Paris Arts Club

The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror ca 1888/9  (Beaux Arts, Rouen)   Artist Walter Sickert plunges us into the world of music hall and theatre in late 19th century London. The Petit Palais has chosen perfect background colours for Sickert's paintings and suitable music hall songs to add to the atmosphere. (It's good to have a 'sing-a-long!) Sickert's first, short-lived, career was as an actor. The theatre is a favourite theme of his. His compositions are often complex, as here. The spectators are seen from the side and the performing artist is seen reflected in a mirror.  Gallery of the Old Bedford  1894-95   (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) A play of mirrors in the above work challenges the 2-dimensional surface of the painting, adding drama and depth. Sickert takes us from the London to the Paris theatres: Montmartre Theatre  ca 1906  (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) Sickert gradually focusses on the audience rather than the performers, blurring the...

Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (detail) 1898 by Anna Klumpke(1856-1942) Rosa Bonheur is a rare example of a woman painter independent and successful enough to live by her own earnings in 19th Century France. She was so commercially successful, especially in the U.S. and Britain, that by the age of 38 she had bought herself a château on the edge of Fontainebleau forest and moved into it with her life-long devoted friend Nathalie Micas and Nathalie's mother, who supervised the practical side of living. Their domaine was baptised "Domaine de la parfaite amitié" (Domain of perfect friendship) Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas Le Marché aux Chevaux (the Horse Fair) 1855 The painting which made a star of Rosa Bonheur in 1855 was "The Horse Fair". It is now in the New York Met, and is too big to be moved, but the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay has a smaller version sent by the National Gallery, London.  This smaller picture was made to allow engravings to be made in order...

Tigon (cross between lion and tiger) 1926 Oscar Kokoschka may have identified with this animal, painted in Regent's Park Zoo in London. Some of the artist's Viennese contemporaries called him the 'Oberwidling'- the 'savage'. The Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris refers to him as a 'fauve' (wild beast).  When it moves to the Guggenheim in Bilbao in March 2023, the title will change to 'enfant terrible'.  Kokoschka expressed his wild side when he shaved off his hair in 1909 to look like a prisoner: Photo of Oskar Kokoschka with shaved head 1909, by Wenzel Weis   Born in 1886 in Pöchlarn, Austria, of a Bohemian goldsmith father and an Austrian mother, Oskar's early days were spent in Vienna, where he studied from 1904 to 1909. He chose the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) in which to do his training- the Artisan School, rather than the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Young girl standing among vines 1908 lithography He was a pa...