The Foundation Louis Vuitton is set to finally open its museum this coming October, showcasing the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton corporate art collection, Bernard Arnault has announced.  It will express the artistic, cultural and emotional values, as well as the art of living, promoted by Bernard Arnault and the LVMH Group, but it is truly a charitable foundation, devoted to the public as a whole,” says advisor Jean-Paul Claverie. (more…)

Sophie Calle, Rachel, Monique (2014), all photos by Emily Heinz for Art Observed

Since May 9th until June 25th this year, the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, has been transformed into a gateway that marries the universality of sacred space and the experience of life and death through the singular exploration of a specific life.  Artist Sophie Calle is known for her deeply emotional work and propensity for crossing the boundaries of personal and social space in a way that is successful in its dramatic and often controversial appeal to the human condition. “Rachel, Monique” may be one of her strongest works in this vein to date.

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The city of Paris has named a public square in its 13th Arrondissement after Jean-Michel Basquiat, a fitting choice given the area’s popularity with street artists and street art tourists.  “Basquiat is one of the biggest contemporary artists,” 13th Arrondissemnet mayor Jérôme Coumet says. “He defended the cause of African-Americans in the US, and was also a lover of France. He was the artist who blazed the trail for street art, and art in public space.” (more…)

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City), via Art Observed

In 2010, Christian Boltanski spread piles of clothes reaching to fifty tons around the interior of Grand Palais. Three years before Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer brought in cement and metal along with dust and debris into this patriarchal symbol of French industrial awakening. Richard Serra, Daniel Buren and Anish Kapoor are among the other superstar artists who have marked their signatures in this historical building in response to France Ministry of Culture’s annual Monumenta project, which invites an artist to create a new body of work to be exhibited inside the impressive architecture of Grand Palais. On view through June 22nd is this year’s commission L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, arguably Russia’s most celebrated names in contemporary art.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City), via Art Observed (more…)

Many of Vincent van Gogh‘s works have been in Arles, France for around a decade since the artist worked there, but due to absence of exhibition space, no one was able to see them. After a three-year remodeling project, the antiquated Hôtel Léautaud de Donines has been officially transformed into a modernized gallery that will contain and display van Gogh’s treasured works to the public. “There was no space like this in Arles before,” said Maja Hoffmann from the Fondation van Gogh. “We can host van Gogh at anytime now. This is what we really call the permanent home for van Gogh.”

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The Musée Picasso in Paris has announced Laurent Le Bon, currently a the head of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, as its newest director, following the dismissal of Anne Baldassari earlier this year.   (more…)

Pierre Soulages, Peinture 175 X 222 Cm, 23 Mai 2013, via Art Observed

Held in high regard in his home country of France, and throughout much of continental Europe, the work of Pierre Soulages has never really achieved the same stature in the United States, despite his formal ties to the particularly American strains abstract expressionism and minimalism that have populated his work over the past sixty years.  But it’s that same lack of recognition that Dominique Lévy and Emmanuel Perrotin are looking to change this spring, bringing a selection of the artist’s most recent work, and some of his most classic canvases to show at the pair’s uptown exhibition spaces.

Pierre Soulages, Peinture 202 X 159 Cm, 18 Octobre 1967, via Art Observed (more…)

President François Hollande is set to inaugurate the first Pierre Soulages museum this week, established near the artist’s hometown in the South of France.  “One of the objectives of the museum is to present a variety of works but also a fluid aspect [of Soulages’s canon],” says historian and chief museum curator Benoit Decron says. “I’ll turn to a network of collectors and [will make] acquisitions backed by public and private bodies.”  (more…)

Jean-Michel Othoniel, Double Collier Autoporté Or (2014), all images courtesy Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong

On view at Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong is a solo exhibition of sculptures by French contemporary artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. For the works, great hanging sculptures composed of glass that Othoniel made in collaboration with a Feng Shui Master. Seeking to create forms that originate in human life, the works seek to achieve a symbiosis with the space that they inhabit.

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Paris’s Picasso Museum has fired director Anne Baldassari, citing a “gravely deteriorating work environment” during the museum’s continually delayed renovation, as well as “profound suffering in the workplace and a toxic atmosphere.”  The museum’s  reopening has already been pushed back twice, and had seen numerous employees leaving the organization during Baldassari’s tenure.  “There was nothing in the report from the inspector general that surprised us,” said one ministry official. “This had been going on for several years. The truth is that we could not open a museum with all these employees leaving.” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiled Camille Henrot this past week, in the lead-up to the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition at the New Museum, opening this upcoming Wednesday.  The show includes her work Grosse Fatigue, which earned her the Silver Lion at Venice last year for most promising young artist, and which features the image of the turtle heavily.  “She’s slow because she is carrying this massive round thing–it’s like a figure of Atlas,” Henrot says. (more…)

