TUTTO PONTI, GIO PONTI Archi-Designer

 

The exhibition Tutto Ponti: Gio Ponti, Archi-Designer, presented in the museum’s main hall, covers the entirety of his long career from 1921 to 1978, highlighting numerous aspects of his work from architecture to industrial design, from furniture to lighting, and from the creation of journals to his incursion into the fields of glassware, ceramics and metalwork.

 

 

 

Over 400 pieces, some of which have never left their place of origin, trace this multidisciplinary display that combines architecture, furniture and interior fittings for private homes and public buildings (universities and cathedrals).The exhibition design was conceived by the agency Wilmotte & Associés in collaboration with the graphic designer Italo Lupi. While Gio Ponti’s work is admired today by enlightened design enthusiasts and highly coveted by collectors, it nevertheless remains little known in France. This exhibition is an opportunity to introduce the wider public to the creative world of this mythical character from the Italian design scene, whose generosity and passion stimulated his contemporaries and continues to inspire new generations of designers and architects.

 

 

 

 

Having received his diploma from the Milan Polytechnic, Gio Ponti opened his architecture practice in 1921. In the beginning, he adopted the principles of classically inspired architecture with his villa on the Via Randaccio in Milan. Named artistic director of the Richard-Ginori porcelain manufactory in 1923, he re-evaluated its serial production system, applying his method to all of the company’s creations. His works of neoclassical inspiration were awarded prizes at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925.

 

The following year, he designed his first architectural work abroad, the Ange volant villa in the Parisian aera, France, and collaborated with Christofle in Paris and Venini in Murano. In parallel, Gio Ponti created a series of modestly priced furniture with simple forms, called La Rinascente, for the Italian department stores, thereby making the decorative arts accessible to the greatest number.

Thanks to his connections with the movement Labirinto which gathered designers and manufacturers, he was able to spread his ideas and promote new talents thanks to the exhibitions that he organized at the Monza Biennial, and especially through the journal Domus, which he founded in 1928.

In the 1930s, his architectural practice took a modernist turn with the construction of Case Tipiche and the offices for the company Montecatini in Milan. Among his work in the field of homewares, he designed lighting for Fontana Arte, silverware for Krupp, fabrics for De Angeli-Frua and Ferrari and furniture for Casa e Giardino.

In the 1940s, Gio Ponti turned his attention to creating monumental frescos at the University of Padua’s Palazzo del Bo. He also returned to oil painting, and to his passion for writing, opera and the cinema, creating new screenplays as well as sets and costumes for la Scala in Milan. At the end of the war, as a major protagonist for the “made in Italy” movement, he promoted Italian design abroad through his journal Domus and the exhibitions he organized. He also conceived of two emblematic objects: the aerodynamic coffee machine La Cornuta (1949) for Pavoni and the Leggera chair for Cassina.

 

 

 

From 1950 to 1960, at the peak of his career, Gio Ponti’s style reached a wider international audience with major private architectural commissions in Venezuela, the United States, the Middle East and even Hong Kong. He created two of his masterpieces during this period: Villa Planchart in Caracas and the Pirelli Tower in Milan. Lightness, transparence, clarity, color and simplicity: these are the key words that describe the profusion of activity coming out of his headquarters in Milan – a veritable creative laboratory. He designed numerous objects and furniture pieces at this time, including the Distex armchair for Cassina (reissued since 2012 by Molteni&C) and his luminous composition for Lumi.

In 1957, the chair Superleggera (a variant of the Leggera), one of the lightest in the world, became the icon of his furniture designs.

 

 

Gio Ponti was particularly interested in the interplay between surfaces and colors, and worked towards making walls into elements that are no longer load bearing, but rather elevated, ethereal and almost suspended. He favored ceramic wall coverings that capture and reflect the light, as in the hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento.

In the 1970s, still seeking transparence and lightness, he envisaged his architectural façades as if they were folded pieces of paper pierced with geometric forms, as in the Taranto Cathedral (1970) and the Denver Art Museum (1974). He also took a new approach to furniture design, which became more flexible, mobile, light and luminous in order to adapt the space to contemporary lifestyles.

The exhibition Tutto Ponti: Gio Ponti, Archi-Designer presents a chronological view of Ponti’s six-decade career in the fields of architecture, design, interior design and publishing. An evocation of the Taranto Cathedral, one of his late masterpieces, introduces the circuit that then unfolds in three parts, focusing on objects, furniture and architecture.

