MAAT

The Best Photos of the Day

People visit the oval gallery of MAAT museum (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) featuring an installation by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP.

 

The Best Photos of the Day

A man looks at the oval gallery of MAAT museum (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) featuring an installation by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

A woman sits on the roof of MAAT museum (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) with the 25th April bridge in the background in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

The architect of the MAAT Museum ((Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) Amanda Levete gives a press conference during a boat ride on the Tagus River in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

Construction workers finish the last details of the new MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

Construction workers finish the last details of the new MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

A construction worker finishes the last details of the new MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

A picture taken on October 3, 2016 shows silhouettes of people taking pictures of the new MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) during a boat ride on the Tagus River in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

The architect of the MAAT museum (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) Amanda Levete gives a press conference accompanied by the CEO of EDP Antonio Mexia during a boat ride on the Tagus River in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

A construction worker stands at the new MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon on October 3, 2016. The MAAT museum will open to the public on October 5, 2016. PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

 

Cash Advances?... getting rid of paper money will lead to a more secure economy

Welcome to strategy+business. Here’s what’s new.

Published: September 28, 2016

Business Literature

Cash Advances?

Economist Kenneth Rogoff argues that getting rid of paper money will lead to a more secure economy and effective monetary policy.

by Mark Gimein

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The Curse of Cash

by Kenneth S. Rogoff, Princeton University Press, 2016

This spring, the European Central Bank announced it would phase out the €500 note. If you have never seen one, you are not alone. The value of having a single note worth that much money — about US$560 — is clear to only a limited demographic. If you want to buy a Kalashnikov rifle with just a couple of bills, or maybe discreetly tip your sommelier in Saint-Tropez, it may be the bank note for you. For ordinary folks, though, it’s not a big loss. The truth is that €500 notes have little value in the licit economy.
In The Curse of Cash, Harvard economist Kenneth S. Rogoff, best known for his study of financial crises, This Time Is Different (coauthored with Carmen Reinhart), proposes a much more dramatic move. If it makes sense to get rid of extra-large bills like the €500 and Canada’s $1,000 notes, why not do away with all paper money? It’s a striking and provocative idea, well worth a public hearing, and likely points in the direction the world is headed — though it will probably take a few decades longer to get there than Rogoff would like.
The Curse of Cash is really two short books: One aimed at general readers, and one for economists and others with a strong interest in economic theory. The first gives an overview of the use of cash, exploring some of its puzzles and many of its misuses. The second focuses on the economic problem of negative interest rates.

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The best way to see the strengths and weaknesses of Rogoff’s case for doing away with cash is to start with the second, more technical part. This is where Rogoff’s greatest insights lie, and that’s to his credit — economists should be at their best when they are talking economics. Rogoff tackles what’s technically known as the “zero bound problem,” or in simpler terms, how central banks can lower interest rates below zero.
When much of the current thinking on monetary policy was developed, during the 1930s through 1970s, the biggest threat central banks were asked to combat was inflation. And in an environment of high inflation, stimulating the economy is easy: lower interest rates to push savings into productive uses.
But what happens if inflation is low and interest rates have already hit zero? That’s pretty much where we’ve been since the financial crisis of 2008. Essentially, Rogoff argues that if we could lower interest rates below zero — effectively taxing cash — central banks would have much more powerful measures to spur recovery in times of crisis. He makes a good case that while taxing cash wouldn’t endear the Fed to savers, the Fed has taken politically tougher steps to get out of crises.
The only obstacle? Cash. It would be very hard to put Rogoff’s theory into practice as long as savers could just turn their money into paper money. After all, if inflation is zero and government bonds pay, say, a –2 percent (or even –4 percent interest rate), why not just store your money in high-value bills?

Which brings us to the first part of Rogoff’s book. He understands that getting rid of cash — starting with hundred-dollar bills and working down — is not exactly an easy sell. So Rogoff builds the case against cash, loading up on all the things wrong with paper money.
The main thing: Paper money is the oil that greases the machinery of illegality. If you are buying drugs or taking bribes, cash is your friend. If you are collecting the proceeds of illegal activity, big bundles of Benjamins are an excellent means of storage. And bribery or drug sales are only the darkest edges of a much larger, hidden, cash-based economy. Rogoff estimates that Europe and the U.S. alone lose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue annually due to cash transactions.

If you are collecting the proceeds of illegal activity, big bundles of Benjamins are an excellent means of storage.

