WANDERING AROUND

We have closing days like most countries for museums. There is a lot closed on Monday and then those Parisian and public centres are closed on Tuesday. Like the Beaubourg centre. I hadn’t been there for quite a while (oh yes, the David Hockney of course and the Ross Lovegrove) but not to wander around the permanent collection. As it is the 40th anniversary of the centre (85,000 visitors for the celebration weekend in February: a record!) a lot had been renewed, added or updated…it was time to go and see.

On Sunday evening I had looked up on Art Tips what was on apart from the Hockney and the photographer, Walker Evans. One picture which was very strange by a Bernard Lassus, who of course I knew nothing about. There was nothing about him but I liked that I saw…




There were very few people around so up I went to the 5th floor to discover something more about the man. 

At once we see an  artificial garden created for the Centre Pompidou and the picture above is part of it...






 For the last sixty years, the visual artist, colourist, landscape architect and town planner Bernard Lassus has been studying and working on the transformation of urban territories. Light, colour and movement  became the prime materials of his art and landscape projects.
You could go inside but there was only a brick wall!!


 In the 1960s, he used his professional practices to further major projects designed to introduce colour into public housing blocks.
Study for colouring flats in Marseille
Colour study for homes -1978-87
Maquette



Preliminary study for rocks
He was convinced that lodgings should be appropriated psychologically by their inhabitants, and was fascinated by the question of landscape.


So there you know a little about him which I learnt after strolling through the small exhibition space. At first I thought that what I saw were just conceptual photos. Then I learnt that many of them were reality.

 
Light Shields


  


The Forest
Project for The Rock fountain -1982-83

Colour study for coal mine machines
     The Garden of Planets -1980



I gather these came from his personal collection. It wasn't clear. They are fun though. 







I then wandered through the permanent collection looking at old friends and finding a few new ones.


Antoine Pevsner (1884-1962) A Spatial construction, 1956

Roland Sabatier (1942-) "Encouraging conversation to go further"
Maurice Lemaître (1926-) "Menhir for Spacagna" 1963
Max Ernst "Loplop presents a little girl" 1930/1966
William de Kooning "Clam Digger" 1972
Richard Artschwager - "Triptych ll" 1964
André Derain "The Two Barges", 1906
Marwan (1934-2016) "Man with a green vest", 1967
Gabriel Pomerand  1925-1972)"The Trip", 1951
Isidore Isou (1925-2007)" Centered Network M67" -196
Roland Sabatier (1942-) "Filiform scultpure "-1964
George Baselitz (1938-)
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) "The Deep", 1953
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
If I had wanted to, I could have gone back into the David Hockney. I chose the Walker Evans. A huge retrospective of over 400 of his photographs. That’s too much for me.

 

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