• Art Exhibition,  English

    Where’s The Respect?

    Animals:  We keep them as pets; use them for food, clothing, and transportation; we travel thousands of miles to see them on safari; gawk at them in zoos; revere them in certain religions; abhor them and call them vermin; experiment on them for medicine and for beauty; work alongside them in certain jobs; use them therapeutically; compete them; bet on them; cage them; free them; hurt them; heal them; study them; and learn from them. They truly are deeply ingrained into our way of life, and have been since the dawn of time. Our treatment of our (usually) four-legged friends, as a society, differs greatly from one country to the…

  • Art,  Art Exhibition,  English

    Musings… and Matisse

    How does one gain immortality these days? No, this is actually a serious question! For the Ancient Egyptians, they took the important person’s corpse, removed the intestines and the other major decomposable parts (excepting the heart of course… every rookie embalmer knows that!), dried the body out with natron*, stuffed it with sawdust, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a couple of coffins, and then put it inside a large sarcophagus**. Easy. Then, they left the now-mummified body, erected a gigantic marking stone (obviously why the pyramids were built), and voila: today practically everybody and their grandmother knows the name of Tutankhamen.  Not bad for a 5,000 year-old mummy!…

  • Art Exhibition,  Français

    Impressionnistes paparazzis

    Les peintres impressionnistes étaient les photographes de leur temps. Intéressés bien sûr par les paysages, mais aussi par les femmes, les intérieurs intimes et les loisirs alors en vogue. Les cocottes parisiennes, vivant à Montmartre ou Montparnasse ne sont rien de moins que les Paris Hilton et Kim Kardashian du xixe siècle. Elles dictaient la mode qui était copiée par toutes les femmes quelle que soient leurs classes sociales. Les peintres voulaient capter l’air du temps et rendre compte du goût par la même occasion. Renoir ou Monet  pénètrent dans la vie intime, accordent beaucoup d’attention au corps féminin qu’ils tracent précisément sous des tissus délicats ou qu’ils montrent nus.…