Latest news with #GustaveCourbet
LeMonde
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- LeMonde
At Musée d'Orsay, a Courbet painting gets a new life before visitors' eyes
Artisinal precision and unwavering patience: In the main gallery of Paris' Musée d'Orsay, a side arcade has become a sensation. Visitors crowd between the signs "Poitiers" and "Limoges" (western French cities) to witness an unusual spectacle. Behind plexiglass panels, a small team of restorers is hard at work breathing new life into this celebrated painting by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877): Un Enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans). Since early June, the monumental canvas – 6.68 meters long and 3.15 meters high – has been restored in public view. Every Thursday morning, three groups of 12 people each enjoy a guided visit that brings them up close to the work. Inside the restorers' area, scaffolding, spotlights and renovation tools surround the realistic painting. During half an hour, the professionals explain the history of the work, the nature of their craft and the various stages in the restoration process. This free visit is open to all by reservation. "It's fascinating. I didn't realize how many scientific skills were required for restoration," said Sylvie, a retired sales manager, as she left the visit. "It made me want to come back in the coming months to see how the project is progressing." The visits will pause in August and resume in September.
LeMonde
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- LeMonde
At Paris' Grand Palais, Denmark and France collaborate through tapestries
Many know Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World). The Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard, born in 1947, drew inspiration from it to create L'Origine du futur ("The Origin of the Future"): a six-meter by three-meter tapestry made by the Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris. It is on display until August 17 in a newly renovated gallery of the Grand Palais, before it travels to Koldinghus Castle in Denmark's Jutland region. Built from fragments, Nørgaard's work traces the history of the world, from prehistory to the era of the Greek city-states and the Enlightenment. At the center is a black hole. On one side, catastrophe is depicted through the enormous mushroom cloud of the H-bomb. On the other, life appears, represented by two children within a crown of flowers. The naked bodies of a man and a woman float as if in weightlessness – one connected to technology, which has both transformed humanity and could lead to its downfall, the other leaning over a newborn. Striking in its detail, the tapestry is part of a series of 16 commissioned by the New Carlsberg Foundation from the Mobilier National, France's national furniture collections and workshops. When the Danish patron established the foundation in 1902, he wanted to celebrate the 750 th anniversary of Koldinghus Castle, whose walls will be adorned with the tapestries beginning in 2028. Until then, all but one – the last still in progress – are on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. This commission calls to mind another.
The Star
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Paris' Orsay Museum opens up the wonders of art restoration to the public gaze
Art restorers work on Gustave Courbet's painting titled 'A Burial At Ornans' - created between 1849 and 1850 - at the Orsay Museum in Paris. Photo: AP As they painstakingly scrape grime off a monumental painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, the restorers do a remarkable job of ignoring their unusual surroundings: They're watched by crowds of people, many recording on mobile phones. Paris' Orsay Museum has thrown open to the public a process that often happens behind closed doors. The Courbet's painting had not undergone any significant restoration for at least half a century, and its condition was no longer considered satisfactory. Photo: AP The cleaning and repairs to A Burial At Ornans, one of the museum's signature works that Courbet painted between 1849 and 1850, are taking place in a bespoke enclosure with windows for visitors to peer through. "A great idea,' said Jennifer Dasal, a visiting art historian from North Carolina. Visitors watch through glass panes as art restorers work on Courbet's painting. Photo: AP "If it's lasting for a while, people can come back and they can watch the restoration over time.' The restoration is expected to take about a year. The painting hasn't had a major overhaul for about 50 years. Layers of varnish that yellowed over time have dulled Courbet's colours. The weight of the huge work has deformed its frame, and its canvas has stitching, folds and tears that need attention. The museum also plans free guided tours of their work for those who register on its website, with three time slots every Thursday morning from June 5. - AP
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
National Gallery rehang review – ‘A momentous retelling of the story of art'
T here are so many twists, turns and fascinating detours in the National Gallery's rehang you have to pick up some kind of thread. In my case, perhaps distracted by the thought of the National's new restaurant, Locatelli, it's foodie still lifes. Two huge paintings of cheese take pride of place in one of the Dutch rooms. In Floris van Dijck's 1616 still life, a black gouda rests on top of a yellow one, their cut and recut surfaces like walls of fat. In another room you can see Gustave Courbet's great, melancholy Still Life With Apples and a Pomegranate, which manages to express the defeat of the Paris Commune in battered, pockmarked fruits. Finally, at the climax of Britain's free national collection of European art from the middle ages to the birth of modernism, three revolutionary still lifes hang together so you can see how Cézanne's pictures of fruit begin to rip apart perspective and make way for Picasso's mind-boggling 1914 cubist masterpiece Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin. The Wonder of Art may seem a glib, even desperate, title for this rehang but I can't really argue. This is one of the greatest museums of painting in the world, a magic labyrinth whose every picture is a door to Wonderland. My anxiety was that the curators might try to reinvent or, God forbid, reimagine their collection, without chronology or coherence. But this 'new' National is reassuringly like the old one. It wasn't broken, so they haven't fixed it. The Titian room rehung … part of the new-look National Gallery. