SHARING WITH ME

Does it seem strange to you that I discovered Velazquez through Francis Bacon? The Velazquez 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. Although Bacon avoided seeing the original, it remains the single most influential painting on him, and its presence can be seen in many of his best works from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Mother and I had gone to the Beyler Foundation for the first time in 2004. A close friend had spoken to us about Francis Bacon and with a click of the computer we were on the train to Basel. 

Bacon was one of the most significant objective painters of the twentieth century and very soon became a favorite painter. The  exhibition  comprised  about  forty  works  by  Bacon,  and  about  the  same  number  by artists,  including  Titian,  Velazquez,  Rembrandt,  Ingres,  Degas,  Picasso  and  Alberto  Giacometti, ……… This was our first trip away for an Exhibition in another country. I can assure you, we were both bowled over. Not by the great Masters, no, but

 Everything got very mixed up yesterday. I started out to see an exhibition called American Icons and ended up in exhibitions which  I had certainly no intention of seeing, the Velazquez and "Lumieres - Invention of cinema". This was the 120th birthday of cinema. The Lumieres Institute organized an exhibition dedicated to the star events.....I wandered around in a very dark purple environment bending over cases to look at cameras, films or read about the history. When I go home all I had taken seemed to be very trivial and certainly did not express the atmosphere of the exhibition. This is a link to what it's all about. In English and in French. Some of the cinema clips are good fun. I sat in the Indien Salon looking at the short films which were showed as the first public paying cinema. That was on the 28th December 1895. The Lumières brothers first film in 75mm was shown a the Universal Exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1990. Have a little look. You might enjoy some

I was very excited about going back to the Louis Vuitton Foundation with Marielle. It was a gorgeous day, the sun shining and maybe I could wear a light coat rather than the winter duvet? The entrance hall Hardly a soul when we arrived which was a turn up for the books after our first visit. So up we went to the top floor again. A couple of rooms had changed versus our first visit. Annette Messager was there and very different from the woolen sculptures we are used to. Le masque rouge  2011 Mes transports - 2011 Charlie don't surf - 1977 La petite ballerine - 2011 Maurizio Cattelan also with « Charlie don’t surf « (1997) which looked extremely painful and not perhaps as amusing as sculptures we had see elsewhere. Another gallery where we discovered Ellsworth  Kelly with A series of Relief/Curves done in 2008/2009. I could see that these were not to Marielle’s liking but strangely when I see his work in this context, I rather like t