In art history, the term 'Romanesque art' distinguishes the period between the beginning of the 11th and the end of the 12th century. This era showed a great diversity of regional schools each with their own unique style. In architecture as well as in sculpture, Romanesque art is marked by raw forms. Through its rich iconography and captivating text, this work reclaims the importance of this art which is today often overshadowed by the later Gothic style.

Romanesque Art

To speak about art is to evoke the hand of the creator who produced the work. It is to confer to its gestures the importance of thoughts and to explore their point of convergence on the canvas or the stone. With this text, Henri Focillon delivers one of the most beautiful odes to the hand and, simultaneously, to the talent of artists, studying Hokusai, Cézanne, and even Rodin. What do artists such as Rembrandt, David, Gauguin, and Hokusai have in common? A virtuosity of the hand, replies Henri Focillon. The viewer often forgets that behind the works, it is first and foremost a hand and its fingers which guide the paintbrush, the pen, or the stylus. Focillon's text recalls the importance of this part of the body, in which the artist's talent comes to life. Within his text, he grants the hand the recognition that it deserves.

In Praise of Hands

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) fut reconnu de son vivant en laissant libre cours à une oeuvre affranchie et souvent scandaleuse. Il n'était pas rare que les oeuvres qu'on lui commandait soient par la suite refusées. La libération du mouvement et des lignes dans ses sculptures témoigne d'une profonde réflexion sur la matière et le corps. Après un survol historique, cet ouvrage retrace l'itinéraire créatif du sculpteur, explorateur infatigable de la modernité, au tournant du XXe siècle. Complément utile de vos visites, réelles ou virtuelles, ce livre abondamment illustré propose une plaisante introduction à la vie, à l'oeuvre et au style de Rodin, de la Porte de l'enfer aux dessins érotiques. Il est émaillé de nombreuses citations, de l'artiste et de ses contemporains.

Auguste Rodin - La scultpture nue

Flowers are the centerpiece in the majority of pictorial still-lifes. By painting their colours and forms, artists from Brueghel to O'Keeffe have created symbols for both life and mortality. Van Gogh's sunflowers, Monet's water lilies and Matisse's bouquets are, of course, unforgotten. Most of the works contained in Flowers are true masterpieces, which have often marked whole epochs and styles.

Flowers 120 illustrations

Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative.
    It has been said that Botticelli, "though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance." As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna's head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli's pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to `line' not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself.
    This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master- draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.

Sandro Botticelli

Parler d'art, c'est évoquer entre les lignes la main du créateur qui produit l'ouvre. C'est conférer au geste l'importance de la pensée et explorer leur lieu de rencontre sur la toile ou dans la pierre. Avec ce texte, Henri Focillon livre l'un des plus beaux éloges de la main et du talent des artistes, évoquant Hokusai, Cézanne ou encore Rodin. Que peuvent bien avoir en commun des artistes comme Rembrandt, David, Gauguin ou Hokusai ? La virtuosité de la main, nous répond Henri Focillon. Derrière les ouvres, le spectateur oublie souvent qu'il y a d'abord une main et des doigts qui guident le pinceau, la plume ou la pointe d'argent. Le texte de Focillon rappelle l'importance de ce membre dans lequel le talent de l'artiste est contenu. À travers ses lignes, il octroie à la main la place qu'elle mérite et érige le geste en monument artistique.

Éloge de la main

La période de la Renaissance débute en Italie à la fin du XIVe siècle et s'étend sur tout le continent européen jusqu'à la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle. La redécouverte des splendeurs de la Grèce et de la Rome antique marque les débuts d'une " renaissance " des arts, en rupture avec les dogmes du Moyen Age. Nombre d'artistes vont innover aussi bien dans les domaines de la peinture, que dans ceux de la sculpture et de l'architecture. Le réel et l'idéal, le profane et le sacré, le mouvement et la perspective constitueront les thèmes de référence, qui influenceront l'art européen pour les quatre siècles à venir. Léonard de Vinci, Michel-Ange, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, Mantegna, Raphaël, Dürer et Bruegel sont au nombre de ces artistes qui apporteront une contribution décisive à l'art de la Renaissance.

L'Art de la Renaissance

Marc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. A failure in the entrance examination for the Stieglitz School did not stop Chagall from later joining that famous school founded by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and directed by Nicholas Roerich. Chagall moved to Paris in 1910. The city was his "second Vitebsk". At first, isolated in the little room on the Impasse du Maine at La Ruche, Chagall soon found numerous compatriots also attracted by the prestige of Paris: Lipchitz, Zadkine, Archipenko and Soutine, all of whom were to maintain the "smell" of his native land. From his very arrival Chagall wanted to "discover everything". And to his dazzled eyes painting did indeed reveal itself. Even the most attentive and partial observer is at times unable to distinguish the "Parisian", Chagall from the "Vitebskian". The artist was not full of contradictions, nor was he a split personality, but he always remained different; he looked around and within himself and at the surrounding world, and he used his present thoughts and recollections. He had an utterly poetical mode of thought that enabled him to pursue such a complex course. Chagall was endowed with a sort of stylistic immunity: he enriched himself without destroying anything of his own inner structure. Admiring the works of others he studied them ingenuously, ridding himself of his youthful awkwardness, yet never losing his authenticity for a moment. 

 At times Chagall seemed to look at the world through magic crystal - overloaded with artistic experimentation - of the Ecole de Paris. In such cases he would embark on a subtle and serious play with the various discoveries of the turn of the century and turned his prophetic gaze like that of a biblical youth, to look at himself ironically and thoughtfully in the mirror. Naturally, it totally and uneclectically reflected the painterly discoveries of Cézanne, the delicate inspiration of Modigliani, and the complex surface rhythms recalling the experiments of the early Cubists (See-Portrait at the Easel, 1914). Despite the analyses which nowadays illuminate the painter's Judaeo-Russian sources, inherited or borrowed but always sublime, and his formal relationships, there is always some share of mystery in Chagall's art. The mystery perhaps lies in the very nature of his art, in which he uses his experiences and memories. Painting truly is life, and perhaps life is painting.

Chagall

Dalí, Salvador (Figueras, 1904 - Torre-Galatea, 1989)

Peintre, artiste, créateur d'objets, écrivain et cinéaste, il est connu du public comme un des représentants majeur du surréalisme. Buñuel, Lorca, Picasso, Breton. : ces rencontres constituent autant d'étapes dans la carrière de Dalí. Réalisé avec Buñuel, le film Un chien andalou marque son entrée officielle dans le groupe des surréalistes parisiens où il rencontre Gala, la femme d'Éluard, qui deviendra sa compagne et son inspiratrice. Entre cet artiste éclectique et provocateur et les surréalistes parisiens, les relations se tendront progressivement à partir de 1934 jusqu'à la rupture avec Breton, cinq ans plus tard. Pourtant, l'art de Dalí relève bien de l'esthétique surréaliste dont il a conservé le goût pour le dépaysement, l'humour et l'imagination.

Romanesque Art

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