News in museums

The collection of Louis-Antoine and Véronique Prat, which they started in the 1970s, has become one of the world’s most prestigious private collections of French drawing and, in 1995, it became the first to be shown in an exhibition at the Louvre.

Le Petit Palais has decided to organize a new and expanded presentation of this collection in 2020 to coincide with the opening of the Salon du Dessin, an event that attracts all French and international art lovers.

The Prat Collection focuses on illustrations from the French school before 1900, and provides a particularly representative overview of three centuries of French art, from Callot to Seurat.

The two collectors have always favoured works that are significant landmarks in art history, and some of their most famous drawings are closely associated with the genesis of seminal works in French painting: the decorations at Versailles, for example, by Le Brun, Coypel and La Fosse, Andromache Mourning Hector by David, The Dream of Ossian by Ingres, and Degas’s The Belleli Family.

The drawings by Poussin, Watteau, Prud’hon, Delacroix, Gros, Millet, Redon, Cézanne and Toulouse‑Lautrec in this collection are certainly among their most important.

The collection also includes masterpieces by artists such as La Hyre, Restout, Vincent, Peyron, Girodet, Doré and Gustave Moreau, who until recently were still forgotten, but who are gradually finding their rightful place in art history.
Exhibition organised with the Prat Collection

Curators

Pierre Rosenberg, honorary president-director of the Musée du Louvre

Christophe Leribault, director of the Petit Palais

Petit Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris

Opening hours:
– Every day exept Monday, from 10 am to 6 pm
– Late opening on friday until 9 pm

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The Petit Palais will present for the first time in France in almost thirty-five years an exhibition dedicated to the finest hours of Danish painting from 1800 to 1864.

The exhibition organized jointly by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the SMK in Copenhagen and the Petit Palais includes more than 200 works by leading artists from this period such as Christoffer Eckersberg, Christen Købke, Martinus Rørbye and Constantin Hansen. This exhibition offers one of the most ambitious analyzes of this artistic period undertaken for many years.

The exhibition focuses on a number of key themes relating to the social, political, economic and cultural conditions of Denmark in the 19th century and offers a panorama of familiar subjects such as life in Copenhagen, artist at work, travel, landscape painting or family. Precise and delicate paintings, these works offer a dive into 19th century Denmark.

Exhibition organized in collaboration with the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Curator for Le Petit Palais
Servane Dargnies-de Vitry, conservatrice des peintures du XIXe siècle au Petit Palais
Christophe Leribault, directeur du Petit Palais

Picture :
Frederiksborg castle from Jaegerbakken at night
Christein Købke
Copenhague, Hirschprung Museum

Petit Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris

Opening hours:
– Every day exept Monday, from 10 am to 6 pm
– Late opening on friday until 9 pm

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Jacques Joseph Tissot, born in Nantes and a student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, is a major artist of the second half of the 19th century. He was a fascinating, ambiguous figure whose career spanned the English Channel.
Although he has regularly featured in exhibitions devoted to this period, this retrospective is the first dedicated to him in Paris since the exhibition organised at the Petit Palais in 1985.

In the late 1850s, Tissot made his debut in the capital, where his passion for Japanese art and his connections with the most influential circles helped further his painting. In the melting pot that was Paris, in an era when modernity, as formulated by Baudelaire, found its expression in the paintings of Whistler, Manet and Degas, Tissot, with his dandy image, was popular with fashionable society.
After the war of 1870 and the Paris Commune, he moved to London and pursued a high profile career where he moved in the best circles.
Gradually his work focused on the initially radiant, then increasingly frail figure of his companion, Kathleen Newton, who was always present in his paintings. After her death in 1882, Tissot decided to return to France.
His career continued with images of Parisian women of different social classes engaged in various occupations, the subject of a great series of paintings, Women of Paris), and explorations of mystical and religious subjects, with the Prodigal Son series and hundreds of illustrations of the Bible, which brought him great fame at the turn of the 19th century.

