The Wall Street Journal reports on the long, convoluted journey of a 63-year old mural painted by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.  Originally created outside of Paris by the well-known Austrian, Paradise: Land of Men, of Trees, of Birds and Ships has since moved from Paris to Switzerland to Long Island, before coming to rest in a Brooklyn warehouse.  The work’s long history and current restoration needs illustrate the challenges facing the preservation of such large-scale works, particularly given its 10 x 16 foot size and its weight of over 3,000 pounds.   The move to its current location “took me two days with six guys and heavy equipment and a tow truck,” Says current owner Chris Muth. “If it fell in the process it would have been destroyed, and if it we had been under it we would have been dead.” (more…)

James Turrell, Prado, Red (1968), Courtesy of Almine Rech

James Turrell is a pioneer in perceptual art using light as his medium, and Almine Rech Paris, capitalizing on the artist’s current nationwide exhibition in his native United States, is currently presenting  his seventh exhibition in its gallery. Shown across three rooms, this collection offers insight into Turrell’s celestial inspiration for his abstract pieces.

James Turrell (Installation View), Courtesy of Almine Rech (more…)

Nick van Woert, Haruspex (Installation View), Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery

The work of American artist Nick van Woert is currently on view at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.  Taking its name from a 2010 work, Haruspex refers to the practice of divination in Etruscan or Roman religious practice, called Haruspicy involving the interpretation of mens or predicting the future based on the entrails of animals. Inspired by the images of divination and dismemberment, the artist has constructed a series of pieces that approach modern economic and social conditions of the world through the deconstruction and application of material runoff.

Nick van Woert, Untitled (2013), courtesy of the Artist (more…)

The inaugural Nouvelles Vagues exhibition in Paris this month will showcase the innovative and increasingly spectacular work of 53 international, freelance curators selected from a pool of 1,600. The state-funded Palais de Tokyo and 31 independent Parisian galleries are holding the event through to September 9th. Among the highly anticipated pavilions are Catalan artist Marti Anson’s house built in the Palais de Tokyo, curated by France’s Marie Griffay, and the exhibitions at Galerie 1900-2000 on the Left Bank, curated by French artist Laurent Grasso.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal

Fashion designer L’Wren Scott has announced the completion of her fall line, inspired by painter Gustav Klimt.  Speaking at a press conference last week, Scott discussed the artist’s inspiration on her work, and the inspiration he took from the fashion and culture of his era. “He was very avant garde and scandalous, in more ways than the children.” Ms. Scott said.  “It was a movement coming from something very strict to loosening up, but as you see, Klimt was a man who missed the waistline. He painted it in everyone of his portraits. He wanted to see the female form.” (more…)

Giuseppe Penone, Le Corps D’Un Jardin (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Leading up to a major installation of sculptures at the Chateau de Versailles in Paris, Giuseppe Penone and Marian Goodman Gallery are presenting a selection of past works by the artist, exhibiting a selection of works playing on themes of nature, flux, space and texture.  Consisting of large sculptures and wall-mounted works, Penone explores the interplay of  gesture and movement within the relatively static forms of the artistic practice, and the elegant exchange between nature and man’s depictions of it.

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Jean Dupuy, Performances/Bouffe Théâtre d’en face (1979) (detail), via Galerie Louevenbruck

Galerie Louevenbruck Paris is currently exhibiting Jean Dupuy: the collective years (1973-1983),  a first time retrospective of the artist’s “collective” period during the late 20th century. This period of work was developed after Dupuy left Paris for New York in 1967. Having begun his art career as a painter, he infamously threw his old works into the Seine before heading off to America, where a year later his Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) sculpture became his introduction to the notions of the collective.  Shortly after its creation the piece had already been exhibited at both the Museum of Modern Art and the Brookyln Museum, and its success launched the artist into his 40 year study of “techno-sensual” techniques and collective art practice.

Jean Dupuy, The Collective Years (Installation View), via Galerie Louevenbruck

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Pablo Picasso,  Absinthe Drinker (1901), via Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery is currently presenting Becoming Picasso, once again bringing together paintings from Picasso’s 1901 debut exhibition in Paris. The works in this exhibition offer a striking view of Picasso’s early work, and his transformation from his early work in the vocabularies made famous at the time by artists such as Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. That early Paris exhibition successfully launched Picasso’s career, and several of the works included in the original exhibition are now considered to be some of his first masterpieces. (more…)

Boléro, a collaboration between artist Marina Abramovic and Belgian choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, is set to open tonight in Paris.  Interpreting Ravel’s immediately recognizable work for dance, the work debuts at the Palais Garnier alongside Maurice Béjart’s “Firebird” and versions of “Afternoon of a Faun” by Nijinsky and Jerome Robbins.  “In my own work I am completely in control, but the interesting thing with collaboration is to give up part of yourself, the ‘I,’ ” said Abramovic. “It’s very liberating to be in a new field, dance, to let things come to you and not to make decisions.” (more…)

The Sacrifice of Polyxena, a painting by 17th century artist Charles Le Brun recently rediscovered in a suite at The Ritz Hotel, has been purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the price of $1.9 Million.  The museum had searched for a Le Brun for over 50 years, and seized on the chance to own the painting when it went up for auction on April 15th at Christie’s.  “No really famous expert of 17th-century painting has ever stayed in the Coco Chanel suite, apparently,” specialist Olivier Lefeuvre said when asked how the painting had hund undiscovered for so long. (more…)