Rogoff’s case against cash is so cogently argued that it’s hard to believe that we haven’t already gotten rid of paper bills and coins — or at least larger bills. And there is the rub, and where Rogoff’s book skims over what should be some of the most interesting terrain. He devotes only three sentences to “adjusting regulation” — one of the shortest sections of the book. Yet this is almost certainly the toughest aspect of transitioning away from cash.
As The Curse of Cash repeatedly points out, Sweden has been moving quickly toward cashlessness, eliminating large bills and cutting the amount of paper currency in circulation. Clearly the shift is possible, and slowly — oh, ever so slowly — the rest of the world has been moving in this direction. (Witness the €500 note’s death.)
But Sweden has a very different regulatory regime than the United States. It has different attitudes toward financial disclosure; how much you pay in taxes in Sweden, for instance, is public record. It has different tax structures, and different attitudes toward undocumented immigrants (it has a great many immigrants, and almost all there legally). And it’s not clear how much political appetite there is in the United States for shutting down the gray economy of cash in the short time frame that Rogoff envisions.
The Curse of Cash has all the strengths you expect of a book from an economist. When it comes to the figuring out how central banks would move away from cash, Rogoff is careful, polished, and detailed, even including a chart-filled technical appendix. On the politics, though, Rogoff punts, effectively saying that we don’t need to sweat the details. That’s too bad, because that’s where all the little devils who kill big ideas tend to hide.

Author Profile:

• Mark Gimein is a writer and editor in New York. He writes regularly about the economy for NewYorker.com and Time.com, and blogs at Chumpchanger.com.

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Philippe Parreno creates a public ritual at Tate Modern

Features

Philippe Parreno creates a public ritual at Tate Modern

283 | October 2016
By Louisa Buck

Watching from a rotating viewing space in H (N)Y PN(Y) OSIS (2015) at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © Philippe Parreno. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, Barbara Gladstone and Esther Schipper.

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As he takes on the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall, the French artist on exhibitions as works of art, why he dislikes the word “installation” and engaging with Londoners

One of the most influential artists of his generation, French artist Philippe Parreno has made his name over three decades by using a mind-boggling range of media to explore how art can and should be experienced. He is known for working collaboratively with fellow artists as well as set builders, digital technicians, film-makers, musicians, ventriloquists and a cinematographer to make animations, films, sound works, light pieces—even an all-black garden—all of which focus on the importance of treating the exhibition as a work of art in itself, rather than a collection of discrete objects.

To say that Parreno challenges institutional conventions is an understatement. In his exhibitions anything can happen: curtains can dance, light works operate like musical instruments or the temperature of a space can plummet and a snowdrift appear. His many films include a reanimated Japanese Manga character; 17 different cameras trained on the footballer Zinédine Zidane; a robot programmed to write like Marilyn Monroe; and a recreation of the train journey carrying the body of Robert Kennedy from New York to Washington.

Now, the Paris-based Parreno has been invited to create this year’s Hyundai Commission in the vast industrial space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, following in the footsteps of, among others, his sometime collaborators Carsten Höller, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tino Sehgal. Speaking ahead of the opening of Anywhen in the Turbine Hall, he tells us how he approached the large-scale, high-profile commission.

The Art Newspaper: Of the 16 artists who have been commissioned to make work in the Turbine Hall, you are the first to visit the architects Herzog & de Meuron to talk about the space—why did you do this and what did you discuss?

Philippe Parreno: Each time I do an exhibition I always like to question the nature of the space and its history: what it is and what it was. Many art centres are buildings left over from the Industrial Revolution that have been transformed into cultural centres—so there’s always a story to tell. This was the case with the shows I did before in the Armory in New York and before that in the Palais de Tokyo [in Paris]—all these spaces have a history. And I wanted to know about all that with the Turbine Hall, but of course it is also well known as a building of [more recent] architecture, and so I thought it’s the only case where I can actually meet the architect. I was very interested [in the fact] that it’s a public space and that it’s free, and I wanted to know where that idea came from and how it was structured. When I went to see Herzog & de Meuron they told me that the idea of the Turbine Hall as a free, open, public space had been at the heart of the project from the very beginning and that was very useful for me.

This year, with the opening of the adjacent Switch House, it is also the first time that the Turbine Hall now connects with Tate Modern’s new building.

