On assignment in Rome in the late 1990s, I had the great privilege of living above this extraordinary painting: the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez.  The reason is simple. I was one of  dozens of tenants of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and my apartment was directly above the gallery housing this and other masterpieces. The few times I saw the portrait, I found it to be both magnificent and quietly chilling. So did Francis Bacon, who based his screaming popes on this masterpiece - and refused, to his dying day, ever to see the original.


That original is now hanging in a comprehensive survey of Velazquez at Paris's Grand Palais. Though Las Meninas is absent (it never leaves the Prado), Paris has managed to pull together enough great works by Velazquez to give you a pretty satisfying overview of his career. His court paintings of the royal offspring -- particularly "Prince Baltasar Carlos on Horseback," a major loan from the Prado -- are breathtaking illustrations of why this Seville-born artist has come to be known as "the painter's painter." 

The exhibition also shows his artistic process. You see his sometimes awkward (yes, awkard) early paintings, produced while studying under the master Francisco Pacheco. You notice the overwhelming influence of Caravaggio, even before Velazquez ever traveled to Italy. And you realize that Velazquez's great artistic breakthrough happened when he was finally admitted as official court painter. Royal approval set him on track to greatness.

The show ends July 13: http://www.grandpalais.fr.

Paris's 19th arrondissement has been in the news for all the wrong reasons this week. It's where the two perpetrators of the 'Charlie Hebdo' massacre lived, where they were first indoctrinated, and where they abandoned the car they used to escape the crime scene. 

Next week, the 19th will (hopefully) receive press coverage of an altogether different kind. On January 14th - provided construction is complete - Paris will inaugurate the biggest concert hall in its history: a 2,400-seat marvel designed by Jean Nouvel. Never mind that, at EUR386 million, the concert hall cost nearly twice what it was supposed to, and that the building works have gone ahead without Nouvel's oversight. When the resident Orchestre de Paris plays its first notes at the gala premiere, it will ring in a triumphant new dawn for classical music in the city (which Paris-trained musicians such as myself can only welcome). Hopefully, also, it will ring in a time of peace. 


You can read more in my Economist piece: 
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21638095-grand-new-concert-hall-opens-unfashionable-district-can-it-become-draw-distant

Mikhail Baryshnikov can dance. He can also take pretty good photos when he puts his mind to it. We spoke at the opening of his new show at the ContiniArtUK Gallery on Bond Street in London.
(Photo credit: Mikhail Baryshnikov, ContiniArtUK, London, October 2014. Photographer: Alex Macguire). 

It turns out that he discovered photography as a little boy growing up in Riga, and spent afternoons leafing through smuggled Conde Nast magazines. Here's the article: 
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/12/mikhail-baryshnikovs-photos

African photography is big - so big that the Grand Palais in Paris is staging a retrospective of the late, great Seydou Keita in November 2015. Here's one of his cult images.



There are plenty of contemporary photographers worth knowing in Africa, too. Yet the acclaimed Addis Foto Fest - which starts in just two weeks - is short on funding. It needs $50,000 to cover the travel costs of its 93 participating artists. Otherwise, they won't be there.

Here's the website:    http://www.addisfotofest.com/2014/index.html
If you wish to contribute, festival founder Aida Muluneh can be reached at  mailto:[email protected].

In The Economist (link below), I tell the story of how France's richest man Bernard Arnault beat the odds to have Frank Gehry build a private museum in the Bois de Boulogne.



News you won't read elsewhere: (1) quotes from the Mayor of Paris, (2) news that the Foundation cost 1/3 more than the budgeted 100 million euros, and (3) revelations that billionaire Francois Pinault is visiting sites in France and may end up building something there himself. Here's the piece:  
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21623570-new-private-museum-marks-change-france-winged-victory

Seventeen years after stunning Europe with his Guggenheim Bilbao, Frank Gehry has given the continent another eye-popping creation, this time in Paris: the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Comparisons with the Guggenheim are pointless. Gehry has gone back to the drawing boards and designed what looks like a very big ship -- with thick wooden membranes, tilting glass sails, and a cascade lapping at its base. The Vuitton Foundation looks, to me, like a 21st-century Noah's ark. 

The architecture stirs you -- by its look, and by its scale. To get a sense of that scale, see the minivan in the first image. Gehry has constructed a wholly functional interior, with large rectangular spaces and (mostly) straight walls.  The 100-million-euro building was commissioned by Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, as is clear from the Gehry-designed logo on the facade. Here's my interview with Gehry last year: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/gehry-designs-house-for-pitt-garden-for-zuckerberg.html.

One highlight is the excellent Lucio Fontana retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Argentinian-born Fontana started out as a sculptor, and a gifted one (though his early expressionistic figures in glazed ceramic may not be to everyone's liking). Gradually, he transitioned into painting, and found his signature style by carving into his pictures. Inspired by the mysteries of the cosmos and man's explorations of  outer space, he perforated the canvas, creating dotty depictions of the galaxy. Eventually, he took out his penknife, making the works he's now best known for. Here's a picture of Fontana in mid-slash:

Across town, the Pompidou Center has a clever new rotating display of its contemporary-art collections titled "A History" where recent art is used to chronicle events of the last 30 years. The curating is first-rate: Works are shown in coherent thematic clusters, and it all makes sense. There's Chris Marker's video montage on the Ceausescu trial, Goncalo Mabunda's powerful sculptures made of used  Mozambican weaponry, plus some cool Isaac Julien videos from the 1980s. Pompidou: always one to watch.

Over at the Louvre, meanwhile, the tourist swarm is horrendous. This was the scene around the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa yesterday:

I caught one male tourist running his hands over a marble bust, and another in shorts and slippers exposing his soiled feet across from the Leonardo's. An Italian family was once seen picnicking with sandwiches on the floor in front of the Mona Lisa. 

Museums are not churches. But a minimum of decorum and respect for art would not be out of place. I hear the Louvre's new president Jean-Luc Martinez is looking to introduce some form of crowd control. If that's true, he has my vote.

'Art Lovers' is a first-rate exhibition (with a cheesy title) where the curating and design are almost better than the art. Curator Martin Bethenod (who used to
co-run the Fiac) has picked out works that are all, in some way, an hommage to past masters - inspiration, emulation, duplication. Instead of a helter-skelter show of works (which is what collector exhibitions tend to be) this has a very clear thread.

 Here is Subodh Gupta's Very Hungry God  (2006) parked outside the venue:

On the whole, the Pinault collection seems strong on sculpture - in Monaco, that first room of sculptures is a knockout. It contains a wax replica by Urs Fischer of Giambologna's monumental marble group Rape of the Sabine Women which will melt slowly over the course of the exhibition (it's basically a very large candle). 

If this exhibition were just a case of another collector showing off, I'd say skip it. In fact it's what all contemporary art shows should be: well chosen, meticulously thought through, well presented, and never random. The exhibition ends Sept. 7 at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco:  http://www.grimaldiforum.com/.

The Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion is now in its 14th year. I was starting to think the formula was getting tired - until I saw this year's creation by Chile's Smiljan Radic. It's a giant button mushroom with a cave-like interior, and it rests on boulders imported all the way from Yorkshire. Inside, it's hollowed like a donut, has timber decking, and crooked apertures that bring the outdoors in.