akg-images blog

Last Thursday I went to the cinema. It was a bitterly cold evening and by the time the film was over, it had started snowing outside. Reaction from the cinemagoers was equally divided. Half of the people moaned about the appalling weather and huddled in the foyer, deciding whether or not to make a break for it or stay in the theatre’s warmth and treat themselves to a post-movie drink. The other half – and here I include myself – bounced out into the night, happy to see London covered again in a fresh layer of powdery snow.

Summer in London is fantastic (as long as the weather plays along) and a walk along the South Bank with sunglasses and an ice cream  on an August Sunday is hard to beat. But winter… London in winter can be a drab, depressing place, with periods of grey drizzle alternating with periods of heavy rain. The Thames takes on a murky brownness and people brace themselves in waterproof boots and tatty umbrellas.

We have been lucky these last few weeks. The weather has been cold and crisp, the winter sun surprisingly bright, and we have been treated to a few days of snow. Not a massive amount of snow, mind you, and Canadian colleagues and friends have been bemused by our tales of traffic gridlock and public transport meltdown at the merest flurry of snowflakes, but enough snow to settle on the ground and profoundly change the shape of the city, albeit briefly.

The way that snow alters the built environment is something that has fascinated me since I was seventeen and read Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo. In one of the stories - La città smarrita nella neve (The city lost in the snow) –  the title character wakes to find his city covered in snow. For Marcovaldo, a man more attuned to nature than the man-made world, the snow is an accomplice, hiding walls and roads underneath itself, making it impossible to see where one building starts and another stops.

Perhaps that’s why I love snow in the city so much: despite the bedlam it causes, it feels like nature reminding us who really has the power here. Those white otherworldly flakes reshape our pathways, obscure our buildings and slow us down in our workdays. In the city, you also get that wonderful orange glow at night, with the lights from street lamps reflecting against the white, so that it never truly gets dark. It really does remake the city and I am always disappointed when the thaw comes…. but at least there’s not long to go until summer!

I was very lucky, thanks to one of my colleagues, to attend the Berlin premiere of “The Artist” this week, a silent movie written and directed by Michel Hazanavicious. The film was a surprise hit at Cannes which was when I first heard about and I have waited for its general release ever since, marking down the days in my diary! I have previously written about my love for silent movies and its stars and this wonderful film is definitely a declaration of love to the glamour and excitement of 1920s Hollywood.

George Valentin, the film’s protagonist, is modelled on Douglas Fairbanks (at least in my opinion!) and looking through images and film stills of Fairbanks certainly confirms it. I will leave you to make up your own mind – I have selected a few for comparison! It helps that Jean Dujardin has more than a passing physical resemblance to Fairbanks and his antics in the films he makes as Valentin show this even more clearly.

Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller is refreshing, sparkling, funny and very physical – this is another aspect of the film that I find wonderful: the acting is much more physical that we are now used to and there is an early scene in which Peppy steals into George’s dressing room to leave a thank you note and ends up using his coat as a stand-in for the star, a routine often used in pantomime. I could swear that everyone in the audience loved it even if it was familiar!

The story is a fairly simple one – George Valentin is the big star and Peppy Miller the fan who meets him in an almost slapstick moment; he helps her onto the first rung of the acting ladder and before long she surpasses him in popularity. She is the new, the talkative, and bubbly and pretty, he is the old, staid and silent, even if he doesn’t want to accept it. The fall and rise of the two main characters are parallel and underlined by the music, plenty of symbolism as well as the style of their wardrobe and cars. There is definitely a love story here but in the mould of old Hollywood – we don’t even see as much as a passionate kiss, yet the romance is plainly there.

Of course we can’t forget to mention Jack, George’s faithful dog who is also a co-star in all of his movies. He must surely be a nod to Asta in the “Thin Man” series but is also reminiscent of Eddie in “Frasier”, another star in his own right. Jack is an integral part of the movie and besides bringing a comic touch to the story; he is also responsible for some of the most moving moments.

