Skip to main content

At the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

I'm in Paris, France, for three weeks, teaching on Columbia College Chicago's study abroad program. The students don't arrive until the weekend, so I'm just relaxing in the city and our rented apartment in Montparnasse, on an easy schedule of one museum per day followed by a nap and a light dinner (with wine, of course).

On Wednesday, we went to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, near the Place de l'Alma. Half of the permanent collection was closed, but I still saw some seminal twentieth century works. From the first third of the century, there was the giant canvas-mural La Danse, the second version, painted for an American patron in the early 1930s. Inside the vast room that housed the works, there were two small cabinet with some fascinating photos, such as this one of Matisse sketching the mural:


When you enter the hall where the paintings are displayed, you first see the sketched version:


On the right, you can just about see one of the museum docents, which gives you a sense of the scale of the piece. The sketch is particularly interesting in that you see the curtain pulled back on Matisse's process of creation, with its sure steady lines and its washes of thinned oil colours. On the other side of the wall, the finished version itself, cut in the shape of the wall spaces in which it was originally installed:


The colours are not as vibrant as the original version of La Danse --also a mural, designed for a Russian collector -- and the figures are more angular, the outlines sharper, It still ahs that Matissean flowing rhythm, though.

In another part of the museum, the Christian Boltanski room, an underground chamber with three of his installations from the lasts decades of the twentieth century. This photograph shows two pieces: a room of photographs of children lit by interrogation chamber-style lamps, and a room of shelves piled high with children's clothing, horribly reminiscent of the storage facilities in the Nazi death camps, where the Nazis forced the sonder commandos (press-ganged camp inmates) to sort through the belongings of the murdered to root out anything valuable.


Popular posts from this blog

Restoring my Printing Press

I've just finished restoring and assembling my large etching press -- a six week process involving lots of rust removal, scrubbing with steel wool, and repainting. Here is a photo of the same kind of press from the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative: And here is a short YouTube video of me testing the press, making sure the motor still works after nearly seven years of lying in storage:

Brancusi in Plastic

Artist Mary Ellen Croteau is showing these columns made from recycled plastic cartons and lids in the window of the Columbia College bookstore on Michigan Avenue. They are a playful homage to Brancusi's "Endless Columns", with a serious environmental message for our times: Image copyright Inhabitat.com and Mary Ellen Croteau Mary Ellen also runs a wonderful experimental art gallery in a window space in west Chicago, called Art on Armitage . I will be exhibiting a mixed media piece there during August 2012.

How to etch a linoleum block

Linoleum as a material for printmaking has been used for nearly a hundred years now. Normally, you cut an image out using special gouges similar to woodcut tools, cutting away the lino around the image you want to print. This is called relief printmaking, because if you look at the block from the side, the material that remains stands up in relief from the backing material. You then roll ink with a brayer over the surface of the block, place paper over it, and either print by hand or run it through a press. You can do complex things this way (for example, reduction linocuts), but the beauty of the process is that it is quick, simple, and direct. Incised lino block, from me.redith.com Etched lino block, from Steve Edwards A few years ago, I saw some prints that were classified as coming from etched linoleum blocks, and I loved the textures I saw in them. In the last few months, I've been trying to use this technique in my own studio, learning about it as one does these d