With its focus on the figure of James Tissot and a desire to set the art of this painter in the artistic and social context of his time, the exhibition presents both the great successes of an artist who often created iconic images, and his boldest experiments.
It also examines his materials and painting techniques, the themes that were dear to him and their variations, as well as his desire to express himself in different media, such as prints, photography and cloisonné enamels, in addition to painting.

Curators
Marine Kisiel, curator, Musée d’Orsay
Melissa E. Buron, Director, Art Division at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Paul Perrin, curator, Musée d’Orsay
Cyrille Sciama, director, Musée des impressionnismes Giverny

Picture:
James Tissot (1836 – 1902)La galerie du HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth)Vers 1876Huile sur toileH. 68,6 ; L. 91,8 cm
Royaume-Uni, Londres, Tate Collection
© Tate, Londres, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Tate Photography

Musée d’Orsay
1 rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 75007 Paris

Opening hours:
– Open from 9.30am to 6pm daily,
except Mondays
& late night on Thursdays until 9.45pm
– Closed on Mondays

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The exhibition Giorgio de Chirico. Metaphysical painting retraces the career and the artistic and philosophic influences of the artist Giorgio de Chirico from Munich to Turin, then to Paris where he discovered the artistic avant-garde of his era, and lastly Ferrare.

The connections between the painter – discovered by Apollinaire and subsequently backed by the art dealer Paul Guillaume – and the Parisian cultural and literary circles will be highlighted as never before.

 Born in Greece and trained in the fount of classical culture and late German Romanticism, de Chirico developed the foundations of a new artistic exploration alongside his younger brother Alberto Savinio. A student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as of 1908, he discovered the thinking of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as well as the works of Böcklin and Klinger. After travelling to Milan then Florence, it was in France, and more specifically Paris, as of autumn 1911, that he established his unique visual vocabulary through contact with the modernist artistic revolutions. He was quickly noticed by numerous artistic celebrities of the time, among whom Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Raynal, André Salmon, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Jean Paulhan were the first to take an interest in and promote his work.

The exhibition thus comes into its own at the Musée de l’Orangerie alongside the figure of Paul Guillaume, the first art dealer to work with Giorgio de Chirico. On his return to Italy in 1915, he and his brother Savinio were sent to Ferrare for military reasons, where he continued his artistic research. This period (June 1915-December 1918) provided an opportunity for painters Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi to get to know the two brothers, thus resulting in the creation of what was later to be known as the “metaphysical movement” which brings the exhibition to a close. 

Exhibition organised by the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 

Curators

General curator: Paolo Baldacci, Président of the Archivio dell’Arte Metafisica

Exhibition in Paris: Cécile Girardeau, curator, Musée de l’Orangerie

Exhibition in Hamburg: Dr. Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, curator, Hamburger Kunsthalle

Musée de l’Orangerie
Jardin de Tuileries
Place de la Concorde (Seine side)
75001 Paris

Opening hours:
Open daily from 9am to 6pm except Tuesdays

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The exhibition of the work of Anna Metz (born in Rotterdam in 1939) covers the whole of her output, from her first prints made during the 1960s to the polychrome etchings of wooded landscapes executed by her last summer after a journey to Spain.

The display focuses more intensively on the work of the past twenty-five years. Metz had to support a family of three children financially and thus did not really find her own way until the 1990s, when she was over fifty. When her children became independent, she was able to experiment more with the technique of etching. At that time her work became more graphic than autobiographical. The view of a stretch of sea or sand, a fence, a bush or an old garment can inspire a print in which the motif soon gives way to the artist’s ‘adventure’ with the plate and acid.

Anna Metz explores etching in a remarkably free and unorthodox manner, reminiscent of the approach of her model Hercules Segers in the seventeenth century. She sometimes deliberately allows the acid to bite into a metal plate until it collapses. In addition, she adds scraps of paper, textile and aluminium foil to the base in her search for a unique impression. The result of this is that the differences inherent in the same edition are sometimes so great that it would be difficult to guess that the impressions all come from the same plate.

