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Arcimboldo’s Seasons

Arcimboldo’s Seasons have returned to the walls of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre Museum after a restoration by Roberto Merlo of the Arcanes workshop, who transformed them and allowed the composite heads to be restored to their original format with impressive monumentality and sculptural relief. The figures breathe on the black background. The intervention has restored the subtlety of the palette and much more ambiguous expressions. The dialogue imagined by Arcimboldo between the four seasons is thus much more lively.

The series was offered by Emperor Maximilian II of Habsburg to Elector Augustus of Saxony. When he received the commission in 1573, Arcimboldo had been at the court in Vienna for eleven years. An official portrait painter, he was especially famous for his “composite heads”, assemblages of plants, animals or various objects that symbolized an allegorical figure or a real person.

The Seasons are virtuoso and amusing inventions and they also have a symbolic and political dimension. They evoke the four ages of man (childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age), the Elements (Air, Fire, Earth, Water) and the temperaments (sanguine, choleric, atrabilious, phlegmatic), according to a game of correspondence between the different parts of nature, specific to the spirit of the Renaissance.

Musée du Louvre

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Ellsworth Kelly

A collection of collages, drawings and postcards from the 1950s to Ellsworth Kelly’s last collaboration with the Revue Cahiers d’Art in 2012: this exhibition, designed in close collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, invites us to discover Kelly’s research into form, colour and composition on paper.

The small format of the works provides a unique opportunity to capture the intimacy of Kelly’s artistic process. Spanning seven decades, these works illustrate the artist’s love of line, form, and the beauty of nature’s shapes. Kelly’s postcards highlight the artist’s mastery of a strong aesthetic in a concise composition. Often sent to family and artist friends, these works reflect Kelly’s deep attraction to the colors and poetic forms of everyday life.

The collages express Kelly’s innovative exploration of formal and chromatic relationships. More than that, they demonstrate his constant experimentation with form and abstraction. Ellsworth Kelly was inspired by the connection between abstraction and nature to draw shapes and colors. His deep attachment to natural forms is reflected in his plant studies, with their subtle and delicate lines. Through these clean lines, Kelly manages to embody and feel the essence of organic forms.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. In 1948, he moved to France, where he discovered many classical and modern works of art. In 1951, Kelly’s first solo exhibition was organized by the Galerie Arnaud in Paris. In 1954, Kelly decided to return to New York. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized his first retrospective. Subsequent exhibitions took place in major museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The connection between Ellsworth Kelly and Cahiers d’Art is a continuation of the artist’s attraction to the famous magazine, collecting issues while he was still a young American student in Paris. The Revue Cahiers d’Art was renowned for covering the different periods of art history, from prehistory to modern art, and this editorial choice had appealed to Kelly because it echoed his artistic approach and his collection of Native American antiquities.

This relationship was sublimated by the rebirth of Cahiers d’Art in 2012, when the first publication of the new edition of the magazine was dedicated to him, thus concretizing the artist’s reunion with his Parisian youth and the history of Cahiers d’Art. By publishing his catalogue raisonné, Cahiers d’Art celebrates Kelly’s importance in the history of modern art.

June 6 – September 30, 2024

CAHIERS D’ART


14-15 rue du Dragon 75006 Paris

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Fashion Jewelry Design Course

The Museum of Decorative Arts presents for the first time a selection of haute couture, ready-to-wear and jewelry pieces in the permanent galleries dedicated to design from the 20th century to the present day.

This thematic presentation pays homage to famous jewelry houses and designers. The circuit highlights the collections of the great houses of Place Vendôme: Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, but also the fertile imagination of creators and artists like Jean Desprès, Jean Schlumberger, Florence Lehmann or even Costanza and Roger Jean- Pierre who showed great creativity.

This unique tour also reveals iconic pieces from the museum’s fashion collections and devotes an important place to designers such as Paco Rabanne, Issey Miyake and Rick Owens. The big fashion houses are also represented, Balmain by Olivier Rousteing, Christian Dior by John Galliano, or even Courrèges and its artistic director Nicolas de Felice, and also, Stéphane Rolland recently entered the collections.