Little Dancer, a musical inspired by an Edgar Degas sculpture, will open this fall in Washington, DC.  Written by the Tony-award winning duo of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Ragtime), the show will follow a young, impoverished dancer in the Paris Opera Ballet as she struggles to practice her art.  Little Dancer is scheduled to open at the Kennedy Center in October. (more…)

The Louvre was forced to close on Wednesday, after 200 guards and surveillance agents went on strike to protest the growing number of often violent pickpockets at the museum.  “For more than a year, pickpockets have come here every day,” Thierry Choquet, a member of the main union at the Louvre, said. “They threaten guards by telling them that they know where they live.” (more…)

Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), via Royal Academy of Arts

London’s Royal Academy of Arts is currently exhibiting an ambitious retrospective of portraiture by iconoclastic French painter Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883), collected from across Europe, Asia and the United States.  This is the first-ever exhibition of work by Manet that focuses on his broad body of portraiture, tracing the artist’s artistic evolution in the format throughout his life, as well as his contributions to modern portraiture in the contemporary era.  While Manet worked across a range of subjects in figurative painting, portraiture makes up about half of his body of work, offering perhaps the strongest evidence of the artist’s creative motivations throughout the course of his life.

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Ugo Rondinone, Pure Moonlight (Installation View), via Almine Rech

Almine Rech Gallery Paris is currently hosting its 7th installation of work by the Swiss-born Ugo Rondinone, exploring the interplay of time and creative practice on the artist.  Titled Pure Moonlight, the show consists of a series of Rondinone’s concentric “date paintings,” as well another set of small-scale candle sculptures.

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The family of late Paris gallery owner Paul Rosenberg has demanded that the Henie Onstand Arts Center in Oslo return a number of paintings seized from him during the German occupation of Paris during World War II .  While the family has provided documents claiming a number of works, including Matisse’s Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace, the Norwegian museum claims it had no indication that the work was plundered when it was purchased 60 years ago, and that the painting is now the property of the museum under Norwegian law. “We need to investigate this matter properly,” Says museum director Tone Hansen. “It is too early to draw any conclusions. We are in dialogue with the family and will continue to be so. This case has other aspects than pure legal aspects that have to be taken into consideration.” (more…)

Gallerist Jérôme de Noirmont, who abruptly shuttered his Paris Gallery on March 23rd, has sat down with ArtInfo to talk about the gallery’s closing, the state of the global art market, and his plans for the future.  “It’s kind of like we’re going from ready-to-wear to haute couture. We’re getting our freedom back. I believe in art, in creativity, and what it can do for society.”
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The Art Newspaper has published its annual survey of museum attendance for 2012, highlighting the best attended shows and museums of the past year.  While the top names on the list stayed relatively unchanged from past years (The Louvre still remains the world’s best attended museum, with The Met close behind), the recently opened Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas surged onto the list, and MOCA in Los Angeles also noted a dip in the face of board defections and budgetary concerns.  Also of note is the top exhibition of last year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s Old Masters show, which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. (more…)

Adel Abdemessed, Le Vase Abominable (Installation View), via David Zwirner

Upon entering the ground floor of David Zwirner’s gallery space in London, visitors are immediately greeted by the surreal image on a massive explosive device, upon which rests an equally enormous gold vase.  This is Le Vase Abominable, the sculpture by French-based, Algerian born artist Adel Abdemessed that serves as the title piece for the artist’s current show, exploring dichotomies of violence and creation through poignantly composed sculptural, video, and drawn works.

Adel Abdemessed, Le Vase Abominable (2012-2013), via David Zwirner (more…)

La Miroiterie, a long-running artist’s settlement and squat in the Parisian neighborhood of Ménilmontant is facing eviction from the development company that owns the abandoned mirror factory.  Founded in 1999, the space has a reputation as fiercely independent, and avoided working with the Parisian government to legitimize the space.  “The City Council has always respected and admired what was done at La Miroiterie, but we never supported them” financially “because they never wished for their project to be institutionalized,” said a spokesman for the Paris city council. (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Mind Breath and Beat Drawings (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris is currently exhibiting a new series of works by painter and illustrator Julie Mehretu. in a show which Mehretu described as a ‘self-ethnographic project,’ involving a dissection of her identity as an artist through a free abstraction of her personal creative practice. The show is Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in France.

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In an unprecedented move, French President François Hollande has cleared Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia to leave the French capital for the first time since it was given to the nation in 1890.  The painting will travel to Venice for this year’s Biennale, where it will sit beside Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, which itself is legally unable to leave Italy.  “We want to show how Italian cultural models influenced Manet,” says Guy Cogeval, director at the Musée D’Orsay, where the Manet masterpiece has been on view for over 100 years.
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David Salle/ Francis Picabia (Installation View), via Galerie Thaddeus Ropac

Currently on view at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac’s Marais location in Paris is a trans-Atlantic exhibition, featuring the works of David Salle and Francis Picabia, and focusing on a dialogue between the US-born Salle’s contemporary paintings and the French surrealism of Picabia. (more…)

Anselm Kiefer, Die Ungeborenen (Installation View) via Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Exploring the origin and creation of life, Die Ungeborenen (“The Unborn”) is a new collection of canvases and sculptures by German artist Anselm Kiefer, currently on view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s new Pantin location in Paris.

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Cyprien Gaillard, Artefacts (2011), via MoMA PS1

Over the past several years, French artist Cyprien Gaillard has created a body of work that negotiates the complex spatio-political, geographical and cultural maps of contemporary culture.  Continuously revisiting themes of decay, flux, erosion and conflict, his work picks through the saturated visual landscape of modernity, and exposes the interlocking mechanisms of destruction and creation at work, as well as the grey area between these polar states. (more…)