So “The Artist” is homage to old Hollywood but is it any more than that? I believe so: there is one particular scene in which Valentin is having a nightmare, having been told by his producer that he has to speak in his next movie, he finds that he can’t but he can suddenly hear everyone else. It begins with the noise his glass makes when put down on a hard surface; the barking of the dog; a telephone ringing and an ever-growing band of giggling girls – the noise is jarring and overwhelming in an otherwise almost silent movie. I say almost as “The Artist” like all silent movies has a fabulous musical soundtrack underlining the action. This short scene certainly made me think of the noise we are confronted with daily, from telephones, to planes, cars and trains – it is very rare to find absolute quiet in our ever noisy world. It has become a white noise, always there in the background but if you force yourself to become aware of it, it can become overwhelming and I could feel for George in his nightmare. The whole scene seemed like a very appropriate comment on our modern world.

Having waited for so many months to see this film, I was a little worried that I might be disappointed but I definitely wasn’t – it is a great film! I hope that the buzz it has created might bring about a new appreciation for silent movies and if we are lucky, more opportunities to see them on the big screen with full orchestra in cinematic palaces of which there are only a few left.

The two men sitting opposite me on the southbound Northern Line train last night had possibly had a few too many drinks. Or maybe they were just naturally loud and slurring. Either way, it was impossible to ignore the conversation they were having about Kim Jong-il. Looking at a photograph of North Korean mourners in a copy of the Evening Standard, one said to the other:

“It’s incredible, just look at them all wailing!”
“Nah,” replied the other. “What you can’t see in that photograph are the ten men with AK-47s behind the mourners, forcing them to cry.”
“I don’t agree,” the first man continued. “It looks real, they’re really upset by his death. Can you imagine this country if the Queen died? Our reaction would be nothing like that, no one would be crying in the streets like that. That man had some power.”

Ever since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the resulting mass grief, I have tried not to second-guess the British public’s reaction to tragedy, but I do disagree with the first man’s comment about the death of the Queen: I think we would see a tremendous outpouring of anguish from most people in the UK.

However, it certainly is true that it would not – could not – be as extreme as what is happening in North Korea at the moment. It’s the perfect example of a truly successful cult of the personality. You can argue that there have been personality cults built up around rulers from the earliest recorded days: from the god-like Pharaohs of Egypt right up to the imperial extravagance of Napoleon I. You could even see the dissemination of portraits of Elizabeth I as Virgin Queen as a Tudor equivalent.

It seems to me, though, that it’s within the last hundred years that we have truly seen a rogues gallery’s worth of leaders harnessing the press, art and photography to shape an idealised image of themselves to their followers, from Stalin to Peron, Sun Yat-Sen to Saddam Hussein.

We have an extraordinary collection of images of Kim Jong-il in the archive courtesy of the photojournalist Alain Noguès who travelled in North Korea in 2000. Some of the paintings of the “supreme leader” that Noguès shot are staggering in their bombast: Kim standing strong against crashing waves; Kim smiling in the sunrise; Kim astride a white horse with his father and mother.

The paintings of Kim Jong-il reminded me of an excellent article by Eric Gibson I read a few years ago on the Wall Street Journal website, “Why Dictators Love Kitsch“. One of the points Gibson’s article makes is that this kitsch realist art is often an assembly-line production, art stripped of any artistic depth created purely to glorify the sitter in the most superficial (and largest) way possible.

The portraits of Kim Jong-il are not going to win the Turner Prize any time soon, but what interests me is how a pedestrian work of art can become totemic, wholly through the personality cult of the person it represents. The painting that comes to mind immediately is Hubert Lanziger’s equestrian portrait of Hitler (which Eric Gibson compares in his article to photos of Vladimir Putin horseriding). The Lanzinger portrait is, solely as a work of art, hideous: flat, with some half-baked foreshortening and metal armour which looks more like polyester satin. Look carefully at Hitler’s face and you’ll see the stab wound inflicted on the canvas by an Allied soldier at the end of the Second World War. A second-rate painting that nonetheless caused a violent reaction in the viewer, a second-rate painting still kept behind lock and key by the US military, a second-rate painting whose power comes not from the artist but from the sitter. These kitsch portraits of Kim Jong-il will no doubt soon be joined by equally kitsch portraits of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong-un and another cycle of totalitarian realist art will begin.