 

 

Finally, six “period rooms” conclude the visit with spectacular reconstructions emphasizing the global aspect of his work. The garden-side gallery explores the collaborations that he undertook with major art-object manufacturers such as Richard Ginori, Christofle and Fontana Arte, as well as with artisans and smaller companies. Ceramics, glass and metalwork intermingle with works in papier mâché and enameled copper.

The main hall – the backbone of the exhibition – is punctuated by five sections featuring major commissions, furniture, lighting and textiles, as well as architectural projects detailed chronologically through drawings, models, photographs and films from the period.

Finally, on the Rivoli side, six unique spaces have been conceived, each representing a decade, in order to highlight Ponti’s creations: l’Ange volant in the Parisian aera, the Montecatini building in Milan, the palazzo Bo – Padua University, Gio Ponti’s home on the via Dezza in Milan, the interior of the Parco dei Principi hotel in Sorrento and finally the Villa Planchart in Caracas.

Until the very end, Gio Ponti defended his notion of an “Italian house”, considered to be the ultimate expression of an authentic modern and international civilization. The expression “from the spoon to the city”, attributed to the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969) in reference to Gio Ponti, perfectly embodies the personality of the Milanese architect, whose projects could range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

This catchphrase sums up the breadth of Ponti’s field of exploration, through which richness and originality remained constant in his joyful, colorful and very personal work.

 

 

 

from 19 October 2018 to 10 February 2019

 

MUSEE DES ARTS DECORATIFS

107, rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris

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GRAYSON PERRY

 

The Monnaie de Paris is organising the first major solo exhibition in France by the celebrated British artist Grayson Perry (born 1960, lives in London). Perry’s works in traditional materials such as ceramics, bronze, cast iron, printmaking and tapestry, offer an ironic and darkly humorous look at universal topics such as identity, gender, class, religion and sexuality.

Perry’s honest and candid unpacking of his own identity is part of what drives his appeal far beyond the confines of the art world. Autobiographical references – tothe artist’s childhood, his family and his transvestite alter ego Claire – can be read in tandem with questions about décor and decorum, class and taste, and the status of the artist versus that of the artisan.

 

 

In several of his works he challenges traditional masculinity and demonstrates how its values and traits have been eroded. These themes are further explored in his book The Descent of Man (2016), in which he explores the ways in which rigid masculine roles can be destructive and suggests an upgrade of masculine identity.

 

 

The winner of the Turner Prize in 2003, Perry made his name with his ceramic works, which he began in the 1980s at a time when ceramics were little considered in the contemporary art world. Covered with sgraffito drawings, handwritten and stencilled texts, photographic transfers and rich glazes, Perry’s detailed pots are deeply alluring. Only when we are up close do we start to absorb narratives that might allude to complex subjects, and, even then, the narrative flow can be hard to discern. He uses the seductive qualities of ceramics and other art forms to communicate his thoughts on society.

 

 

The exhibition will occupy the two floors of the Monnaie de Paris and be divided into ten themed chapters that reveal the artist’s interests.

 

 

 

October 19, 2018 thru february 2, 2019

 

MONNAIE DE PARIS

11 quai de Conti 75006 Paris

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The cruel stories of PAULA REGO

Paula Rego, The Dance [La Danse], 1988

 

 

The only female artist in the London Group, Paula Rego set herself apart with her strongly figurative, literary, incisive and singular work.
Born in Lisbon in 1935, Paula Rego left Portugal and Salazar’s oppressive dictatorship as an adolescent to study in London where she has now lived for over fifty years. Trained at the Slade School of Arts, she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney.
As a painter, she produces large pastel polyptychs with exceptional flair. Obsessed by a certain literature and cultural vision of the 19th century, both realistic and imaginary, like her fellow countryman and film director Manoel de Oliveira, Paula Rego intertwines these references (Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, Daumier, Goya, Lewis Carroll, Hogarth, Ensor, Degas, etc.) with strongly autobiographical elements and elements of real life, that of the contemporary world and its social and political issues, with a contemporary twist. Dark narratives, her paintings seem to be taken from a cruel tale and evoke women’s issues in strange scenes, going against social codes.

 

 

 

“My favourite themes are power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots”. In this aspect, Paula Rego’s ideas reflect those of Hogarth, Goya and Grosz, questioning established conventions and revealing with irony the traits of bourgeois society embodied by family, religion and the State.
Drawing her inspiration from the mannequins, dolls and masks staged in her studio, Paula Rego creates characters and animals which she transforms and distorts, thus creating large-format playlets where reality and fiction, dreams and nightmares merge.

 

from 17 October 2018 to 14 January 2019

 

Musée de l’Orangerie

Jardin des Tuileries

Place de la Concorde  75001 Paris

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MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS 1900-1960

 

To celebrate the Year of Japan in France, the Fondation Custodia presents an important retrospective exhibition of early twentieth-century Japanese prints.