I also wanted to know from Herzog & de Meuron how the [Turbine Hall] has been transformed. One thing that was a trigger for me was that Herzog & de Meuron not only thought of making a large public space that was free, but they also made it even larger by digging down and making it higher. So it was especially interesting that the verticality of the building was designed by the architect—it wasn’t like a found object. For me, that was the beginning of the scenario, and as you will see in the show I use this verticality a lot: there are a lot of things that are coming up and down.

Installation view of the Hyundai Commission 2016: Philippe Parreno, Anywhen (Photo: Tate Photography)

You’ve said that you thought of the Palais de Tokyo as a garden and New York’s Park Avenue Armory as a city plaza—so how do you view the Turbine Hall?

For me the Turbine Hall is a public park. I took it as an English park, rather than a French park. It is protected from the rain and it is a place where people hang around and play and eat and do things and gather. The fact that it is free, and that people come in the morning and leave at night—I wanted to use that as a journey. I thought it would be interesting to take that as a place where things are different in the mornings to how they are at night. If you go to a park in the morning you will see trolleys with babies and later people coming for lunch with their lunchboxes; then in the evening you may have a banjo player, and at night the screening of a film. So I took it as a place where time can float and things can come in and disappear: that’s the structure of the project, it’s a time project.

You consider an exhibition to be a medium in its own right and having a language of its own, with the different components acting as props or adjuncts to make a composite experience. Is this the case with the Turbine Hall?

Installation view of the Hyundai Commission 2016: Philippe Parreno, Anywhen (until 2 April 2017). (Photo: Tate Photography)

Yes, the project is absolutely a form, with a structure and a logic that obeys the rules of the space and which exists at that moment, in that time and in that space, and which disappears afterwards. I think about it as an automaton that works on a timeline of eight hours: it opens at ten and closes at six. So when you open the doors the automaton starts to wake up and starts to produce its movement, and when the sun declines and there’s less light you start to have another kind of atmosphere. So it is linked to the sun and the way it comes into the building, and the way people use the building and the way the building exists, inside and outside. It is never the same and it would be impossible to repeat anywhere else. I like the fact that people can come in to the Turbine Hall in the morning and meet a friend who went at the same time the day before and who will maybe have seen something completely different. You may miss things, but that’s OK.

Your exhibitions are immersive experiences involving multiple elements yet you dislike the term “installation”—why?

I started to hear this word when I was a student, and first of all, it’s not nice word—it’s quite ugly. It seems to say that there’s a form that we call “art” and then there’s something else we call “installation”. I’ve always been afraid of neologisms: why go looking for some other word than “exhibition” in the first place? It’s really narrow-minded. When I started, people used to say to me that what I made wasn’t art and that I wasn’t an artist because I worked in collaboration with other artists. So I will stick to what it is: I am a visual artist and I try to engage art into rituals that are not necessarily coming from the 19th century.

You have used the Indonesian gamelan as a metaphor for how you make exhibitions. Does this apply to the Turbine Hall?

Yes. A gamelan is an ensemble of different percussion instruments, which are relevant as individual objects, but when they come together they become a single instrument. To play it you need a lot of musicians, but led by a single person, the dalang—a kind of spiritual leader who conducts and directs the ensemble. So for me it was quite a good definition of an art object that on its own can occupy space and is something quite decorative, and when it comes together with other objects then it becomes performative again. When I first talked about the gamelan it was in connection with my Marquees [a series of works dating from 2006 that explore space using light and the format of a marquee canopy] but it is an interesting way to talk about my understanding of an exhibition—an exhibition is made out of objects but these objects come together to produce more than their components.

You say your work addresses the public and not an audience—what’s the difference?

The main difference is that you can design an audience. An audience comes for something that you’re designing an event for, but the public is not expecting anything—they are just people, basically. A way to evolve exhibitions is to stop thinking about the audience and to start considering the public.

So what do you want the public visitors to the Turbine Hall to experience?

I want people to spend time with themselves and in the space and without expectations. If you spend time in the space looking at things, you also spend time with yourself. I’m interested in trying to see if we can find new forms of rituals for appreciating architecture, looking at moving pictures, hearing sound and coming to see objects. I want to see if we can offer another type of possibility for engaging with form and with people.

