One of the 39 paintings on view through February 20 at the Metropolitan Museum for its exhibition Max Beckmann in New York: Max Beckmann. German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York, “Carnival Mask, Green, Violet and Pink (Columbine),” 1950. Oil on canvas, 53 3/8 × 39 9/16 inches(135.5 × 100.5 cm). Framed: 61 3/8 × 47 3/4 × 1 3/4 inches (155.9 × 121.3 × 4.4 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May. SL.9.2016.24.2. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. To access the full version of the article, including more images, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not a subscriber? 1-year subscriptions are just $39.99, or $19.99 for students and unemployed or under-employed artists. Just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address for information on how to pay by check or in Euros or British pounds.

 

Support Winter Arts, Dance, and Theater Coverage on Dance Insider & Arts Voyager by donating now

We have a couple of opportunities for affordable lodging in Paris starting in January which will enable us to cover, among other artistic events, upcoming shows from Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin, Belgian company Peeping Tom, Faustin Linyekula, Maguy Marin, various companies you’ve never heard of but should know at the Theatre de la Bastille and elsewhere, the major Frank Capra retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise, and exhibitions including American art from the 1930s at the Orangerie and — of course and more important — independent visual and performance artists, as well as galleries and art collectives. To do this we need to raise a minimum of $2,000. To donate, please designate your PayPal payment to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to find out about donating via check or in Euros or British pounds. Should we fall short of the goal, your donation will be applied to support continuing cultural coverage on the Arts Voyager and Dance Insider. PS: On cherche tjrs quand meme des sous-locations a partir du 23 fevrier.

From the festival Making Faces: Images of Exploitation and Empowerment in Cinema, on view at the Museum of Modern Art through April 30: Marlene Dietrich in “Blonde Venus,” 1932. Directed by Josef von Sternberg (Austrian, born Austria–Hungary. 1894–1969). Paramount Pictures. Film Study Center Special Collections, The Museum of Modern Art.

Carrie Fisher: Author, screenwriter, actress, and post-Feminist trailblazer (Updated, 12/29)

“This will really, really impress you. I am in the abnormal psychology textbook. How cool is that? Now, keep in mind, I am a Pez dispenser, and I’m in the abnormal psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?”

— Carrie Fisher, 2006, from her one-woman show “Wishful Drinking,”  cited December 28 on Democracy Now.

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2016 Paul Ben-Itzak

The appalling level of ignorance and lack of enterprise of much cultural journalism on French public radio, particularly when it comes to reporting on American culture, has once again revealed itself in this morning’s shallow coverage of the death yesterday at the age of 60, following a heart attack Friday (fittingly, while descending from the stratosphere), of Carrie Fisher, reduced to her portrayal of Princess Leia in the 1977 “Star Wars” and its sequels. Simply posing the essential five Ws of journalism (Who, Where, Why, What, and When) would have yielded a much deeper — and more accurate and just — portrait of this pivotal figure in the Women’s Liberation Movement.

To access the rest of the article, including more images, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not a subscriber? 1-year subscriptions are just $49, or $25 for students and unemployed artists. Just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address for information on how to pay by check or in Euros or British pounds.

You Belong to Me: Keith Haring Sketches Penises in front of Tiffany’s, and other dreamquests

Keith Haring. Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, 1978. Graphite on paper. 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (21.6 x 14 cm). ©Keith Haring Foundation. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York. First published on the Arts Voyager in 2012.

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Text copyright 2016 Paul Ben-Itzak

Today my  DVD deck on my more or less brand new lap-top broke down just after I’d popped in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for my annual refresher course in pursuing one’s dreams and fleeing one’s disappointments with panache. Every year Blake Edwards’s film of Truman Capote (note to French media: It’s CA-POE-TEE not CA-POHT)’s novel teaches me something new. Two years ago, I finally understood why George Peppard’s insisting, “You belong to me, Holly” is not misogynistic. (If I told you there would be no need for you to view the film.)

To access the rest of the article, including more images, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not a subscriber? 1-year subscriptions are just $49, or $25 for students and unemployed artists. Just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address for information on how to pay by check or in Euros or British pounds.