„He is the Lon Chaney of the tuxedo set“

I just read this sentence on my way to work in Jeanine Basinger’s excellent book on silent movie stars and it got me thinking about actors transforming themselves into their character, no matter how hideous they may be. This particular quote is about John Barrymore, the bad boy member of the Barrymore acting clan – he was hugely successful as an actor and matinee idol in silent movies and went on to have a very distinguished career in sound films before dying at the relatively young age of 60 in 1942, a shadow of his former self after years of heavy drinking.

Most of us still know Lon Chaney, both his name and his image, especially as the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Phantom of the Opera. His status in film history is pretty unique, he was hugely accomplished in using his whole body to convey a character (something a lot of silent stars did) and he also did his own make-up. It is always a fascinating process to see people change into someone different and it is certainly a device that horror films have used since the movies began. It is not just the horror genre, though, which has made use of the dual personalities – Marion Davies, Julia Andrews in Victor/Victoria all the way up to Gwyneth Paltrow, playing two roles in Shallow Hal – actors seem to revel in the opportunity to play not one but two parts in the same movie.

John Barrymore excelled at transforming himself without much make-up into a totally different character such as in his celebrated success Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Lon Chaney before him, who was still a star at the same time as Barrymore, he managed to convey this change with his entire body – the make-up only being apparent in later close-ups.

Why are we so fascinated with transformation? Do we all secretly long to be someone else? To play out all our different characteristics, desires, bad and good, pretty and ugly sides?

I’m sure there is some truth in this and many of us enjoy the opportunity to be someone or something different, be it at costume parties, Halloween or carnivals!

The selection of stills comes from the wonderful collection of our Spanish partner agency album, I hope you like them.

At university I studied mainly French 18th and early 19th century art and Jacques Louis David obviously featured quite strongly. By the time it came to doing my MA in the Art of the French Revolution, I was totally immersed in French history painting. There are very few of those on view in London and most of the large David paintings are in the Louvre in Paris. We were only a small group and so we had spend some time in Paris and Versailles as well as going to the Museum of the French Revolution in Vizille near the French Alps. The museum there is a whole different story and will need its own future blog!

Back to Jacques Louis David. We had seen and discussed most of his large history paintings from the late 1780s such as “The Oath of the Horatii” from 1784, “The Lictors bring Brutus the Bodies of his Dead Sons” from 1789 and “The Intervention of the Sabine Women” from 1799, all in the same room at the Louvre.

The one major painting from the Revolutionary Period that isn’t in Paris but in Brussels is his “Death of Marat” from 1793. David went into exile to Brussels after the fall of Napoleon and it is here that he died on 29 December 1825.

I had never been to Brussels and in the pre Eurostar days had no really easy way of getting there short of flying. On one of my trips home I managed to persuade my sister to drive with me to Brussels for the day, look at the painting, have some food and turn round. I am so grateful to her to this day – it was a miserable journey, raining constantly, we were in a 2CV and my sister really wasn’t that interested in seeing the painting. Still, it was an unforgettable day and one that we will both remember if for different reasons!

I have always found the “Death of Marat” a fascinating painting – like most of David’s work during this time period it has a very strong political message and in this case even shows the artist’s own political convictions very clearly.

Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist and politician, a defender of the sans-culottes and close to Robespierre and Danton – the three of them were for a while the most powerful men in Revolutionary France. Marat ran a paper called L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People) in which he published lists of so-called enemies of the people, without much regard as to their guilt or innocence. By all accounts he wasn’t a handsome man, contemporaries commented on his toad-like appearance mainly caused by a chronic skin disease which he could only alleviate by sitting in a bath tub, the same kind that we can see in David’s painting.

Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen and a Girondin sympathiser came to see Marat on July 13 1793 under the pretext of wanting to supply him with more names of enemies of the people. She stabbed Marat in the chest and was guillotined for her crime on 17 July 1793. The background story is important to the understanding of David’s painting, especially as contemporary viewers would have been familiar with those details.