• The Hyundai Commission: Philippe Parreno, Tate Modern, London, 4 October-2 April 2017, tate.org.uk

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Manga, football and opera: three of Parreno’s key works

Philippe Parreno, No Ghost just a Shell (1999-2003) © Philippe Parreno

No Ghost just A Shell (1999-2003)
In 1999 Parreno and his fellow French artist Pierre Huyghe bought the copyright for the Japanese manga character Annlee, for 4,600 yen from a clearing house for animated characters. They then invited 15 fellow artists—including Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster—to “collaborate” with this bought-off-the-peg avatar. Described by Parreno as “a portrait of a dead product”, in 2002 Annlee was eventually “set free” by Huyghe and Parreno by forming an independent Annlee Association, which in effect transferred the copyright back to Annlee and required her permission for future use of her likeness. This event was recorded in the 2002 film A Smile Without a Cat, in which Annlee made her final appearance in a firework display over the ocean in Miami.

Stills from Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait (2006) by Philippe Parreno with Douglas Gordon © Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006)
Made with Douglas Gordon, this 90-minute film is composed of real-time footage shot from 17 different cameras, each trained solely on the French midfielder Zinédine Zidane during an entire match for Real Madrid against Villarreal. An intimate portrait filmed in front of tens of thousands of spectators, and intercut with live footage from a television broadcast of the game, Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait was presented as a multi-screen installation and released as a feature film. Parreno describes what is probably his best known collaborative work as operating between “fiction and documentary” and occupying a place “between a photograph and a painting, between a ready-made and a sculpture”. The film score was by the Scottish band Mogwai.

Philippe Parreno, Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World, exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo, 2013. Photo: Aurélien Mole

Anywhere, Anywhere out of the world (2013)
Parreno was the first artist to fill the entirety of the colossal interior of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which was open until midnight, six days a week. This exhibition-cum-gesamtkunstwerk marked a significant watershed in Parreno’s conception of the exhibition as a complete work in its own right—or, as he put it, “parallel events running throughout a promenade in a consistent Euclidean space”. This enormous, constantly changing ensemble of films, robots, performances, light pieces and sculptural works unfolded to Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, which was played throughout the space on scattered, haunted pianolas, and which guided visitors through the exhibition. As Parreno puts it: “Producing an exhibition is my studio practice.”

Digest: Parreno’s Journey to the Turbine Hall

Background: Born in Oran, Algeria, in 1964, Parreno grows up in Grenoble, the son of working-class parents, his mother a house cleaner, his father a factory worker. He begins his higher education studying maths, but switches to art, first at the École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble (1983-88), where he meets Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and then at the Institute des Hautes Études en arts plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (1988-89). To earn money during his studies he assists various artists including Lawrence Weiner and Daniel Buren when they make projects for Grenoble’s Le Magasin art space.

Milestones: In 1996, Parreno features in Traffic, an exhibition that defines the artistic movement known as Relational Aesthetics. In 1999, with Pierre Huyghe, Parreno purchases the Japanese Manga character Annlee and inaugurates No Ghost Just a Shell, a collaborative project in which various artists make work with the avatar. Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, made by Parreno and Douglas Gordon, premieres at the Cannes film festival in 2006. The following year, he directs and co-curates with Hans Ulrich Obrist Il Tempo del Postino, a group exhibition of live performances for the Manchester International Festival. In 2009 Parreno has solo shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Kunsthalle in Zürich. His first major London solo exhibition opens at the Serpentine Gallery the following year. In 2012, Parreno presents two major new films, Marilyn and C.H.Z. (Continuously Habitable Zones) at Fondation Beyeler, Basel. H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, his first major US exhibition, opens in the monumental interior of Park Avenue Armory in 2015, as does Hypothesis at HangarBicocca in Milan, Parreno’s first survey exhibition in Italy. It was curated by Andrea Lissoni, the curator of Parreno’s Tate Modern commission.

Represented by Pilar Corrias, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

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Museums

Why museum leaders are organising shows for private collectors

With government funding harder to come by, museums must stay in the good graces of ultra-rich patrons

by Cristina Ruiz  |  4 October 2016

Lacma's director organised an exhibition at François Pinault's gallery, Punta della Dogana, two years after Pinault gave Lacma a stake in a work by Bruce Nauman. (Image: G. Sighele)

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The director of Tate Modern in London, Frances Morris, has organised an exhibition of post-war art from Europe and Asia due to open this month at the George Economou Collection, a private museum in Athens set up by the eponymous Greek shipping magnate (13 October-9 April 2017). Earlier this year, the same private gallery hosted a survey of Minimalism organised by the Tate curator Mark Godfrey.