Reading the writing on the wall (text): Beckmann in New York — When Brilliant Art meets Dull Presentation, or why Trump Tower isn’t the only sign of dumbed down cultural discourse on Fifth Avenue

Max Beckmann. German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York, “Falling Man,” 1950. Oil on canvas, 55 1/2 × 35 inches (141 × 88.9 cm). Frame: 62 1/4 × 41 1/4 × 2 3/4 inches (158.1 × 104.8 × 7 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mrs. Max Beckmann. SL.9.2016.13.1. Wall text for the Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Max Beckmann in New York” has reduced the interpretive possibilities for this complex tableau, rich in mythological and historical references, to a sort of back to the future echo of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Text copyright 2016 Paul Ben-Itzak

I was all set to write about how refreshing it was to discover an exhibition, Max Beckmann in New York, whose curator, going against the trend in many leading Paris museums, does not feel the need to re-encadre a painter who should be able to stand on his own merit in an artificial curatorial construct that contrasts him with other artists or situates him, after the fact, in a historical, literary, or sociological context that has more to do with museum marketing than the artist’s actual intent and universe.

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PAUL BEN-ITZAK, REDACTEUR DE L’ARTS VOYAGER, CHERCHE UN LOGEMENT A PARIS

Basé en Dordogne, Paul Ben-Itzak, le redacteur / journaliste / animateur de l’Arts Voyager, francaisanglaistraduction, et Dance Insider, cherche un logement a Paris. (Location, sous-location, co-location, ou echange pour services — traduction/ redaction, DJ, cuisine, website development, etc.) Merci de me contacter a artsvoyager@gmail.com. (Il faut copier cette addresse mail a votre messagerie.) Avec moi j’ai une petite chatte blanche, trés propre. (Je l’attache — voir la photo — seulement quand elle proméne sur le balcon, histoire d’empecher qu’elle saute!)

Willy Ronis inheritance at Artcurial: A legacy of terrains pas si desuet que ca

Willy Ronis (1910 – 2009), “Boulevard Sérurier, Paris,” 1948. Gelatin silver print (circa 1990), 15.95 x 12 inches, including margins. Title, date, and negative number in artist’s hand on back. Artcurial pre-sale estimate: 1,500 – 2,000 Euros. Image courtesy and copyright Artcurial.

Willy Ronis (1910 – 2009), “Le nu provencal (Provencal nude),” summer 1949. Gelatin silver print, 51 x 34.25 inches, including margins. Signed in ink at lower right. (See story for details.) Artcurial pre-sale estimate: 10,000 – 15,000 Euros. Image courtesy and copyright Artcurial.

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Text copyright 2016 Paul Ben-Itzak

If Willy Ronis, from whom a monumental 163 lots of photographs from the 6,000 inherited by his grandson Stéphane Kovalsky spanning eight decades go on sale tonight at Artcurial in Paris (the rest went to the State on or before the photographer’s death in 2009 at age 99), is not as cloying as Robert Doisneau, crafty as Brassai, clever as André Kertesz, lucky as Henri Cartier-Bresson nor eternally naive (in the positive sense) as Jacques Lartigue, none of these worthy peers come close to him as an instinctive chronicler of a proletarian Paris which, if not completely disappeared, has at least been dispersed and upscaled in recent years: the terrain of what would become the parc Belleville before it was a well-manicured garden that closed at sunset; wide-open catty-corners in pre-BoBo (Bourgeosie Bohemian) Belleville-Menilmontant when the drying linen that was still permitted on the balconies became a stage curtain for the intricate charades of ragamuffins; a wine and liquor store that doubled as a charcoal depot before rising pollution threatened to ban chimneys from the Metropole; artisanal glassmakers and above all that ramshackle sky-line before developers started eliminating the former and blighting the latter.

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At Artcurial Photography Auction, Frontiers in a Reflecting Glass

Helmut Newton (1920 – 1984), “Veruschka on the Terrace of the Presidential Suite, Hotel Meridien, Nice,” 1975. Silver gelatin print, 7.48 x 11.42 inches. Signed, titled, and dated with artist’s stamp on back. Artcurial pre-sale estimate: 15,000 – 20,000 Euros. Image courtesy and copyright Artcurial.

One might think that scheduled as a curtain closer on the same evening as its monumental “From the Willy Ronis Inheritance” sale, which offers 163 lots starting with a 1926 self-portrait and finishing with a 1990 nude, book-ending no less than a photo-biography of a largely mid-20th century popular Paris, an auction entitled simply “Photography” might have trouble holding one’s attention. But if the scale is more modest, the scope of tonight’s second Artcurial auction is in a way more audacious than the Ronis sale, with one predominant — and timely — theme emerging: Frontiers. We’ve chosen to share a some samples, ranging from the intimate to the inter-galactic and finishing with a presidential epilogue, from, respectively, Helmut Newton, NASA, Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, and Mark Seliger, whose portrait of a retreating Barack Obama is just begging to be Photo-shopped. – Paul Ben-Itzak
To access the full version of the article, including more images, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not a subscriber? 1-year subscriptions are just $49, or $25 for students and unemployed artists. Just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address for information on how to pay by check or in Euros or British pounds.