SHARING WITH ME

Yesterday Pierre and I set out to see a so called Cannes Prize winning film. I had seen extracts but can’t say I was too enthusiastic. I can be wrong. I was not. In the first ten minutes of «La Vie d’Adele» I had written the scenario, was bored stiff and got up to leave. Films without a little mystery where everything is spelled out  leave me grumpy - or as Pierre would say «grogne» or snarly! We wandered up toward the Luxembourg gardens. I was still fuming about losing time....and there the exhibition «The Renaissance and Dreams» had just started. «How about it?» I said to Pierre. So off we went. Sure there were a lot of people. There will be twice the crowds in a couple of weeks. This is not my art nor my period but I was relieved to be out of the cinema and looking at «dreams». Perhaps the dreams come from the powers of beyond during this period? 15th to 17th centuries. I did look closely at  the work and was as usual stunned by the number of symbols in all of those dream...

I discovered Felix Vallotton (1868-1925) in Basel years ago. Félix Vallotton, a Swiss-born painter who became a French citizen in 1900, straddled two centuries, two countries and several aesthetic trends, from the Nabis to the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity]. Although now less well known in France than in Switzerland, it was nonetheless in Paris in the 1890s that he established his reputation with his innovative woodcuts, and rapidly gained recognition throughout Europe. All his life, the “foreign Nabi”, as he was nicknamed, took an interest in a wide range of subjects to which he returned time and again - interiors, toilettes, female nudes, landscapes, still lifes, among others – all imbued with an enigmatic strangeness by his smooth, detached style with its refined palette, cut-out compositions and bold framings. And although not always understood by the critics of his time, Vallotton succeeded in establishing himself as a notable figure in the Parisian art scene, and asserting...