In the new game
Avant-Garde, you play an up-and-coming artist in 19th century Paris, a contemporary of Manet and Bouguereau. Carve and sell allegorical statue groups! Get snubbed by Napoleon III! Subsidize Gustave Courbet's drinking! Compose and promulgate your own aesthetic manifesto!
posted by Iridic
on Mar 8, 2013 -
56 comments
James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is one of those very rare novels that seems not so much to have been written as discovered. At its heart is a love story, an encounter, that transforms its relatively ordinary protagonists into beings around whom the entire cosmos shapes itself. The love story is delicate and ephemeral, put together out of bits and pieces, like a bird's nest. The vulnerable lovers tremble, in the most mundane circumstances, on the edge of catastrophe. Simply the way one of them moves across the room to meet the other seems miraculous and hazardous. Were they to become aware of themselves everything would be lost. But there is no danger of that. Oblivious, they tiptoe on a precipice. They do not and cannot know that their innocence cloaks them in a kind of divinity and infallibility. Actions and attitudes we expect to bring them down don't. They do things that seem so perfect, so poignant, without knowing they are doing anything at all. They arc beautifully across our path, and then vanish. -
Michael Doliner (previously) [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Jul 31, 2012 -
8 comments
Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Apr 16, 2012 -
6 comments
French hospitals have rooms where medical students (
internes) can rest, lunch and vent off steam between calls, but these
salles de garde are not your usual staff room. They are brightly decorated with lively mural paintings showing the current
internes, the doctors and other hospital staff engaging in very (very) explicit sex acts. The frescos are done by the students themselves or commissioned from local artists, and are replaced on a regular basis. Here are some choice examples (sorted by hospital):
Ambroise Paré,
Cochin,
Widal,
Louis Mourier,
Saint-Louis,
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul,
Institut Gustave Roussy (
ibid) (
ibid),
Lariboisière,
Robert Debré,
Saint-Cloud,
Tenon.
Many other images can be seen on the
website of an association of former internes. [
Totally NSFW unless you're a medical student training in France]
[more inside]
posted by elgilito
on Mar 19, 2012 -
203 comments
This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris. - Wired.com
"The New French Hacker-Artist Underground"
posted by The Whelk
on Jan 24, 2012 -
20 comments
The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
Tania Blanco is a modern artist who shares her time in France and Spain. She says of her collection
Sleepdrunk Vademecum, "The body is made up of a large set of rounded painting formats. Medical instruments, high precision technology, scientific devices, anatomical models, clandestine laboratories and human representation become the object of study and thought. The bizarre represented objects reflect a mixture of past and future, and an ambiguous
clinical atmosphere flows in them. On many of these painted surfaces, a soft cool-cold gradient isolates the represented elements and gives a
non-gravitational character to the compositions." [
via]
posted by netbros
on Sep 11, 2011 -
3 comments
Stephane Halleux is a French sculpture artist whose work feels like Jules Verne as realized by Tim Burton; the sculptures all share cartoonish steampunk vibe that's really appealing. Sadly, the site is 100% Flash, so no linking to specific favorites, but at the very least the navigation remains fairly straightforward.
posted by jonson
on May 5, 2007 -
14 comments
This time-lapse video of an oil-painting being created by Pablo Picasso is brief, but captivating. The clip is a scene taken from the 1955 French documentary "
The Mystery of Picasso," in which director Henri-Georges Clouzot filmed the artist painting 20 different pieces. Bizarrely enough, almost all the art created for the film had to be destroyed upon close of production due to contractual obligation.
Via
posted by jonson
on Jan 1, 2007 -
28 comments
Bourbonnais. No, not
Bourbonnais, IL, but
Bourbonnais, a historic province in France that flourished during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this area there are hundreds of churches built in the
Romanesque style.
In 2004
Stephen Murray, an art history professor, and his students recieved a $500,000
grant to
document, process, and archive data from the churches into a digital database, all available
online.
posted by provolot
on Dec 5, 2006 -
13 comments
BramTV [flash] [possibly NSFW] Art + interaction = data-dandy behaviour. If you like to be in control you may well find this extremely annoying.
posted by tellurian
on Oct 19, 2006 -
12 comments
Ahmad Nadalian's work can be found all over the world. He is an artist that carves symbols on rocks and then leaves them at the site where they were created (sometimes
burying them).
posted by tellurian
on Aug 2, 2006 -
7 comments
Insecula. As the
Wiki says:
Insecula: L'encyclopédie des arts et de l'architecture is a French language art website containing images and descriptions of thousands of works of art from major museums and collections in France and elsewhere, including the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Palace of Versailles, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MOMA.
But it's not just museums and art. It's got
Mayan ruins,
Manhattan and
Brooklyn, and of course lots of
Paris streets.
I can't believe plep hasn't posted this already...
posted by languagehat
on Apr 10, 2004 -
12 comments
"pleix is a virtual community of digital artists based in paris. some of us are 3d artists, some others are musicians or graphic designers. this website is the perfect place to share our latest creations." [note: quicktime]
posted by crunchland
on Oct 17, 2003 -
4 comments
The Vertically Inclined Photographer: Shooting Paris, Rome, the French Riviera and the Loire Valley from a low-flying plane is
Patrick Durand's photographic obsession. It's an interesting
flat alternative to
Horst Hamann's [
click on "Gallery" and go to "New Verticals"]
tall vertical New York. There's something very exciting about looking at familiar sights from an unfamiliar point of view. [
Both sites very, perhaps too Flash.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jul 4, 2003 -
14 comments
You probably remember him best for his famous
green devil, tempting you with the esoteric delight of evil absinthe
*, or the familiar image of the jester pushing the pleasures of
Bitter Campari. Called by some the "father of the modern poster", and even the "
father of advertising", Italian-born
Leonetto Cappiello created over 1,000 memorable posters during his 40-year career in belle-epoque and fin-de-siecle Paris, and a quick look at a
collection of his work quickly reminds us how enduring both his images and his basic concepts have been.
(more...)
posted by taz
on Nov 4, 2002 -
15 comments