The first impression you get is one of an almost empty canvas, the top half of the painting shows nothing much except for an eerie light, the source of which we can’t quite make out. One of the main things to remember when looking at any of David’s work is that he never left anything to chance: he wanted his paintings to be understood in a certain way and he planted enough visual clues for the contemporary viewer to “get it”.

We see Marat’s dead or dying body slumped in his bath in a position not unlike the dead Christ as he is being taken down from the cross. David makes his intentions clear from the start, this was no ordinary man and he is being elevated to a saint pretty much from the first. Marat’s face looks much younger than his 50 years and the skin disease is not much in evidence – this is a young man’s toned body, his serene face turned towards the viewer. The murderess Charlotte Corday is nowhere to be seen but she is there in two visual clues – the bloody knife and the letter Marat is still clutching in his hand. Corday uses the old calendar and addresses Marat in a roundabout way in marked contrast to David own address at the bottom of the wooden box: À Marat de David, addressing him as a friend, and, crucially, he dates it  L’An Deux. This is Year Two of the Revolution which officially started 1 January 1793. Corday is unmasked in a way which would have been clearly understood at the time and David adds one more clue – the letter and banknote which is seen on the wooden box. Here is a different letter, from the widow of a Revolutionary asking for help with her children and the assignat on top suggests that Marat was about to make a charitable donation to her (as far as I know there is no evidence that Marat was indeed a charitable man). In David’s universe he was working in Spartan surroundings helping the poor while the Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday gained entrance under false pretence and murdered him in cold blood. A revolutionary martyr was thus visually created, not the only one in David’s work from this time but certainly the most famous.

Jacques Louis David managed to stay at the top of the art world through the Napoleonic era, not a small feat! He moved seamlessly from revolutionary to imperial subject under Napoleon Bonaparte for whom he created more unforgettable works such as the Coronation or Napoleon crossing the Alps, probably one of the most well-known images of the French Emperor.

It would take more space than this blog to discuss all David’s politically motivated paintings in detail but I hope you got a taste of what a political and artistic genius he really was.

History painting is anything but dull!

This blog post was written by Ulrike Haussen, the picture researcher at akg-images in Paris responsible for the Les Arts Décoratifs collection.

Yes, I confess, I am a museophile. I go to the museum in the same way other people go to church: my eyes wide open, not wanting to miss a single thing, daydreaming and imagining myself elsewhere. I am part of a silent community of visitors, standing in front of exhibits in the same way pilgrims pray before a holy relic in a chapel. Who was it that said that museums were modern-day cathedrals?

When I was first given the job of managing the integration of the photographic collections of Les Arts Décoratifs into our database, I was immediately beside myself with joy. However, I had to calm myself down and wait, as there were technical questions about file names, caption lengths and keywords which had to be discussed at length first!

Nevertheless, every time I visited Les Arts Décoratifs and walked through the permanent collections or explored the temporary exhibitions, I was once again filled with enthusiasm at finding myself in such an exceptional place, somewhere which can only really exist in a large city.

So what is Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris, exactly? 

Les Arts Décoratifs is located in the Rohan and Marsan wing of the behemoth that is the Palais du Louvre, running along the Rue de Rivoli and ending at the Pavillon de Marsan at the side of the Tuileries. This is the part of the Louvre built by Napoleon III in 1852 and which, much later, served as the seat of the Ministry of Finance, before becoming in 1905 the site of the UCAD, the Union centrale des Arts décoratifs, the forerunner of the current organisation.

The Musée Nissim de Camondo, which is also part of Les Arts Décoratifs, is located in the Hôtel Camondo, bordering the Parc Monceau.

The institution is not a national museum, but rather a private organisation (governed by the law of 1901 on not-for-profit associations), born out of a willingness by collectors to create a space dedicated to the preservation, promotion and dissemination of the decorative arts, in the wake of the Universal Exhibitions of the second half of the 19th Century.

After several years of structural and spatial reorganisation, the museum of Les Arts Décoratifs was reopened in 2006, with the collections of decorative arts, fashion, textiles and advertising displayed over 900 m2 of permanent gallery and temporary exhibition space.