Artist Pharrell Williams is continuing his ventures into the art world later this year, curating a show at Emmanuel Perrotin’s Paris space.  The show, titled G I R L after the artist’s hit album, will feature 40 works by 32 artists (half of them women), including Tracey Emin, Alex Katz and Bharti Kher, as well as Daniel Arsham and Gregor Hildebrandt.  The works selected mix images of women and of love, viewed from a variety of angles,” the artist’s team said in a press statement. (more…)

The Guardian has published an imaginative profile on Marcel Duchamp, noting some of the artist’s quirks and passions, including his avid chess-playing, his daring transportation of his art materials out of Nazi Germany posing as a cheese vendor, and his takes on quickly produced artworks: “Quick art, that’s been the characteristic of the whole century from the cubists on, ” he once said.  “The speed that’s being used in space, in communications, is also being used in art. But things of great importance in art have always to be slowly produced.” (more…)

Artist Xavier Veilhan and dealer Emmanuel Perrotin have lost a court case asserting Veilhan’s work was copied by artist Richard Orlinski, whose installation of several works in the French alps bear a strong similarity to Veilhan’s previous work.   “The court has rightly recognised the originality of Orlinski’s work,” said Orlinski’s lawyer, Julie Jacob. Regardless, Perrotin and Veilhan have stated that they may appeal the decision. (more…)

A Rembrandt stolen over 15 years ago from a French museum has been recovered, the Art Newspaper reports.  L’enfant à la bulle de savon was stolen from the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Draguignan in 1999, during the Bastille Day parade.  The work is believed to be valued at â‚¬4m today. (more…)

Emmanuel Perrotin is profiled in W Magazine this month, underlining the gallerist’s penchant for risk-taking, and his adventurous spirit in regards to his relationship with his artists.  “There are a lot of dealers in Europe who just want to complain,” Perrotin says. “I’m rather positive and energetic. But it’s true that the bigger you get, the more you start to worry and to ask yourself how well you’re really doing.” (more…)

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue seeks an experience akin to the slow trawls of internet message boards, Wikipedia pages, and Google searches that mark the contemporary search for information, a compartmentalized seeking after discrete bits of data.  Running from image to image, many culled from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Henrot’s project offers a condensed experience of information overload, cramming the story of the earth’s creation into 13 minutes.

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed (more…)

Laure Prouvost, For Forgetting (Installation View), via Art Observed

Laure Prouvost has a lot to say.  Creating multifaceted, occasionally dizzying multimedia installations using wood, paint, video and various props, the 2013 Turner Prize Winner’s work is hyper-loaded in its signifiers and subjects, moving rapidly from the divine to the profane and back, all expressed with a masterful storytelling bent.  It’s just this line, in fact, that the artist makes express use of in her first U.S. installation, occupying the lobby of the New Museum, telling a lightning-fast narrative of identity theft and financial scamming in the post-digital economy.

Laure Prouvost, For Forgetting, 2014 (still). Installation and video. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and MOTINTERNATIONAL, London and Brussels (more…)

The Musée Marmottan-Monet, the private museum holding the largest collection ofClaude Monet paintings in the world, will look to relaunch itself this week alongside its more well-recognized Parisian contemporaries.  “Many of our paintings are well known but the museum is less well known,” says museum director Patrick de Carolis. “We have to change that. We are private and entirely funded by the money we earn for ourselves. We hope that the exhibition, which starts this week will encourage people to come to the Marmottan.” (more…)

Michael Beutler, Weaving Workshop (2009-2013) all images courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

At the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is the largest ever textile show presented by the museum to date, including more than 100 woven works by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, as well as several contemporary artists. The show will remain on view through February 9th.

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Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States has announced a month-long visual arts festival to take place in April of this year, across 46 venues in New York City.  The ART2 Festival “will consider issues prevalent in today’s patently global art world…with the goal of encouraging intellectual discourse between institutions, artists, scholars, students and the public,” the organization said in a statement. (more…)

A number of deals and arrangements made this month have signaled that the centuries-old artistic bastion of Paris may have begun its rise to the highest levels of the international art market.  A classic Modigliani has sold for over €6.5 million, the highest price paid for a painting in France this year, and comes alongside news of a record €44 million tally for sales in France by Sotheby’s in 2013, while Christie’s showed similar success and a €56 million sales total for the year. (more…)

Cyprien Gaillard, Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens (Installation View), via Art Observed

Coming off his impeccable retrospective at MoMA PS1 earlier this year, Cyprien Gaillard returns to New York with two series of works that continue his fascination with the complexly layered experience of history, and the forces that keep this process constantly in flux.  Moving towards a more active exploration of these phenomena, Gaillard’s show feels as if the artist is taking a more active role in his creative inquiries.

Cyprien Gaillard, Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens (Installation View), via Gladstone Gallery (more…)

Georges Braque, Compotier et Cartes (1918), Courtesy Grand Palais

On view at Grand Palais, Galeries nationales in Paris is a retrospective covering the full life and output of French painter and sculptor Georges Braque’s career, beginning with Fauvism to his later works, particularly his birds series. The exhibition will continue through January 6th 2014.

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