me and pour out like a fountain. Does the fountain come to them, or do they have to come to the fountain? Of course, they have to come to the fountain. This kind of exchange—a bit mannered, moderate, hewing to form—suits the French just fine. It mirrors their everyday interactions. Desire lies underneath the exchange, probably what Freud called Eros . Anxieties. Tamed sexual instincts. Tamed survival instincts.”
Yes , I think, walking out a few minutes later into LA’s own mishmash of a downtown. That’s when the opera, like a city, throws us back on ourselves. There must be a reason that Paris and the opera are molded the way they are, these magnificent containers—gilded cages?—for the gamut of human behavior. Vanity, desire, betrayal, revolt, murder, self-indulgence, tenderness, sentimentality,
love, despair, passion, pride—are these necessary echoes of that most powerful of all our longings, the never-ending quest of the heart to know itself? I sometimes think I’m incapable of loving the opera. Just as I sometimes think I’m incapable of loving a city so prodigal with glory and indifference that it can’t possibly love me back. Both seem to entrap me, more than I would prefer, in my own chaotic cage of emotions and drives.
But for a few fickle moments—I never know when it might hit me—human unreason comes to me, unbidden, transformed into the most measured and reasonable buildings on Earth, or into a singer’s breath rendered plangent and pure. Then, and only then, does beauty, writ large, feel like the perfect justice. And for those instants, for Paris as for the opera, I faithfully reserve the highest part of me, no matter that they will, inescapably, disappoint me in some of the details.
Rachel Willis-Sørensen can also be heard on her two recordings on Sony: Rachel and Strauss: Four Last Songs Opera can be heard in Paris at the Opéra national de Paris (Opéra Bastille and Palais Garnier), Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Opéra Comique, the Philharmonie de Paris, and many other theaters.
Opposite:
Rachel Willis-Sørensen.
Photo: Olivia Kahler
Below:
The Palais Garnier, Paris.
Photo: ZUMA Press, Inc./ Alamy Stock Photo
CROSSWORD
By Myles Mellor
Across
1 Poet and critic who published the Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris in 1924, André
5 Famous first name in Paris’ fashion world
8 Was decked out in
10 Jazz-pop singer Jarreau whose headstone reads: “I know I can / Like any man / Reach out my hand / And touch the face of God.”
11 Boléro composer
13 Promotional piece
14 Romantic comedy set in Montmartre
17 Rapper who made the album Scorpion and the single “What Ya Want”
19 Margarita fruit
20 à café (coffee cup in French)
21 Victor Hugo classic, slangy short form (two words)
23 Noted Surrealist who met Picasso in Paris
25 Director of Beau Travail , Claire
27 French actor who played in the Pink Panther remake in 2006, Reno
The Grand Louvre Project architect
Dawn time
Peach state, abbr.
Writer Forster’s initials
42 Agree (with)
44 Reddish-brown
46 “Little” in French
47 Building addition
49 Painter of The Marble Polisher (two words)
50 Michel de Montaigne’s genre
51 Liberates (two words) Down
1 Favorite hat for Parisian artists
2 Santa’s workers
3 Hibou is the French word for this night bird
4 Rejection word
5 Chaired
6 Belief system
7 One of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, Beauty
9 Remy, in Ratatouille
10 Goal
12 James Cameron movie that outgrossed his own Titanic
15 Bible prophet
16 The Last Time I Saw Paris actress, Taylor
18 four : French bite-size cake
22 Spark of innovation
24 Camera’s creation
26 “ gather” (two words)
27 Quip
29 One of Estée Lauder’s ambassadors, de Armas
31 Chris Marker’s sci-fi featurette (two words)
33 In Search of Lost Time author, Marcel
35 Napoleon, e.g.
37 Last word in the title of a famous Ancient Greek sculpture in the Louvre
39 Crème
41 Lorraine : classic French brunch item
43 Colors of the French national soccer team, colloquially
45 Praises
48 The meaning of Sacre in Sacre Coeur
Gagosian Journal October 2024
Founder: Larry Gagosian
Editor-in-chief: Alison McDonald
Managing Editor: Wyatt Allgeier
Editor Online and Print: Gillian Jakab
Executive Editor: Derek C. Blasberg
Design: Graphic Thought Facility
Publisher: Jorge Garcia
Distribution Manager: Alexandra Samaras
Prepress: DL Imaging Printing: Pureprint Group
Locations
1 4 rue de Ponthieu, Maison Ancart
2 9 rue de Castiglione, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Venus
3 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget, James Turrell: At One
7 Fondation Louis Vuitton Plus all Gagosian locations
Exhibitions
8 Bourse de Commerce
Arte Povera, featuring Giuseppe Penone
9 Centre Pompidou
Chine, une nouvelle génération d’artistes, featuring Hao Liang
10 Fondation Louis Vuitton
Pop Forever, featuring Tom Wesselmann, Lauren Halsey, Derrick Adams, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol
11 Institut Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti: Ne pas parler de sculptures peintes
12 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
L’âge atomique: Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire , featuring Francis Bacon, Chris Burden, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, Giuseppe Penone, and Jim Shaw 13 Musée de l’Orangerie
Heinz Berggruen, un marchand et sa collection , featuring Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti 14 Musée des Arts Décoratifs L’Intime, de la chambre aux réseaux sociaux, featuring Nan Goldin
15 Musée Marmottan Monet
Le trompe-l’œil, de 1520 à nos jours, featuring Giuseppe Penone
16 Musée Picasso
Jackson Pollock. Les premières années (1934–1947), featuring Pablo Picasso
PARIS
Illustration by Teresa Mathew