This exhibition allows us to take a new look at design from the post-war period to the present day, French and international, deployed in a thematic journey from Nathalie du Pasquier to Martin Szekely, from Jean Prouvé to Charlotte Perriand, via Michael Graves , Roger Tallon and contemporaries Marc Newson and Pierre Charpin. It thus highlights the creative and historical links between the disciplines of Decorative Arts.

This visit shows the games of correspondence between forms, techniques and approaches revealed by the selection of works. Another way to sharpen your perspective and approach contemporary creation!

April 3 – November 10 novembre, 2024

MAD

107 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris

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The MET in Louvre

Dialogues of oriental antiquities

The Department of Oriental Antiquities hosts ten major works from the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York, currently closed for comprehensive renovation work. The Louvre was thus able to design with the Met an unprecedented dialogue between these two collections which will take place within the permanent rooms of oriental antiquities.

Dated between the end of the 4th millennium BC and the 5th century AD, the Met’s works, exceptional guests, introduce remarkable correspondences with the collections of the Louvre, that is, together they form a pair brought together for the first time on this occasion, or that they complement each other due to the specificities linked to the history of each of the two collections. From Central Asia to Syria, often passing through Iran and Mesopotamia, these collection dialogues allow us to (re)discover these multi-millennial works and the stories to which they bear witness in a different way.

February 29, 2024 – September 28, 2025

MUSEE DU LOUVRE

AILE Richelieu et Aile Sully, niveau 0

BOOK YOUR TICKETS

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Masterpieces from the Torlonia Collection

The largest private collection of ancient Roman sculpture preserved to date – that gathered by the Torlonia princes throughout the 19th century in Rome – is being revealed to the public for the first time since the mid-20th century in a series of exhibitions – events.

It is at the Louvre that the Torlonia marbles are installed for their first stay outside Italy, in the restored setting of the apartments of Anne of Austria, home to the permanent collections of ancient sculpture since the end of the 18th century and the birth of the Louvre Museum. The French national collections willingly lend themselves to a fruitful dialogue with the Torlonia marbles, which questions the origins of museums and the taste for Antiquity, a founding element of Western culture.

This exhibition highlights masterpieces of ancient sculpture and invites visitors to contemplate the undisputed jewels of Roman art, but also to delve into the roots of the history of museums, in the Europe of the Enlightenment and the 19th century.

June 26 – November 11, 2024

MUSEE DU LOUVRE

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In the Seine

Objects found from prehistory to the present day

In 2020, in Clichy-la-Garenne (Paris suburbs), a team of prehistorians from Inrap (National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research) is carrying out a preventive excavation on a plot close to the banks, affected by a real estate program. Under four meters of modern embankments, they discover the history of the ancient bed of the Seine, dated between −85,000 and −25,000 years before our era (Paleolithic). During this period, the river bed is very wide and dotted with sandy banks. The banks are gently sloping and the sand islands allow animals and human groups to cross it in places. The climate is cold and windy, and the landscape, dominated by a steppe of tall grasses, grasses and a few rare shrubs, is roamed by large mammals: reindeer, horses, bison and woolly rhinoceroses.

The river which has shaped Paris from the first human settlements to the present day has received numerous objects that have fallen, thrown away, lost, or moved by the currents. They all bear witness to the history of the Seine, its evolution, its developments and its landscapes, but also its successive populations, their lifestyles, their beliefs or their struggles. Presented chronologically, these discoveries are also an opportunity to explain the scientific methods used in the interpretation and dating of archaeological remains and objects.

The exhibition is structured around four chronological periods and several themes chosen from archaeological discoveries linked to the Seine. Firstly, there are human settlements from prehistoric times, on the banks of the river, then in Antiquity, the time of its first developments. The medieval and modern periods reveal weapons, ex-votos and waste, while the Seine today still provides us with chance finds, such as pieces of bridges. These objects bear witness to the stories of men and women who built their daily lives with the Seine, whether Neanderthal hunters or the pious and superstitious Parisian people.

January 31, 2024 – February 1st, 2025

CRYPTE ARCHEOLOGIQUE DE L’ILE DE LA CITE

7 place Jean Paul II 75004 Paris

01 55 42 50 10

Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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