 

 

Waves of renewal. Modern Japanese Prints 1900-1960 offers an exciting opportunity to discover, almost for the first time in France, the work of artists who bear witness to the twentieth-century modernisation of Japan. It explores the twin movements shin hanga and sōsaku hanga through more than two hundred prints, the work of about fifty artists.

 

 

The prints on show come from the Nihon no hanga museum in Amsterdam, which houses the collection built up by Elise Wessels over the past twenty-five years. The prints in the collection provide a comprehensive overview of twentieth-century Japanese art. The whole collection will be donated to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in a few years’ time.

 

 

The renewal of Japanese printmaking in the twentieth century

At the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional Japanese print (ukiyo-e) was facing an unprecedented crisis. The cultural context of the production was changing. No prints were being issued anymore related to the Yoshiwara, the brothel neighbourhood of old Edo (Tōkyō) and the link between prints and the daily performance of theatre plays was slowly disappearing. Nor was there an interest anymore to refer in print to the history of Japan and of heroic samurai. The tendency was to be modern and to produce prints for the sake of beauty only. Apart from this, the western market evolved and publishers were aiming to sell their works to American customers and printed English catalogues and organised exhibitions in the United States. The success was immediate and at the beginning of the twentieth century, prints by icons such as Hokusai, Utamaro and Hiroshige were surpassed in value by contemporary artists whose prints were sold in auctions, primarily in New York.

 

 

 

The introduction of new production processes such as lithography, then the rotating press, made it possible for publishers to produce large editions of prints in a short space of time. In addition, the classic prints had been bought by foreign collectors in such great numbers that the beautiful products of eighteenth and nineteenth-century printmakers had become very scarce in Japan. The artists of Japan had themselves left in large numbers to study in Europe and the USA where they had discovered very different approaches to the role of the artist in the creation of the engraved print to those prevailing in their own country.

 

 

from  october 6 2018 until january 6 2019

 

FONDATION CUSTODIA

121 rue de Lille 75007 Paris

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Galerie ALEXANDRE PIATTI

Within the Carré Rive Gauche Alexandre Piatti is the only one to defend the Haute Époque and medieval art, but also Italian art. Son of an antique dealer, he evolved in the world of art from his earliest childhood and he is a real enthusiast who likes to show amateurs and collectors all the modernity of the very old pieces he presents. Rare objects, sometimes of museum quality, and whose original use or history is often unknown, but Alexandre Piatti likes to reveal all their secrets.

Galerie ALEXANDRE PIATTI


11 rue de Beaune 75007 Paris

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GIACOMETTI

 

The Musée Maillol presents a focus on the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and present—in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris—an overview of his oeuvre, complemented by works by the major classical and modern sculptors of his time.

The exhibition present more than 50 sculptures by the artist, all of which are from the Fondation Giacometti collection, complemented by around 25 works by other major artists such as Rodin, Bourdelle, Maillol, Despiau, Brancusi, Laurens, Lipchitz, Zadkine, Csaky, and Richier.

 

Via a chronological and thematic itinerary, the exhibition highlight Giacometti’s relations with these artists at each stage of the development of his style. The itinerary thus shed new light on the little-known pre-war period: the first section of the exhibition is devoted to Giacometti’s early works, which still bear the influences of classical modernism (Despiau and Maillol), and then another larger section will be devoted to the discovery of the Parisian avant-garde artists after 1925 (Zadkine, Lipchitz, and Csaky).

The lure of abstraction, on the fringe of surrealism, is highlighted via fascinating comparisons (Brancusi and Laurens). The exhibition focus on the artist’s return to figurative work based on the study of models and explore his mature style. There is many thematic comparisons with Rodin, Bourdelle, and Maillol: the motif of the head, the bases of the works, and inspiration from early antiquity.

 

The major post-war themes (groups of figures, standing women, and walking men) is explored, from their origins in surrealism with Walking Woman (1932) to the iconic works of the 1950s–60s, such as La Clairière (1950), Woman of Venice III (1956), and Walking Man II (1960). Giacometti’s formal orientations are analysed in a novel way via comparisons with various well-known artists, in particular Rodin, and with some of his contemporaries, such as Richier.

To guide the general public, the itinerary is enriched with a selection of graphic arts and archive documents. Echoing Aristide Maillol’s studio, which has been recreated within the museum, Giacometti’s legendary Parisian studio will also be evoked via an ensemble of the artist’s lithographs and photographs taken by some of the greatest twentieth-century photographers, such as Brassaï, Denise Colomb, Sabine Weiss, and Herbert Matter.

