Step away from the Art Basel Paris fair booths and you’ll find an array of exhibitions to visit in and around Paris this season.
‘Marie Antoinette’
Inside the private getaway of Queen Marie Antoinette — the Petit Trianon, a neoclassical chateau on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles — you’ll find a show dedicated to “Marie Antoinette,” the movie directed by Sofia Coppola, which opened at the Cannes Film Festival 20 years ago, receiving scattered boos at the press screening and very mixed reviews from French and international critics. It has now developed something of a cult following, hence the exhibition at Versailles, where the film was shot.
“Marie Antoinette” tracks the life of the 14-year-old Austrian princess who is dispatched to France to marry the future King Louis XVI. Swept up by pomp and ritual, Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) soon finds herself covered in diamonds, satins and silks, and leading a life of luxury. Yet she is portrayed throughout as an isolated, melancholy figure.
The Versailles exhibition focuses on the filmmaking process, from Coppola’s early mood boards, sketches and preparatory photos, to the lavish pastel-colored costumes by Milena Canonero (who won an Academy Award for them), the Manolo Blahnik shoes designed for the movie, towering wigs, and a replica of the royal banquet table in the movie.
How did Coppola feel about her movie’s initial reception?
“I’m sensitive, and being criticized never feels nice,” said the director in a video interview. She said that while searching for material to display in the exhibition, she came across a box of bad reviews by American critics, with headlines such as “A Royal Mess” and “Lost in Sensation” (a play on the title of her film “Lost in Translation”).
“They were pretty funny, but they were all dismissing it as girly fluff,” said Coppola. Still, she added, “I felt like I got to make the movie I wanted to make. I’d rather make something that some people love and some people hate, than something in the middle that doesn’t touch anyone.”
Coppola was drawn to the subject when she found out, from a family friend who was reading Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography of the former queen, that Marie Antoinette was only 14 when she got married.
“I had no idea she was so young,” said Coppola, who then read the 2001 biography of Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser, which “made her really human.”
So does the movie.
“I was really interested in her point of view,” Coppola said. “I wanted to be in her world.” Even in the story of “this character that you have nothing in common with,” there are “universal themes,” she said. While Marie Antoinette was portrayed throughout history as the villain and “blamed for the Revolution,” Coppola noted, she “wasn’t in any position to make any decisions.”
Other Coppola movies also tell stories of young girls on the cusp of womanhood — such as “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) and “Priscilla” (2023). Why?
Adolescence is “the biggest moment of transition,” when one is “finding one’s identity,” the director replied, adding, “I’m interested in how people develop into who they are, and the roles they take.”
Coppola said that when she was growing up, she didn’t see adolescence reflected in movies, and teenagers were often played by women in their 20s and even 30s. She took it upon herself to tell those stories.
Are women making inroads in the film industry? “There are so many more female directors now than when I was starting,” said Coppola, “but it does feel like it’s really slow.”
She said she wished there were more women in the positions of power to decide what films were being made and which ones to finance. Women “are a real audience” that needs to be taken into account, which was not the case when she started, Coppola added.
Asked if she worried that artificial intelligence might threaten the future of her art, she said: “I feel like art needs to be made by humans with souls,” adding: “Me and my artist friends are all making our work in a tactile way.”
‘Cézanne and Us‘
If you’re at Art Basel Paris, you won’t have far to go to find this exhibition: It’s in another wing of the Grand Palais, where the fair is being held.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) profoundly shaped modern art — Picasso called him “the father of us all.” More than a century after the artist’s death, this exhibition maps his influence on art and illustrates it with 174 works in total, 69 of them by Cézanne.
The curators explain that it was Cézanne’s fellow artists who first conveyed his greatness. In the last couple of decades of his life, artists in Paris studied his work and used it as a source of emulation. Less than a decade after his death, he became an international star — revered by avant-garde artists from Moscow to New York. What they admired in him most was his ability to come up with new ways of looking at, and representing, the world. Even for artists who lived and worked after World War II, Cézanne continued to be seen as a pioneering painter who reinvigorated abstraction.
Cézanne was, it turns out, a late bloomer. He was still something of an unknown quantity in the Paris of the early 1880s, when he was in his 40s. One early collector of Cézanne who very much helped promote his talent was Paul Gauguin. Gauguin’s dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who put on six shows of Cézanne’s work while the artist was still alive, then acquired several hundred works by him — establishing something of a monopoly — and through exhibitions, sales, loans and a biography, helped make him internationally famous.
Alongside the several dozen Cézanne works in the Grand Palais exhibition, there are works by Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse, but also by living artists: Jasper Johns, Sean Scully, Wolfgang Tillmans and Luc Tuymans, among others.
‘Lee Krasner: Works From the 1960s’
The power couple of 20th-century American art — Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock — are currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Coinciding with the Met show, the Gagosian Gallery in Paris is putting on a Krasner exhibition (opening Oct. 19) that focuses on works from the 1960s.
It’s the first time that a solo exhibition of Krasner has ever been held in France. Like many of her talented female contemporaries, the artist was long overshadowed by her other half. As Larry Gagosian notes in the exhibition news release, the show comes at a time when “her talent and contributions are finally being acknowledged on an institutional scale.”
Paris meant a lot to Krasner. On her first trip to the city in 1956, she spent days at the Louvre Museum and was profoundly influenced by the paintings of Matisse. Much later, in 1982, France gave her the insignia of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
There are a number of paintings and works on paper in the exhibition. One of the largest works on display is “Seeded” (1960). Measuring nearly 2.8 meters (over nine feet) in length, the painting is part of her “Umber” series, which she produced when she suffered from insomnia and worked at night with artificial light.
The post What Else to Check Out During Art Basel Paris appeared first on New York Times.