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock Seriously, what other capital city offers, free of charge, the chance to wander in casually off its main square and see masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck and Monet in such a calm, unfussy atmosphere, which the cool new architecture and lighting improve? I guess the National would love a bit more crowding – like other London museums it has lost visitors after Covid – but there's a subtlety to the choices its Victorian founders made that somehow enforces introspection and seriousness. It is the most intelligent of great art museums. That does not have to mean inaccessible or snobbish. You no longer enter the revamped Sainsbury Wing to be confronted by ranks of gold-dripping gothic altarpieces but get a welcoming embrace from Leonardo. His Virgin of the Rocks hangs right there at the start – blam! – a cool dive into shadowy depths out of which floats the pale androgynous face of art's queerest angel. Behind is a darkened chapel containing Leonardo's smokily drawn Burlington House Cartoon. As openers go this is as classic as a negroni. (I am thinking of Locatelli again. And his bar Giorgio downstairs.) Blam! … The Virgin of the Rocks, circa 1491-1508, by Leonardo da Vinci. Photograph: Peter Barritt/Alamy One of the most effective moves in this new approach is to isolate the collection's biggest stars to let you savour their drop-dead genius. Later on Titian and Monet get rooms of their own. But a few metres from Leonardo you'll find a wall of paintings by Van Eyck, the Flemish artist who anticipated many of the Tuscan polymath's techniques in the early 1400s. No other gallery in the world has such a perfect group of Van Eycks and here they all are: a strangely miniaturised head of the artist himself, looking like a magician in his turban, a portrait of a young man movingly inscribed 'Faithful memory', and between them, The Arnolfini Portrait with its dead-eyed merchant and young bride, Death and the Maiden set in a perfect simulacrum of an ordinary room. We're not in Florence any more. The National Gallery used to tell a traditional textbook tale of art that began when perspective was 'invented' in early 1400s Florence. This rehang involves a great retelling of the story. We now begin in Bruges with Van Eyck, which helps define the great leap forward in the Renaissance in a simpler, more human way as the discovery of the real world. You see it happen all around you as Rogier van der Weyden watches a grey-faced corpse being exhumed, a follower of Robert Campin spies on the Virgin as she breastfeeds Christ and Hans Holbein gazes into the eyes of a squirrel. This northern Renaissance route runs right down one side of the Sainsbury Wing (or aisle, if you like the supermarket metaphor) and leads to 16th-century Basel where Holbein met the humanist theologian Erasmus. His portrait of Erasmus, a gentle half-smile on his scholarly face, is hung next to paintings that share Erasmus's witty imagination by Bruegel, Bosch and Matsys. We've gone from art discovering how to depict people as people, to portraying inner lives. This is the story the National Gallery tells, now more clearly than ever. A brilliant room shows how portraiture became a Shakespearean art of the inner self right across 16th-century Europe. Holbein's Ambassadors preside over a gathering that includes Giovanni Battista Moroni's captivating portrait of an ordinary worker, The Tailor, sensitively giving you the once-over from his table as he cuts cloth with shears. The new Canaletto room … another great moment in The wonder of Art. Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock Any concessions this museum has made to accessibility have not compromised its collection one iota. Instead, emotion is allowed to bloom. The British gallery has become a purely 18th-century space, chucking out its Turners and Constables (to their own place nearby). Go Georgians! I am delighted there's more focus on Hogarth and Gainsborough. A special wall of Gainsborough's most intimate portraits centres on his love for his daughters, captured for ever – yet so fragile and momentary – in his heartbreaking The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly. The people gathered here are from other times, other worlds almost. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun strikes a pose that nods to Rubens in her Self Portrait in a Straw Hat. Rembrandt's Self Portrait at the Age of 63 looks back at you with eyes as deep, sad and addictive as they always will be, whatever the hang. They are all so real, so immediate. I know and love them. That's the wonder of art. The Wonder of Art at National Gallery, London, opens on 10 May
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
AP PHOTOS: Paris' Orsay Museum opens up the wonders of art restoration to the public gaze
AP PHOTOS: Paris' Orsay Museum opens up the wonders of art restoration to the public gaze PARIS (AP) — As they painstakingly scrape grime off a monumental painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, the restorers do a remarkable job of ignoring their unusual surroundings: They're watched by crowds of people, many recording on mobile phones. Paris' Orsay Museum has thrown open to the public a process that often happens behind closed doors. The cleaning and repairs to 'A Burial at Ornans," one of the museum's signature works that Courbet painted between 1849 and 1850, are taking place in a bespoke enclosure with windows for visitors to peer through. 'A great idea,' said Jennifer Dasal, a visiting art historian from North Carolina. 'If it's lasting for a while, people can come back and they can watch the restoration over time.' ADVERTISEMENT The restoration is expected to take about a year. The painting hasn't had a major overhaul for about 50 years. Layers of varnish that yellowed over time have dulled Courbet's colors. The weight of the huge work has deformed its frame, and its canvas has stitching, folds and tears that need attention. The museum also plans free guided tours of their work for those who register on its website, with three time slots every Thursday morning from June 5. The Associated Press
