Wednesday, May 4, 2016The Maerais District, Part 2

Musée National Picasso andCentre Georges Pompidou

The Musée National Picasso The Musée Picasso is an art gallery located in the Hô-tel Salé in rue de Thorigny, in the Marais district of Paris dedicated to the work of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).

The hôtel particulier that house the collection was built be-tween 1656 and 1659 for Pierre Aubert, seigneur de Fon-tenay, a tax farmer who became rich collecting the gabelle

or salt tax (the name of the build-ing means "salted"). The architect was Jean Boullier from Bourges, also known as Boullier de Bourges; sculpture was car-ried out by the broth-ers Gas-pard and Balthazard Marsy and by Martin Desjardins. It is consid-ered to be one of the finest histor-ic houses in the Marais.

The man-sion has changed hands

several times by sale or inheritance. The occupants have included the Embassy of the Republic of Venice (1671), then François de Neufville, duc de Villeroi; it was expropri-ated by the State during the French Revolution; in 1815 it became a school, in which Balzac studied; before housing

the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1829. It also housed the municipal École des Métiers d'Art. It was acquired by the City of Paris in 1964, and was granted historical monu-ment status in 1968. The mansion was restored by Bernard Vitry and Bernard Fonquernie of the Monuments Historiques in 1974–1980.

The Hotel Salé was selected for the Musée Picasso after some contentious civic and national debate. A competition was held

to determine who would design the facilities. The pro-posal from Roland Simounet was selected in 1976 from amongst the four that were submitted. Other proposals were submitted by Roland Castro and the GAU (Groupement pour l'Architecture et l'Urbanisme), Jean Monge, and Carlo Scarpa. For the most part, the interior of the mansion (which had undergone significant modifications) was restored to its former spacious state.

In 1968, France created a law that permitted heirs to pay inheritance taxes with works of art instead of

money, as long as the art is consid-ered an impor-tant contri-bution to the French cultural heritage. This is known as a dation, and it is allowable only in exceptional cir-cumstances. Dominique Bozo, a curator of national museums, selected those works that were to become the dation Picasso. This selection was reviewed by Jean Leymarie and ratified in 1979. It contained work by Picasso in all techniques and from all periods, and is especially rare in terms of its excellent collection of sculptures. Upon Jacqueline Picasso's death in 1986, her daugh-ter offered to pay inheri-

tance taxes by a new dation. The collection has also acquired a number of works through purchases and gifts.

Picasso once said "I am the greatest collector of Picassos in the world." He had amassed an enormous collection of his own work by the time of his death in 1973, rang-ing from sketchbooks to finished masterpiec-es. The Mu-sée Picasso has over 5,000 works

Montage by me

ranging from sketchbooks to finished masterpieces. The Musée Pi-casso has over 5,000 works of art by Picasso including 3,700 works on paper, ceram-ics, sculptures in wood and metal, and paintings. This is comple-mented by Picasso's own personal art collection of works by other artists, includ-ing Cézanne, Degas, Rous-

Montages by me

seau, Seurat, de Chirico and Matisse. It also con-tains some Iberian bronzes and a good col-lection of African art, by which Pi-casso was greatly inspired. The mu-seum also contains a large

number of works that Picasso painted after his seventieth birthday.

The museum has made an effort to present works by cartoonists who mocked or caricatured Picasso's work from the 1950s. There are a few rooms with thematic presentations, but the museum largely follows a chrono-logical sequence, displaying painting, drawings, sculp-tures and prints. Other items include photographs, manuscripts, newspaper clippings and photographs to provide additional contextual information.

The second floor has a special area set aside for tem-porary exhibitions and prints. The third floor contains

the library, the documentation and archives department (re-served for research), and the curator's offices.

More than 5,000 works were donated by Picasso’s family after his death in 1973 under a law permitting heirs to contribute art in lieu of tax payments. More donations came from the estate of Picasso’s last wife, Jacqueline Roque, and from Anne Sinclair, a museum board member. Since 1985 more than 1,000 exhibits have been bought by the museum.

In a period of economic crisis and government cutbacks on funding for culture, longtime director Anne Baldas-sari still managed to raise $41 million for the makeover by exporting artworks for exhibition abroad. The Musée Picasso raised between €1 million and €3.5 million a year be-tween 2008 and 2011 from the touring exhibition "Masterpieces from the Picasso Museum". The tour helped fund the refurbish-ment of the museum and included the De Young Museum, San Francisco, where attendance topped 335,000, the Chinese Pavil-ion, Shanghai, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Palazzo Reale, Milan.