 

 

 

September 14, 2018 – february 3, 2019

 

MUSEE MAILLOL

61 rue de Grenelle 75007 Paris

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PICASSO, BLUE AND ROSE

 

The Musée d’Orsay and the Musée national Picasso-Paris are organising an exceptional event dedicated to Pablo Picasso’s blue and rose periods. This exhibition is the first large-scale collaboration between our two museums. It features masterpieces and proposes a new interpretation on the years 1900-1906, a critical period in the artist’s career which to date has not been covered in its entirety by a French museum.

 

 

 

The presentation of this exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay demonstrates the desire to include the young Picasso in his time and reconsider his work under the prism of his belonging to the nineteenth century.

 

 

The exhibition will bring together a large number of paintings and drawings with the aim of presenting a comprehensive overview of the artist’s sculptures and engravings between 1900 and 1906.

 

 

 

September 18, 2018 – January 6, 2019

 

MUSEE D’ORSAY

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

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HÔTEL LUTETIA

A jewel of Art Deco and the Left Bank, inaugurated in 1910, Le Lutetia was for a long time an unmissable event and its makeover, carried out under the direction of Jean-Michel Wilmotte, was carried out with the greatest respect for the past. . The 184 rooms, including 47 suites, have been extended and modernized

In terms of gastronomy, Brasserie Lutetia is now supervised by three-star chef Gérald Passedat.

The restaurant L’Orangerie serves breakfast during the week as well as a gourmet and well-being brunch on weekends.

The Bar Joséphine offers a lunch to share as well as a selection of sweets for dinner and cocktails throughout the evening in a jazz atmosphere dear to the place.

And finally, the Bar Aristide, an intimate place which has two smoking areas: Le Blue and Le Jazz.

The AKASHA Wellness Center

700 m2 reserved for well-being, fitness and relaxation. A sublime swimming pool, six individual treatment areas, including a double cabin with a Jacuzzi for two. Spaces reserved for relaxation before and after treatments. Locker rooms with private hammams and a 100 m2 gym.

Entirely created for the “new” Lutetia, the Akasha Spa unveils a unique holistic approach based on the 4 elements, surrounded by three major expert brands: Carita, Cellcosmet & Cellmen and Aromatherapy Associates.

HOTEL LUTETIA

45 Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

01 49 54 46 00

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GUCCI

SPRING / SUMMER 2024

GUCCI

161 Boulevard Saint-Germain 75006 Paris

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ETRO

SPRING / SUMMER 2024

ETRO


177 bd Saint Germain 75007 Paris

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PIERRE HERME

In this shop, what we have is more gastronomic pastry than simple pastry. Pierre Hermé is an avant-garde pastry confectioner and a magician with flavors. He revolutionizes the most established traditions and eliminates the excessive or useless decors which clutter cake shops. He uses salt as sugar to bring out other shades of flavors and he constantly reassesses his own work by exploring new territories or by revisiting his own recipes.

PIERRE HERME

72 rue Bonaparte 75006 Paris

01 43 54 47 77

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The Water Lilies. American Abstract Painting and the last Monet

monet_nympheas_bleus Musée de L'Orangerie

 

In 1955, Alfred Barr brought one of Monet’s large panels of Water Lilies (W1992) into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at a time when these great “decorations”, still in the studio in Giverny, were beginning to attract the attention of collectors and museums.

 

tion Américaine Musée de l'Orangerie

 

Monet was presented at that time as “a bridge between the naturalism of early Impressionism and the highly developed school of Abstract Art” in New York, with his Water Lilies seen in the context of Pollock’s paintings, such as Autumn Rhythm (number 30), 1950. The reception of these later Monet works resonated with American Abstract Expression then coming into the museum collections. At the same time, the idea of “Abstract Impressionism” was forged.
The exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie focuses on this precise moment – when the great decorations of the master of Giverny were rediscovered and the New York School of Abstract Art was recognised – with a selection of some of Monet’s later works and around twenty major paintings by American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Mark Tobey, Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Ellsworth Kelly.

 

 

At the entrance to the Water Lilies, there is a tribute to Ellsworth Kelly, the American abstract artist who died in 2015 and whose work is still in dialogue with Monet’s. This display was designed by Eric de Chassey with the support of the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

 

Ellsworth kelly-water-lily Musée de l'Orangerie

 

 

April 13 – August 20, 2018

 

MUSEE DE L’ORANGERIE

Jardin des Tuileries

Place de la Concorde 75001 PARIS

01 44 77 80 07

 

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