What starts as a landscape or a still-life soon follows its own particular path while it is being printed, transforming itself into a delicate combination of forms, colours and textures. Anna Metz likes chance to play its part. Still it is she who chooses which of the accidental elements to keep or discard. Those retained, she ‘showcases’ in her work.

Curiously enough, after all the acid baths and the stages of printing, after all the experiments and leaving things to chance, most of the etchings still (or once again) evoke the landscape or still-life that first inspired Anna Metz to start work. ‘I think you have to be completely impregnated by a subject to be able to detach yourself from it’, she says. ‘All the same, I never produce the image I originally planned; in general, I showcase the opportunities the image offers me. It can turn out much larger than the idea I had of it at the outset’

Fondation Custodia
121 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris

Opening hours:
Every day except Monday,
from 12 to 6 pm

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Siemen Dijkstra (1968) lives and works in the village of Dwingeloo, in Drenthe in the Netherlands; here he produces spectacular coloured woodcuts in which he seeks to ‘capture on paper the spatial experience of a landscape.’

These are ‘fisheye’ prints, laden with plants and leaves, ripples and grass. But alongside all the details, Dijkstra never loses sight of the global image: light piercing the vegetation, colours that harmonise, the slightly misty atmosphere in the distance.

The technique of reduction woodcut (à bois perdu) that he uses entails each layer of colour being cut out separately from a single piece of wood, then printed successively on the paper. With his large editions sometimes built up out of 10 to 18 colours, the artist evokes, inside his studio, an eloquent world beyond his four walls. ‘What I should really love to do is to be able to reproduce the scents of the outside world’, he says. His prints smell of printing ink, of course, but with the cut-out forms and the printed colours, he is able to suggest light and the sky, the earth and vegetation in masterly fashion.

In the seven exhibition rooms allotted to him at the Fondation Custodia, a selection of Dijkstra’s very best coloured woodcuts is offered, all dating from the past twenty-five years, along with drawings, gouaches and watercolour paintings by his hand.

His work is based upon his acute sense of the history of the landscape he depicts. In his view, the organisations for the protection of nature are mistaken in their attempts to create an idealised landscape: the landscape of Drenthe is unique because the authentic heaths and peat bogs jostle with the agricultural and forested lands of the twentieth century – which have themselves now become a kind of nature. Siemen Dijkstra illustrates this diversity.

The Drenthe landscape is Dijkstra’s main subject, but in Paris representations of other parts of the Netherlands are also on show, as well as drawings and prints executed during (or immediately after) travels in Scandinavia, India and France. At the centre of the exhibition, by way of an intermezzo, can be found drawings of dead animals: birds killed by crashing into a window or a windscreen, rats and mice caught by a cat, weasels, moles and hedgehogs and, less frequently, a stone marten or a squirrel. Still-lifes of fur and feathers.

Fondation Custodia
121 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris

Opening hours:
Every day except Monday,
from 12 to 6 pm

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The Fondation Custodia exhibits 86 of the 600 Italian drawings in its collection, executed by artists from the Renaissance to the Baroque period (Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, Federico Barocci, the Carracci family, Palma Giovane, Guercino, …).

Before drawings became collectible in their own right, drawing constituted one of the essential elements of the artist’s work in the studio. The sketch drawn on the page was the first step to creation; it was the most immediate and most natural visual translation of the inspiration of the artist’s ideas.

The representation of the human figure was a major preoccupation during the Renaissance period and one of the constant interests of Italian art over the centuries. Striving for a narrative ideal in an image which, by its very nature, is fixed in two dimensions, the artists were keen to represent their figures in eloquent proportions and attitudes.

The exhibition highlights the manner in which artists managed to resolve formal problems thanks to the practice of drawing. How to convey the position of the models and the links uniting them? How to translate the effects of light and shade on bodies and on drapery? How to arrange the figures in a confined space, corresponding to the shape and size of the final work?

Fondation Custodia
121 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris

Opening hours :
Every day except Monday,
from 12 to 6 pm

Learn more