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From Munch, Monet and Matisse to Picasso, Picabia and Popists: the Louis Vuitton Foundation has them all




The Fondation Louis Vuitton (the Louis Vuitton Foundation), opened in October 2014, presents a selection of major 20th century works, loans from prestigious galleries in Russia, America, Europe, Australia, and of course France. The exhibition called Keys to a passion, from April 1 to July 6, 2015, is organized in four sequences: Subjective Expressionism, Contemplative, Popist, and Music.

The Subjective Expressionism sequence shows works on life, death, anguish, and solitude by Kazamir Malevich  (1879-1935), Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Otto Dix (1891-1969), and Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). The top photograph is Kasimir Malevich's Complex Feeling or Bust with a Yellow Shirt (1932). 

Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) from the Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg Art Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, shows the 26-year-old dancer from Leipzig.


The Portrait of Jean Genet (1954-55) by Alberto Giacometti from the Pompidou Centre National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, France, is of the French novelist in a light grey suit.


Heavily protected behind sheet glass is Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1893? 1910?) from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. It is probably one of the most recognized paintings in art history along with the Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1517). Munch painted four versions of the picture on cardboard. Two of them are drawn with pastel, whereas the other two are painted. The one exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton is painted with broad sweeping brushstrokes.


The Contemplative sequence displays works on nature by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Claude Monet’s Blue Waterlilies (1916-19) from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris is a good choice for the contemplative section. Monet was 75 years old when he painted this work.


The full title of Piet Mondrian’s Dune III (1909) is Pointillist Dune Study, Crest at Centre, painted during his experimental period. It is on loan from the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in The Netherlands.


Emil Nold’s Twilight (1916) from the Art Museum in Basel, Switzerland, is of the low coastline of the North Sea where Denmark meets Germany, where he lived.


The Pablo Picasso painting Woman with Yellow Hair (1931) is from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and was painted in Paris. The woman in the painting is 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter, whom he painted many times.


The Popist sequence focuses on themes of vitality, energy, and progress by Robert Delaunay (1885-1979), Fernand Leger (1881-1955), and Francis Picabia (1879-1953).

The Cardiff Team by Robert Delaunay (1912-13) is from the Musee d’Art modern de la Ville, Paris, and depicts the Welsh football team in Paris with a mixture of cubism and French motif.


The exhibit has a series of five works by artist Francis Picabia. The two photographs below show parts of the painting Woman with Bulldog (1941-42) that uses a technique called photographic and cinematographic realism.



The Music sequence contains works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), and Gino Severini (1883-1966).


The large oil painting, The Dance (1909-10), by Henri Matisse depicts the music theme, a common theme in his works, and is quite commanding in the last sequence of the exhibition.




 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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