Paris Delices City Guide

Until July 29th - Lalique
Musée du Luxembourg. 19, rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris

Until June 4th - Pascin
Musée Maillol. 61, rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris

Until June 25th - Picasso-Carmen
Musée Picasso. Hôtel Salé, 5, rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris

Until June 3rd - Richard Kalvar. Terriens.

This exhibition looks back at the 40-year career of the American and Parisian photographer Richard Kalvar, who travelled across the USA, Europe and Japan in search of unusual, moving and amusing pictures. Though Richard Kalvar travelled widely, his journeys did not lead him towards photo-journalism. He could even be termed an ” anti-photojournalist “. He opted for a more impressionistic, psychological and enigmatic approach. His photos create an interplay between the apparent banality of a situation and an impression of strangeness, constantly shifting between several levels of interpretation. Shot through with ambiguity and dark humour, these deceptively classical photographs provide a singular means of engaging with reality.

source : Maison Europeenne de la Photographie

Maison Europeenne de la Photographie. 5-7 rue de Fourcy, 75004 Paris
www.mep-fr.org

Until May 19th - Andy Warhol. Popstars. Drawings and collages.

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce the opening of the new drawing space with the exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Popstars. The exhibition of this group of works was organized by the gallery for the Albertina Museum of Vienna.

In collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Warhol’s death, this exhibition will combine drawings and collages of pop stars, one of his primary themes. We will be presenting major works from his Popstars series dating from between 1975 and 1986.

Andy Warhol, who started out in the 1950s as a commercial artist in New York, was intimately familiar with the medium of drawing and photography. Drawing was relevant to the artist in a twofold way : On the one hand, he used it as a « tool », producing preliminary studies for his well-known subjects, such as the ‘disaster’ paintings, portraits, and icons of consumerism ; on the other hand, he presented the drawing as a work of art in its own right, where he used the « artificial processes » of overhead projection, silk-screen printing, or superimposed photography.

Andy Warhol’s Popstars graphite drawings were developed in a creative process comprising two stages. First, Warhol took Polaroids of pop musicians, actors, and singers, which he subsequently projected onto the wall, and onto the paper mounted there, by means of overhead projection. Finally, using a gray graphite pencil, he traced the outlines that seemed most significant to him in order to mark the features of his sitters.

These graphite drawings may also be considered as models and studies for the colored acrylic and silk-screen pictures executed by Warhol of the same personalities. There they will encounter Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli, Charles Aznavour, as well as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. From 1963 onwards, Warhol entertained a particularly close relationship with the Stones. Mick Jagger, androgynous icon and paragon of the zeitgeist of those days, was committed to paper by Warhol’s reduced and perfect penciling. In the mid-1970s, Warhol made the designs for the album cover of Love You Live, which appeared in 1977 at Virgin Records. The original drawings of the Love You Live series and the ingenious portraits of Mick Jagger are certainly the climax of the exhibition.

For further information, please contact Victoire de Pourtales (+33 1 42 72 99 00 or victoire@ropac.net).

Source - Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. 7, rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris
www.ropac.net

Until July 1st - Rembrandt and the New Jerusalem. Jews and Christians in Amsterdam during the Golden Age.

The Rembrandt and the New Jerusalem exhibition brings together over 190 works (paintings, etchings, artefacts, manuscripts and rare documents), including five paintings by Rembrandt never previously shown in France. It explores the relationship between a major ensemble of works by the master and his contemporaries and a cultural and religious event of considerable significance: the arrival in Amsterdam in the 17th century, in a unique climate of tolerance, of Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe. The Netherlands was then undergoing a period of intense ‘Hebraic identification’, during which the Dutch saw themselves as the new Israelites. The Jewish and Reformed Christian worlds mingled in Amsterdam, the ‘New Jerusalem’, where they forged innumerable religious and cultural bonds. This community of ‘new Christians’, had been forcibly converted in Portugal but secretly never renouncing Judaism. In Amsterdam, they became ‘new Jews’, laid the foundations of modern Jewish society and innovated in many fields: in the organisation of the community, in self-representation in images and archives, in their acculturation and in their integration into society.

source : Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme

Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, 71, rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
www.mahj.org

Until July 30th - The image to come - How cinema inspires photographers

“The image to come” is an expression coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson to define filmmaking as opposed to photography. For the photographer, the cinema is always what comes next : not the image that is being viewed or projected onto the screen, but the next one, taken as a progression. The still versus the moving picture. Could the opposite also hold true, that cinema acts as an “image that came before”, inspiring the photographer while he captures reality? How does cinema infiltrate the photographer’s imagination? To what extent does the photographer project his dreams, fantasies, and obsessions onto the world?

In celebration of Magnum’s 60th anniversary in 2007, we questioned ten of its photographers, from different generations, representing various trends in documentary photography today. They revealed to us how a director, film, or scene left an imprint in the labyrinth of their psyche and how this imprint in turn affected or influenced their work. Many photographers have acknowledged the patent influence of another art on their practice. Deeply buried, mobile images superimpose themselves on the film of life: a way of framing what happens, “under influence”.

Transition, infiltration, and superimposition narrow down the complicity between the two media. Cinema creates the illusion of the real so that the spectator cannot doubt its verisimilitude; photography draws on the imagination to re-establish the truth of lived experience. Standing at the frontier between the true and the false, the certain and the uncertain, the just and the unjust. The ultimate possibility for recounting a reality that is mobile, evasive, on which we cannot get a re-take. “We know that under the image which is revealed, there is another one, more faithful to reality, and under this other one, there is yet another, and on it goes. Right up to the image of absolute reality, mysterious, that no one will ever see.” (Michelangelo Antonioni)

source : Diane Dufour and Serge Toubiana

Cinémathèque française. 51, rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris
www.cinematheque.fr