Discover the art of Saint-Paul-de-Vence through three essential stops: Fondation CAB, Fondation Maeght and Galerie Catherine Issert, with modern masters, contemporary art and a little Côte d’Azur magic.
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Some shows you miss, and you keep missing them, until a city you were not expecting hands them back to you.
In 2018 the Guggenheim gave Hilma af Klint her first big American show. I was living in New York at the time. I kept meaning to go. And then, suddenly, the show got famous, the available slots were gone, the line ran down Fifth, and eventually, the show closed. More than 600,000 people saw it, the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history. Sadly, I was not one of them. And, I have been mildly annoyed with myself ever since.
But then, fate gave me another chance. The Grand Palais in Paris announced a big Hilma show for this summer. As luck would have it, I was now living in Prague, a quick plane ride away. So, I booked my ticket and I went in early July.
I took an art-loving college friend with me. She’s such a good sport - always open to exploring whatever artsy outing I propose. So, earlier this July, we braved the Parisian summer heat to and crowded metro to get to the show. After a brief detour (the Grand Palais is grand after all!) we found the right entrance and soon enough we made our way to Gallery 8 and into the show.
Unlike the Guggenheim, the show in Paris is not attempting to deliver a full career survey, and that turns out to be the best decision. Here, the show is focused on Paintings for the Temple, the cycle that the artist worked on from 1906 to 1915. All 193 works, almost the entire set in one place. The show is curated by Pascal Rousseau and it’s co-produced with the currently closed Centre Pompidou.
In the first set of galleries, you start getting a taste for Hilma and her work. And you get the sense that, at least in my opinion, she was far ahead of her time. Smaller paintings, range of colors and shapes both simple and complex at the same time. Definitely intriguing.
The first gallery gave us a taste and made us feel we knew what to expect upstairs. How wrong were we! We did not expect the scale.
The Ten Largest are ten paintings from 1907, each one over three meters tall, were waiting for us there. Hilma af Klint painted them on the floor because there was no other way to work at that size. Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Old Age. A whole human life in ten panels, in peach and pale blue and egg yolk yellow, with shapes that can look like a botanical diagram and that can, at times, resemble a very good textile archive. We loved them and spent quite a bit of time admiring every single one.
Photographs do nothing for them. The color is chalkier and looks closer to fresco than to paint in real life. And the size is really awe-inspiring. She was not making pictures for a wall. She was building a room for a spiral temple that existed only in her head. Too bad it was never built, I wonder what that experience would be like.
The large paintings were, by far, my favorite part of the show. Both my friend and I kept returning to them to take another picture, to admire them some more. And frankly, to admire the woman we had not known before but whose work was so far ahead of her time.
Her story itself is interesting. She died in 1944 and left instructions that the abstract work stay sealed for twenty years. More than a thousand pieces, in crates. She asked for twenty years. She got forty-two. The twenty passed and nothing happened. Moderna Museet was offered the collection in 1970 and turned it down. It took until 1986, and a group show in Los Angeles about spirituality in abstract painting, before a public finally saw her. She chose the silence. But is looks like the art world was already well practiced at not looking in her direction. What a shame.
She was painting abstraction in 1906. Kandinsky’s first abstractions are usually dated around 1911. Do that math however you like. The tidy story about who got there first was written by people who had no idea her work existed. I came out thinking about how much of what we call art history is just a record of who happened to get shown.
Well, she has the limelight now. New York gave her a career. Paris gives her the temple. So, if you happen to be in Paris before the end of August, go. Give it a full afternoon. Not an hour. An afternoon.
Grand Palais, Paris. Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Temple 1906-1915, until 30 August 2026.
Rome's summer art scene, decoded: Mapplethorpe, Francesca Woodman, and Valentino's Venus exhibition, plus where to unwind between shows.
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Some artists you admire for years, before you ever get the chance to see their full range.
Calder has been one of my faves for a long time. I caught some of his work at MoMA in New York a few years back, and again in the South of France, Copenhagen and Madrid, where his shapes always seem to belong outdoors, in the light. So when I heard the Fondation Louis Vuitton was giving him acomprehensive show, I did not need much convincing. I had been meaning to visit the building itself for ages anyway. Two birds...
The show is called Calder. Rêver en équilibre, which means Dreaming in Balance. It runs until August and marks two anniversaries at once. A hundred years since Calder first arrived in France in 1926, and fifty years since he died. The Fondation has done something it has never done before. It has handed over its entire space, and for the first time the lawn outside, to a single artist. Almost three hundred works across more than three thousand square meters.
I thought I knew what to expect. I did not expect the scale.
What impressed me most was how complete it felt. The show moves through everything. The early wire pieces, the famous circus, the moment in the early thirties when he invented the mobile and a whole new kind of sculpture came into being, the big still stabiles, the huge late public works. There is jewelry and there are paintings too. It is the whole arc of a life, laid out in order, and you understand him better for seeing it all in one room after another.
We spent a few hours and did not rush.
My favourites were the mobiles, of course, the way they turn so slowly you are not sure they are moving until they already have. But what I really loved was the wire sculptures. The faces especially. Each one gives you two things at once, the actual wire and its shadow thrown on the wall behind it. The line and its reflection. The thing and its echo. I was really drawn to them.
Calder spent much of his later life in France and always called it his second home. Standing inside Gehry's glass sails, watching his shapes turn in the light, that made complete sense to me.
If you are in Paris before 16 August, give it an afternoon. Not an hour. An afternoon.
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Calder. Rêver en équilibre, until 16 August 2026.
Alzbeta Jungrova’s terrific new photography show (curated by the Trafo Gallery team) at the Vila Volman is officially titled “Bez konce a začátku” but in my mind, it could also be called “Traces of Ludi” given its strong focus on Mr. Volman’s daughter Ludi and the energy she left behind after the family had to give up their still-new residence and leave the country.
Jungrova was clearly drawn to the story and Ludi’s energy is now felt throughout all the photographs that are brilliantly sprinkled throughout the iconic building. Whether it’s a subtle veil with a female face imprint flowing in the gentle breeze of the living room, a blurred image of a woman seemingly in flight, greeting you at the top of the stairs, a woman leaning against the window or relaxing on one of the villa’s many verandas, or a powerful portrait of a woman, a packed car behind her, taking a look at the villa one last time… the story is there. And, together with the striking architecture of Karel Janů a Jiří Štursa it is bound to pull you in as well. I loved it all.
I was not new to Jungrova’s magic. A few years ago I first stumbled on her personal work in the dilapidated washroom of an old hospital at Karlovo náměstí in Prague. A raw place about as depressing as they come, came alive with her installation. Large images printed on metal mesh screens, film foils glued to the windows to filter in the afternoon light, neon projection giving the photograph negatives a slightly spooky appearance. A life-long lover of contemporary art, I had not seen anything like it in Prague until then. I was hooked. So much so that I actually went ahead and bought not only the exhibition catalog (a work of art in its own right) but got a large size print of one of the key pieces as well. You can read about my impressions here.
So, this time, as soon as I learned Jungrova was at it again, I marked the opening date on my calendar and booked my timed ticket. The show did not disappoint. Through now somewhat familiar collages and atypical printing techniques, Jungrova once again tells a captivating story, rich in powerful female energy, beautiful in execution, and with just a hint of how destructive some forces in the Czech Republic’s past had been. And how lucky we are now that a few dedicated souls restored this architectural gem back to its former beauty.
If you loved her 2023 solo show, you are bound to like this one as well. The show runs at the Vila Volman in Čelákovice through the end of August.