Upon re-opening, the museum is expected to finance more than 60 per-cent of its annual budget.

In 2014, Baldassari was dismissed by Aurélie Filippetti, the French minis-ter of culture, after mounting criticism of her manage-ment. New director Laurent Le Bon will oversee the reopen-ing of the museum in September 2014

follow-ing a €52 million five-year renova-tion dogged by delays and escalating costs.

By the end of the ongoing

construction work, the museum’s public space will nearly triple, to around 58,000 square feet, by moving staff offices to a newly purchased building. The expansion project, whose budget doubled to almost $70 million, was supposed to be completed in two years when it began in 2009. But as it grew in scope and size, reopening dates were announced and delayed several times.

After a five-year closure the museum reopened on 25 October 2014. The collection in the Musée Picasso-Paris includes more than 5,000 works and tens of thousands of archive pieces. By its

qual-ity and its size shown by the diversity of artistic domains repre-sented, it is the only public collection in the world that allows you on a journey following the creative process

of the artist using all the work painted, carved, engraved and drawn by Picasso, including sketches, studies, drawings, sketchbooks, engravings, photographs, illustrated books, movies and documents. Established in 1985 in the Hotel Salé, one of the most iconic private hotels built at the end of the 17th century, the museum has just ben-efited from an important renovation that has enabled the directors to double size of the exhibition spaces and create welcome desks and adapted facilities for the public.

Centre Georges PompidouCentre Georges Pompidou is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of the 4th ar-rondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the archi-tectural team of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini.

It houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information, a vast public library, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is the larg-est museum for modern art in Europe, and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic re-

search. Because of its location, the Centre is known locally as Beaubourg It is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. As of 2006, the Centre Pompidou has had over 180 million visitors since 1977 and more than 5,209,678 visitors in 2013, including 3,746,899 for the museum.

The idea for a multicultural complex, bringing together in one place different forms of art and literature, developed, in part, from the ideas of France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, a western proponent of the de-centralization of art and culture by impulse of the political power.[7] In the 1960s, city planners decided to move the foodmarkets of Les Halles, historically significant struc-tures long prized by Parisians, with the idea that some of the cultural institutes be built in the former market area. Hoping to renew the idea of Paris as a leading city of culture and art, it was proposed to move the Musée d'Art Moderne to this new location. Paris also needed a large, free pub-lic library, as one did not exist at this time. At first the debate concerned Les Halles, but as the controversy

Wassily Kandinsky - Black Relationship - 1924 - Bauhaus

settled, in 1968, President Charles de Gaulle announced the Plateau Beau-bourg as the new site for the library. A year later in 1969, the new president adopted the Beaubourg project and decided it to be the location of both the new library and a centre for the contemporary arts. In the process of developing the project, the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordina-tion Acoustique/Musique) was also housed in the complex.

By the mid-1980s, the Centre Pom-pidou was becoming the victim of its huge and unexpected popularity, its many activities, and a complex administrative structure. When Domi-nique Bozo returned to the Centre in 1981 as Director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, he re-installed the museum, bringing out the full range of its collections and

displayed the many major acquisitions that had been made. By 1992, the Centre de Création Industrielle was incorporated into the Centre Pompidou.

Piet Mondrian - Composition 1937 - De Stijl

Andy Warhol, Ten Lizes, 1963Pop Art

Wassily Kandinsky - Odessa Port, 1898 - Impressionist

Since reopening in 2000 after a three-year renovation, the Centre Pompidou has improved the logis-tics of a visit. Visitors can only access the escalators if they pay to enter the museum.

The Centre was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano; British architect Richard Rogers; and Ital-ian architect Gianfranco Franchini, assisted by Ove Arup & Partners. The project was awarded to this

Mark Rothko - Abstract No. 12 - 1954 - Abstract

Robert Delaunay - Landscape with Disc 1906 - Fauvism

Paul Klee - Senecio -1933Abstract Expressionism -Cubism

André Derain - Bateaux à Collioure- 1900s - Fauvism

team in an architectural design competition, whose results were announced in 1971. It was the first time in France that interna-tional architects were allowed to participate. World-renowned architects Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson made up the jury which would select one design out of the 681 entries.

