Atelier Mends Art Blog

According to a recent article in Le Monde, the Louvre Museum has been drawing fire from criticisms recently owing to a controversial decision: lending about twenty masterpieces to the area stricken since a tsunami flattened the coastline and seriously damaged a nuclear reactor in March 2011; experts have ranked the accident at the plant as on the same level as Chernobyl.

The Louvre is making this move, planned for the period of 20 April to 17 September, as a gesture of solidarity with the victims in three of the towns hardest hit.  This includes Fukushima City, which falls within 40 miles of the site of the crippled plant.  It should be noted that a recent New York Times articles still indicates Fukushima City as lying in an area where inhabitants have received 20 milliseiverts of radiation over the past year; in the United States, people on the average receive six.

Yet the Louvre insists it will be very safe to make this loan, and has insisted that the artworks be unpacked from their crates only inside the three museums; placed inside sealed glass cases for exhibition; and some of the more delicate works will even remain in sealed glass cases for the entire trip.  A Louvre spokesman stated: "For the Fukushima museum, inside the exhibition rooms the rate is 0.06 microsieverts an hour, a normal rate, what you would find in a Parisian museum."

The French website La Tribune de l'Art doesn't see it with quite the same eye.  In an article entitled "The Louvre is more and more (radio) active in Japan", the loan is declared "meaningless" and "dangerous for the artworks", reasoning that if French travelers are encouraged by their government to regularly vacuum carpets and furniture, perhaps the Louvre suggests the same treatment for their works.

I myself often translate for a nuclear physicist who has specialized in reporting on nuclear accidents in the French press; when I asked her about the risks of traveling to Japan these days, she told me flatly that no one should go there without a Geiger counter - and it was not a joke.

Indeed:  should the Louvre be sending its paintings and its personnel to a nuclear disaster area?

Magritte's "Olympia", © The Week, January 2012

 

Olympia, a 1948 painting by René Magritte, has resurfaced after having been stolen from Magritte’s former terrace house in 2009, resolving at last the mystery as to the reasons for its theft.

 

The original robbery took place only ten minutes after the house had opened to function as a museum by appointment only.  A man rang the bell and asked if visiting hours had begun, and then put a gun to the museum attendant’s head to permit his accomplice to enter as well. 

 

The two unmasked men, wearing wigs and speaking both French and English, had the staff and the visitors, a Japanese couple, kneel in the courtyard.  They then smashed a protective glass plate to reach the painting, setting off the alarm, and made their getaway before the police arrived.

 

The stolen painting is a nude of Magritte’s wife, Georgette, on her back and with a seashell sitting on her stomach.

 

This was where the mystery began, as the Art Loss Register said at the time that Magritte was not a painter whose works were often stolen, and in fact there were very few of them missing.  Olympia, being a highly recognizable painting, could not be sold openly on the market.  According to Maja Pertot Bernard at the Register, interviewed by The Guardian in 2009, “In thefts like these the paintings either tend to turn up very quickly when the thieves realize it’s a lost cause, or if they do go missing for a long time, they often change hands so many times that the final seller doesn’t realize there is a problem with the painting.”  It was further specified that paintings were also sometimes held for ransom, or often used as collateral in exchange for something, or to pay off a debt.

 

At the time, however, it was conjectured that the theft had been conducted to order for a collector, as the robbers had known unhesitatingly which work they were looking for.

 

The Daily Telegraph now reports, three years later, that an unidentified person called up the insurance company and offered to return the work.  According to the Belgian press, rather it was art expert Janpiet Callens who was contacted anonymously about two years ago.

Fortunately, Olympia has been returned, undamaged an in excellent condition, for a ransom of 75,000 euros paid by the insurance company.  The work itself is estimated to be worth 3 million.

With six film festival nominations, animated film Le Tableau (“The Painting") has already met with both critical and popular success. Due to the wonderful script by Anik Le Ray and its magic realization by director Jean-François Laguionie, it develops a wonderfully fanciful conceit on the notion of what a painting is, means and represents.

 Poster for "Le Tableau"

© Blue Spirit Animation - Be Films -Blue Spirit Studio - Sinematik - Rezo Productions

The story:  a painting has been left incomplete, and the figures peopling it form a society consisting of three castes: the Toupins (“tout-peint”, or “all-painted”), the Pafinis (“pas-fini”, or “not-finished”) and the Reufs (from the English word “roughs”). The increasing violence of the Toupins in rejecting both the Pafinis and especially the Reufs leads to three characters leaving the painting itself in a search for The Painter to ask him to finish his work, to thereby bring peace to their troubled world.

The story is rich in that it can be read on several levels. There is the allegory of intolerance, especially illustrated in the love story between Ramo, a Toupin, and Claire, a Pafini. There is the mystery too of The Painter, whose own story we gradually come to understand in his absence as the three explorers discover his studio and his other paintings. There is the development as well of the idea of forging one’s self and growing as an individual. All this enriches the wonderful aesthetics of the film’s graphic elements.

The Toupins have a scornful look at the Pafinis and the Reufs

(click on image to enlarge)

According to an interview with Télérama, Laguionie decided that The Painter’s style would necessarily have to be figurative, if figures were to escape from it: “…concerning the references to art history, we needed a style that wasn’t too contemporary, to avoid our heading towards Abstract art. So I placed the artist at a time when painting was very rich, but still figurative. This allowed me to show his influences, what he admired. He even permitted himself a few imitations: Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and a bit of Chagall too…”

Indeed, one of the film’s most beautiful moments is precisely when the unfinished Claire sleeps cradled in the leaf of a benevolent flower (already one thinks of William Blake). Her face a Modigliani mask, she dreams of her absent lover come to enfold her in his arms and his being, and for a brilliant several seconds the colorful lines of the two lovers weave and bind into a Chagall-esque bird taking flight. The aesthetic beauty of the moment is matched only by its poetry, echoed again and again throughout the film, as when Ramo returns to give her sight and consistency, himself taking the place of The Painter to complete her face.

Two Toupins, one Pafini and a Reuf

(click on image to enlarge)

For the film’s greater story is about creativity. When the adventurers set out, they are three seeking to meet their Creator. Only one, Lola, will take the risk of true self-discovery to actually have an encounter with The Painter (played by director Laguionia himself) in the world of unpainted reality. The plot’s conceit there reaches its greatest moment, caught in an offhand remark she tosses over her shoulder as she embarks on her exploration of this different, limitless world: “I wonder who painted you.”

"Le Tableau" (2011), a Franco-Belgian film by Jean-François Laguionie, written by Anik Le Ray, with Jean-François Laguionie and the voices of young Conservatory talents Jessica Monceau, Adrien Larmande and Thierry Jahn.