For our “customary” Sunday morning museum trip, my daughter and I visited MaM, the museum of modern art of the City of Paris. (This happened to coincide with the starting point of the road race Paris-Versailles, so the area was full of runners and would-be runners wearing garbage bags to cut off the sharp wind!) The MaM is located within the Palais de Tokyo, which is an impressive building of the 1930’s in a poor state, as shown by the pictures above… No wonder burglars had no trouble getting away with masterpieces earlier this year! The rooms of the museum are however quite decent and include pieces from major 20th century artists like Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Delaunay, Matisse, Bonnard… There was a special room dedicated to Eugène Leroy, with intricate multilayered compositions (that my daughter simply hated)! Continue reading
Archive for Turner
morn at the MaM
Posted in Kids, pictures, Running with tags Eugène Leroy, Jorge Luis Borges, MaM, Paris, Paris-Versailles, Pierre Soulages, replicas, Turner on October 2, 2010 by xi'anTurner
Posted in Kids, pictures with tags Grand Palais, Monet, Paris, Titien, Turner on April 4, 2010 by xi'an
My daughter and I went to see the exhibit “Turner and the masters” in Grand Palais, Paris, this morning. When I first saw his fiery sky paintings at The Tate, more than twenty years ago, I thought that no other painter had produced such a strong impression of skies and light (although the final Monets come close in terms of rendering of sheer light). It was thus a pleasant prospect to see more Turners in Paris. The exhibit’s theme was to contrast Turner’s paintings with the masters’ he took his inspiration from (Lorrain, Titien, Rembrandt, Watteau, Constable, Veronese) by putting the paintings next to one another. This does not always turn to the advantage of Turner, but the stronger emphasis on light and aerial colours is a constant. Some of his most academic paintings like the one commemorating Trafalgar are seriously missing, especially in the rendering of characters, but there are a few of Turners’ masterpieces in the exhibit, like the one above and Snow Storm and Moonlight, a study at Millbank, below.
Those paintings are clearly prefiguring impressionism, more than thirty years before, but the exhibit does not go into this direction. Besides the paintings, the exhibit also shows one notebook Turner used when visiting Le Louvre with a superb reproduction of Titien… The exhibit runs till May 24 and tickets must be purchased in advance.