These shows follow a cash gift made to Tate Modern by the Greek tycoon, who is a trustee of the Tate foundation, an advisory and fundraising board. Although the museum declined to disclose the size of Economou’s gift, it was large enough for one of the galleries in Tate Modern’s new £260m Herzog & de Meuron-designed extension to be named after him.

This collaboration between one of the world’s leading museums and a wealthy patron exemplifies the ever closer ties between public institutions and the rich in an era of reduced government funding. Although collectors have always served on museum boards, many are now opening their own galleries as well—and asking the curators and directors of public museums to organise exhibitions for them. “There used to be a dyke between private interest and public purpose and now it’s burst,” says one senior art world source. “It’s a complete sea change in how museums operate.”

Directors for hire?

Morris is not the only director who has organised a show for a museum donor. In 2011, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Iwona Blazwick, embarked on a three-year partnership with the Anglo-Canadian Weston family. In exchange for a donation to the Whitechapel’s programming and education fund, Blazwick organised three exhibitions at the Weston’s art gallery at Windsor, a gated community near Orlando, Florida.

Meanwhile, Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), developed a relationship with the French luxury goods magnate and collector François Pinault when both were trying to acquire Bruce Nauman’s installation For Beginners (2010). Pinault bought the work in 2011 and donated a 50% stake to Lacma.

Two years later, Govan co-organised a show of Mono-ha and Arte Povera at Punta della Dogana, Pinault’s private museum in Venice, Italy. “We share many artists of common interest, which led to his asking me to have a dialogue with his collection and this resulted in an ongoing relationship,” Govan says in a statement.

As museums increasingly compete for donations of both cash and art from deep-pocketed individuals, we are likely to see more of these apparent quid pro quos. The Belgian collector Alain Servais observes: “There have been attacks on corporate funding of museums, such as the demonstrations surrounding BP’s sponsorship of Tate.” (Earlier this year, the oil company ended its 26-year sponsorship of the London museum following numerous protests.) “The public doesn’t want institutions to be funded by cigarette money or oil money. Who should they be funded by?” Servais asks.

Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, says: “The key question is how a museum navigates these waters ethically, transparently and to the benefit of its visitors, staff and supporters.”

“Implicitly regressive”

Yet collaborations with private collectors have the potential to subvert the purpose of museums, warns Adrian Ellis, the director of the cultural advisory firm AEA Consulting. “Museums are supported by public money, either through direct funding in Europe or tax benefits in the United States. If the beneficiaries of this are collectors, there is an implicitly regressive element where money is taken away from poorer people and given to rich people.”

Even if collectors have transferred ownership of their art to foundations, “these organisations are often still effectively controlled by the donors and many of them don’t make a hard distinction between their foundation’s assets and what they own privately”, Ellis says.

The private collector George Economou, who made a cash gift to Tate Modern, is working with the museum’s director, Frances Morris, on a show in Athens. (Image: Joerg Koch/dapd/AP)

The George Economou Collection is a “not-for-profit, free admission space which creates exhibitions to aid in expanding the international dialogue as well as inspiring the public”, the director of the collection, Skarlet Smatana, says in a statement. She adds that guest curators bring different viewpoints and expert knowledge, and that the museum has “not received any comments related to a conflict of interest with museum relationships”. But she declined to specify whether the collection ever sells art, a scenario that allows private collectors to benefit financially from the stamp of approval given by the leader of a museum.

Frances Morris (Image: © Tate)

A Tate spokeswoman points out that Economou’s cash gift to the institution was made in 2011, long before Morris was invited to organise the exhibition in Athens and before she became director. The spokeswoman adds that Tate curators are frequently invited to organise shows outside the museum’s walls. The institution evaluates these opportunities based on “key criteria”, she says, including the excellence of the collection, the public benefit of the project and the potential to further public knowledge of the subject.

"Very careful": Chris Dercon (Image: Dazaifu89)

Don’t criticise private collectors’ art

One insidious effect of museums’ desire to keep collectors happy is self-censorship, says Chris Dercon, the recently departed director of Tate Modern. He says it has become impossible to criticise the acquisitions of private collectors. “When I was working in [Europe], we used to have lengthy debates about which collector has better examples of conceptual art. We would discuss this directly with the collectors themselves. In London, I learned to be very careful,” he says. “We are all extremely polite [to collectors who show us their acquisitions] to the point where critique as we knew it does not exist any more.”



