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Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), born in Pieve di Cadore, in the Dolomites, came under the Venetian spell through his apprenticeship with the Bellini clan and Giorgione. He swiftly rose to fame in Venice from 1520, then throughout Italy and Europe.
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) was born in Venice around 1518. Thirty years stood between him and Titian, who was apparently his master for a while. Yet a mutual disliking seemed to take a firm hold between them, and many commissions or promises of commissions appeared as attempts to outdo or thwart the other man.
Veronese (Paolo Caliari) was born in Verona in 1528. In the 1550s he moved to Venice, where he soon received a large number of commissions from churches or the Doge’s Palace, thereby overshadowing Tintoretto. He apparently became Titian’s protégé or even a pawn in his rivalry with Tintoretto.

These three painters were to rub shoulders for over thirty years, and after Titian’s death in 1576, the other two would continue their mutual confrontation for another dozen years. Though rivals, they also influenced and inspired one another. For each artist, the others’ work was a stimulus that demanded a response. Their contribution to artistic revival was huge in their use of oil on canvas, their focus on “color” as opposed to “line”, and the emergence of easel painting that was to transform not only Venetian art but also the whole of European painting itself.

20 October 2009 - 4 February 2010

There were many reasons for this revival: tributes paid by the Surrealists in the 1930s, the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition organised by the MoMA in 1940, major exhibitions put on in New York (Art Nouveau. Art and Design at the Turn of the Century, MoMA, 1959), and in Paris.

However, it is not a question of determining the reasons for this renaissance, but of comparing Art Nouveau creations with creative output from 1950 to 1970, in order to highlight the influences expressed in very varied and sometimes unexpected areas, such as furnishings, fashion, advertising, films and even the psychedelic aesthetic.

Museum Tours

October 14 2009 - March 8 2010
11h00 - 21h00

Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris

The Centre Pompidou held its first large scale exhibition of Pierre Soulages in 1979, following on from the show given at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1967, before the Centre was opened. This autumn's show looks back over more than 60 years of painting and offers a new reading of the artist's oeuvre, with the emphasis on the more recent developments in his work.

The exhibition brings together over a hundred major works dating from 1946 to the present day, from the striking walnut stain works painted between 1947 and 1949 to the paintings of recent years, most of them shown for the first time, which display the dynamism and diversity of his constantly evolving approach.

Izis Paris des Reves,
To May 29, 2010
Mairie de Paris,
5, rue Lobau, 75004 Paris.
Admission Free

It was raining and I was standing in line outside of Hotel de Ville with a newspaper on my head.  I didn't care. I had been looking forward see, for the first time, the work of one of the great photographers of the 20th century.  I was unfamiliar with; Israëlis Bidermanas (1911-1980)  who was a Jewish emigre from Lithuania.

Article: Enchanted Paris