War photographers are mostly portrayed as a macho breed, summed up in the death-defying bravado of Al Rockoff as played by John Malkovich in the movie The Killing Fields, about the genocide in Cambodia, or the frontline action motto of … Read More
The subtitle of the National Library of France’s exhibition commemorating the 400th birthday of the great comic playwright Molière – “Le Jeu du Vrai et du Faux,” meaning “play on truth and falsehood” – not only captures very well a … Read More
Of all the horrors that occurred during World War II, the mass exodus from Paris in 1940 as the Germans approached the city may not have been the most horrendous, which may explain why the story has been so seldom … Read More
The latest exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, always on the lookout for new ways to present its collection of 19th-century art, is “Huysmans Critique d’Art: De Degas à Grünewald, sous le Regard de Francesco Vezzoli.” That long title translates into … Read More
The first time I saw an exhibition of El Greco’s paintings, I thought they were profoundly weird and incomprehensible, but over time I have grown to love them and seek them out in the museums I visit. Now we can … Read More
Berthe Morisot (1841-95), a key French Impressionist painter, has not been the subject of a major exhibition in France since 1941. Is this because she was a woman and therefore dismissed as a minor painter? Perhaps. The current exhibition of … Read More
If you have been mooning around wondering why no one has ever staged an exhibition about that big cheese ball in the sky, your worries are over. The Grand Palais is holding a show called “The Moon: Real and Imaginary … Read More
For its latest temporary exhibition, “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” the Musée d’Orsay has scoured Western art history for examples of people of color posing for artists and has conducted extensive research to learn more about these models and, … Read More
The exhibition “Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets” at the Grand Palais in Paris tells the tale of how the Russian Revolution of 1917 affected the arts under the Soviet regime, but it inadvertently goes beyond … Read More
The Musée d’Orsay has put together a sweet little exhibition focusing on a small painting by Paul Sérusier that is considered seminal for the development of 19th-century art. As the curators note, “Landscape in the Bois d’Amour” (aka “Le Talisman”) is … Read More