 

bizou du jour

 




The Best Photos of the Day

In this photograph taken on October 1, 2016, the gold dome of Shwedagon pagoda, Yangon's main religious landmark is seen through a stretch of road lined with colonial era and new buildings. Many colonial era buildings constructed during the British period have already been razed by the flood of foreign investment that followed the end of total military rule in 2011 and has pushed the city into a development frenzy. Heritage and conservation experts have lobbied to preserve the city's crumbling colonial era architecture. ROMEO GACAD / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

Visitors pose for a photo before mock-ups of dinosaur skeletons inside the Museum of Natural History in Pyongyang on September 28, 2016. Ed JONES / AFP

The Best Photos of the Day

Tourists visit Temple of Heaven in Beijing on September 28, 2016 ahead of Golden Week, a week-long holiday that coincides with the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China which falls on October 1. FRED DUFOUR / AFP

 

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Flemish landscape paintings on view at Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau
With 160 artworks, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden possesses one of the world’s most important collections of Flemish landscape paintings. 12
DRESDEN.- Dizzying vistas of river valleys and mountain peaks, the impenetrable thicket of a forest bustling with countless animals, the idyllic quiet of a lake in the evening light. What we now call landscapes weren’t always seen that way – and they certainly weren’t depicted that way either. In the special exhibition ‘Paradise on Earth: Flemish Landscape Painting from Bruegel to Rubens’, which opened on 1 October in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, nature takes over the surfaces of the paintings on display. Initially appearing as backgrounds and vistas, nature gradually spread over the panels and canvases, eventually taking centre stage in such a convincing manner that, for the first time, nature became a natural part of the artistic canon. Flanders, with its important trading ports in Antwerp and Brussels, is both the centre and the turning point of this dynamic, which began in the sixteenth century. It is the era of great discoveries, of the increasing cartographic measurement of the world, and of the establishment of trade routes that would bring wealth and prosperity to the Flemish regions. Nature came to be viewed in this period from the perspective both of the scientific, detached explorer, and of the astonished believers who had been unsettled by denominational conflicts. The desire for paradise – a place of unity between humans and creation – is expressed in this emerging genre of art, as are spiritual abysses that individuals might encounter in the course of their lives. In this sense, the artists featured in this presentation did not paint landscape portraits but rather ideal representations they composed in their workshops. They drew on the repertoire of forms found in nature for the paradises they devised in their heads. Incredibly multifaceted images of natural space unfold before the viewer – spaces that are, for the most part, artistic inventions. FROM BRUEGEL TO RUBENS: AN INVENTORY OF THE COLLECTION IN DRESDEN With 160 artworks, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden possesses one of the world’s most important collections of Flemish landscape paintings. Only a small part of this collection has previously been on display in the permanent exhibition. With this special exhibition, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden reveals the findings of a three-year research project in which scholars investigated the entire collection of Flemish paintings. In an exhibition space of more than 500 square metres, visitors are led through an earthly paradise. The show is divided into various thematic areas that illustrate the emergence of the new genre through an exceptionally high-calibre selection of artworks. One section is comprised of early landscape backgrounds – both in miniature paintings from the late Middle Ages, and in altarpieces and devotional paintings. The development of this artistic lineage led landscape genres to emerge that continuously distinguished themselves from one another. They include the postcard-sized cabinet paintings of country and forest landscapes and lake scenes by Hans Bol (1534–1593), and the large-scale animal landscapes of Roelant Savery (1576–1639). The video installation ‘Travel, 1996–2013’ by the contemporary artist David Claerbout (born 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium), bridges the gap between the show’s older works and the twenty-first century, taking visitors on a pictorial voyage. The exhibition also includes documentary videos that show the technical and restoration work done on two important paintings in the show. RESTORATION AND TECHNICAL ANALYSIS In an interdisciplinary collaboration, art historians, conservators, and scientists carried out extensive investigations for this exhibition. These included material analyses and various diagnostic procedures using radiation, like infrared reflectography and digital x-radiography. Such procedures yielded insights that, in many cases, amount to a rediscovery of the works studied. Images that had been painted over were made visible, and new attributions of the artists behind the works could be made. The exhibition brings together 141 works, including prized items on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In addition to paintings, there are drawings and prints from the Kupferstich-Kabinett (Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs), and a precious globe from the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon (Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments). In cooperation with the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, part of this exhibition will be displayed in adapted form in the Museum Rockoxhuis in Antwerp from March to June, 2017. This staging of the exhibition will bring the Dresden artworks back to their place of origin.