National Geographic described the reaction to the design as "love at second sight." An article in Le Figaro declared "Paris has its

own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness." But two decades later, while reporting on Rog-ers' winning the Pritzker Prize in 2007, The New York Times noted that the design of the Centre "turned the architecture world upside down" and that "Mr. Rogers earned a reputa-tion as a high-tech iconoclast

with the completion of the 1977 Pompidou Centre, with its exposed skeleton of bright-ly coloured tubes for mechanical systems. The Pritzker jury said the Pompidou "revo-lutionized museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popu-lar places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.".

Initially, all of the functional structural ele-ments of the building were colour-coded:

Henri Matisse - Dance - 1909 - Fauvism

Wassily Kandinsky Composition IX 1936

Bauhaus

Sandy Skoglund - Radioactive Cats - 1980

Epreuve Cibachrome

green pipes are plumbing, blue ducts are for climate con-trol, electrical wires are encased in yellow, and circulation elements and devices for safety (e.g., fire extinguishers) are red.

ConstructionThe Centre was built by GTM and completed in 1977.[15] The building cost 993 million 1972 French francs. Renovation work conducted from October 1996 to January 2000 was completed on a budget of 576 million 1999 francs.

Special Exhibi-tions: Paul Davis (1977), Henri Michaux (1978), Dalí (1979), Pollock (1982), Bonnard (1984), Kandinsky (1984), Étienne Martin (1984), Paul Klee (1985),

Cy Twombly (1988), Frank Stella (1988), Andy Warhol (1990), Max Ernst (1991), Matisse (1993), Joseph Beuys (1994), Kurt Schwitters (1994), Gerard Gasiorowski (1995), Brâncuși (1995), Sanejouand (1995), Bob Morris (1995), Francis Bacon (1996), Fernand Léger (1997), David Hockney (1998), Philip Guston (2000), Picasso (2000), Jean Dubuffet (2001), Roland Barthes

(2002), Max Beckmann (2002), Nicolas de Staël (2003), So-phie Calle (2003), Cocteau (2003), Philippe Starck (2003), Miró (2004), Aurelie Nemours (2004), Charlotte Perri-and (2005), Robert Rauschenberg (2006), Claude Closky (2006), Jean-Luc Godard (2006), Yves Klein (2006), Hergé (2006), An-nette Mes-sager (2007), Richard Rogers (2007),Sam-uel Beckett (2007), David Claerbout (2007), Julio González

Marcel Duchamp, The Foun-tain, 1917 - Dadaism

Wassily Kandinsky - Composition VIII - 1923 - Suprematism and Construc-tivismBorn in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky took up the study of art in ear-nest at age 30, moving to Munich to study drawing and painting. A trained musician, Kandinsky approached color with a musician’s sensibility. An obsession with Monet led him to explore his own creative concepts of color on canvas, which were sometimes controversial among his contempo-raries and critics, but Kandinsky emerged as a respected leader of the abstract art movement in the early 20th century.

(2007), Alberto Giacometti (2007), Louise Bourgeois (2008), Pol Abraham (2008), Tatiana Trouvé (2008), Miroslav Tichy (2008), Dominique Perrault (2008), Jean Gourmelin (2008), Jacques Villeglé (2008), Ron Arad (2008), Alexander Calder (2009), Philippe Par-reno (2009), Kandinski (2009), Pierre Soulages (2009), Étienne Martin (2010), Lucian Freud (2010), Arman (2010), François Morellet (2011), Edvard Munch (2011), Gerhard Richter (2012), Salvador Dalí (2013), Roy Lichtenstein (2013), Mike Kelley (2013), Pierre Huyghe (2013), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2014), Simon Hantaï (2014), Jeff Koons (2014), Mona Hatoum (2015), Wi-fredo Lam (2015), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (2015), Paul Klee and Brâncuși (2016).

Otto Dix, Bildnis Der Journalistin Sylvia Von Harden, 1926

This painting by Dix, is representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) wave. This was a Ger-man art movement that appeared around 1920, and refers to the German masters of the 16th century, such as Holbein or Cranach. It brought back to use older technics, such as tempera on wood, and in the choice of the subject.

Paul Klee - Insula Dulcamara - 1938Bauhaus

Overview of Movements in Art History

2016 Installation Centre Georges Pompideu