Surrounding the large Nave, a vast central space used for temporary exhibitions, exhibits are organised chronologically and thematically. Thanks to this arrangement the visitor has an overview of other parts of the museum from several vantage points and at different heights.

The Study Gallery (Galerie d’études) covers two floors and is devoted to long-term exhibitions which display a variety of objects from all periods to illustrate a particular theme. The Toy Gallery (Galerie des jouets) is always a pleasure to visit with its fun, colourful layout.

The whole of the Marsan Pavilion is occupied by the collections, right up to the roof, and the view from the 9th floor mezzanine right down to the pyramid of chairs way below is worth taking a detour to see!

The Jewellery Gallery (Galerie des bjoux) is spread across two rooms, veritable jewellery boxes plunged into darkness from which glitter a thousand objects in gold, silver and precious stones. From this gallery the visitor turns into the Rohan wing, where the two other great collections of Les Arts Décoratifs are displayed, with a bias towards temporary exhibitions (of which there are 2 to 3 per year):

Fashion is presented over two floors, large glass cases occupying entire sections of wall from floor to ceiling which give the visitor the delicious impression of being able walk amongst pieces created by some of the most gifted creative talents in the world.

The space reserved for the advertising collection has its own character and offers a very particular type of escape, with its bare walls and the fireplaces and cabinets retained from the old palace. A narrow corridor runs though the middle just like on a ship, even down to its metal cladding and windows.

© Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris / akg-images

Apart from the sheer diversity of their collections, it’s the composite nature of Les Arts Décoratifs that is so special, with its temporary exhibitions, its permanent galleries displaying numerous collections of objects, as well as “period rooms” in which sets of objects evoke a particular era.

Above all it is the amount of space and time through which the visitor travels within a relatively small location that’s amazing: collections dating from the Twelfth Century are only a hundred metres away from objects created in 2011, on display in a gallery at the other end of the building.

It is in this time machine that these objects, gathered from the past, present and future, are brought together, and all of them have a valued place in the daily lives of humankind. They shape, have shaped, and will shape the way in which we sit, eat, work, sleep, play and dress; they accompany us on our most essential activities, not only by decorating and adorning us.

We are here “where the beautiful meets the useful”, that is to say where the most successful, most eccentric, most charming, most unusual, most avant-garde examples of objects are kept, preserved safe under glass cases, yet accessible to all the everyday uses that one could make of them.

Alongside its conservation work, Les Arts Décoratifs has from the very outset had a policy of teaching and promoting contemporary creative art.

In addition to numerous educational visits, a multitude of art classes is offered in the Carrousel studios and at the École Camondo on Boulevard Raspail, the latter specialising in interior architecture and design. It is the École Camondo which gave us renowned designers such as Philippe Starck and Jean-Michel Wilmotte.

The gift shop at 107 Rivoli is definitely the place to be, with its large bookshop specialising in all of the decorative arts, as well as limited edition design objects, jewellery, fashion accessories and tableware created by contemporary artists. It is not only one of the most chic and fashionable meeting points in the capital, but also a vehicle for promoting creativity today.

When I’m not going mad in the shop, my favourite game in Les Arts Décoratifs is to ask myself: “If I could take home any three exhibits, what would they be?”

Well, there’s a lounge chair by Charlotte Perriand which dates from 1941 and was inspired by a stay in Japan: that would be on my list. I am almost ashamed to say that I’d also include an ostrich-leather Balmain coat from 1977. Last but not last, the 1938 Bugatti 57 SC Atlantic Coupe, which featured in a recent “Art of the Automobile” exhibition, that would be my third choice! It was whilst looking through the side window of this car and noticing that the windshield was separated in two by a border made of leather that I suddenly realised that beauty can indeed make one happy!

After each visit to Les Arts Décoratifs, I ask myself: Where have I just been? And when? It feels as if I was asleep on a 15th-century canopy, or as if I had woken up on board a spaceship blasting into the future, or as if I was sitting at dinner in the 18th Century, if only that inflatable plastic turtle had not taken me back to the beaches of my childhood. But where was I? I had just spent a few hours at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Ulrike Haussen
Picture Researcher, akg-images Paris