viernes, 31 de marzo de 2017

SENTIDO, ARMONIOSO EL RECITAL DEL POLIVALENTE TENOR PETER CANTA A PETRARCA EN EL TEATRO DE LA ZARZUELA - XXIII CICLO LIED. LUNES 3 DE ABRIL, 20,00 h.

MUY BIEN ESTA NOCHE, MAURO. PRONTO DAMOS MÁS DETALLES DE TU PRECIOSO RECITAL EN EL TEATRO DE LA ZARZUELA.
DELEITANTE Y AMOROSO PETRARCA. TRES PROPINAS Y EL PÚBLICO AGRADECE CON APLAUSOS Y BRAVOS.
Alicia Perris

Mauro Peter acompañado por Helmut Deutsch, nombre indispensable dentro de los pianistas de este género se presentan el próximo lunes 3 de abril por vez primera vez en el Ciclo de Lied, coproducido por el Teatro de la Zarzuela y el Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM), que cumple su XXIII edición. En esta cita del Teatro de La Zarzuela (20h00), Peter interpretará el ciclo de canciones de Franz Liszt sobre tres sonetos de Petrarca, además de seis canciones de Robert Schumann sobre poemas de Heinrich Heine y dos atractivas series de canciones de Richard Strauss sobre poemas de Felix Dahn: Schlichte Weisen (Canciones sencillas) y Mädchenblumen (Flores y muchachas).

Nacido en Lucerna (Suiza), Mauro Peter hizo su debut como cantante de lied en las Schubertiadas de Hohenems y Schwarzenberg, interpretando La bella molinera de Schubert con Helmut Deutsch. A éste siguieron muchos otros recitales en las más importantes salas de concierto y teatros de ópera europeos, como el Musikverein y el Konzerthaus de Viena, el Musikverein de Graz, el Wigmore Hall de Londres, deSingel de Amberes, KKL de Lucerna y las óperas de Frankfurt y Zúrich.
Las entradas para este recital, con un precio general de 8 a 35 euros, ya están a la venta en las taquillas del Teatro de La Zarzuela, teatros del INAEM, www.entradasinaem.es y 902 22 49 49.

El XXIII Ciclo de Lied , con 9 conciertos, es una coproducción entre el el Teatro de la Zarzuela  y el Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical.

THE SLOW REVEAL FRÉDÉRIC MALLE ON THE PLEASURE OF PERFUMES THAT TAKE LONGER TO LOVE.

Instant gratification doesn’t always equal the greatest olfactory reward. Overturning that love-at-first-sniff moment, perfume’s master curator Frédéric Malle suggests why the slow burning scents might be worth a second spritz…

A LOT OF PERFUME SHOPPING IS GEARED TOWARDS THE QUICK FIX. HOW CAN WE BECOME MORE PATIENT WHEN TRYING NEW PERFUMES AND DRAW OUT THEIR DELIGHTS OVER TIME?
Never look for an instant reward. Otherwise you are shopping for the tune of the summer – you like the song for two weeks and then you never want to hear it again. Take a moment to think about who you are. How do you want to come across? Once you understand this, you are in a good place to judge a fragrance.

The few that you like the best, wear on your arm. Twenty minutes later, do you still see yourself smelling like that for weeks? When you are alone with the smell without the imagery, without the packaging, do you still feel the same way? If you are true to yourself, then you will find something that is really going to radiate.


IS FALLING IN LOVE WITH A DIFFICULT PERFUME ABOUTA MOMENT OF REVELATION OR A SLOWLY ACQUIRED INTIMACY?
It can be both. Some fragrances require timeto understand, but once you have been touched by their addictive nature you cant leave them. Sometimes you fall in love at first sight but then it’s difficult to sustain. When you fall in love over time the slow burners can be very powerful.

WHAT IS IT IN THE WRITING OF CERTAIN FRAGRANCES OF YOURS THAT MEANS WE NEED TIME TO GET TO KNOW THEM?
If you think of fragrances like dresses, some are easy to wear every day, whereas others are almost part of another era. Anything that references the past can be hard for people to bring into their world. For example, with our Une Fleur de Cassie, it was really a scent of the late 1920s, early ’30s, when culture and the arts were moving towards surrealism. There is a smell to it that demands exploration and unmuzzling.


TELL US ABOUT A FRAGRANCE OUTSIDE YOUR EDITIONS THAT TOOK YOU A WHILE TO APPRECIATE.
Mitsouko by Guerlain. It comes from another world, a relic of amazing elegance from the past. You are first intrigued so as not to be dismissive, then you question yourself about the risk of enjoying something you do not understand. But then, when the appreciation clicks, it is a secret kind of love that becomes personal. Only you know why or can explain it.


http://www.libertylondon.com/uk/liberty-life/beauty/frederic-malle-the-slow-reveal.html?utm_source=libertystatic&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170330-whats-on

ART LUDIQUE. Le Musée

 Abolissant les frontières entre bande dessinée, manga, jeu vidéo, cinéma live action ou film d’animation, l’Art Ludique met en valeur les œuvres des créateurs d’univers qui marquent notre imaginaire et influencent la culture de notre siècle. Les dessins, peintures et sculptures réalisés par les grands studios d’animation, les dessinateurs de Super Héros, les designers de décors de films ou de personnages de BD disposeront désormais d’un véritable lieu d’exposition à la mesure du génie de leurs créateurs, dont les productions sont admirées dans le monde entier.


Grâce au succès phénoménal de ces productions issues des industries créatives, l’Art Ludique s’impose aujourd'hui comme une passerelle entre le grand public et l’art contemporain, à travers un courant figuratif et narratif permettant de faire découvrir à une large audience familiale et transgénérationnelle la dimension artistique éblouissante qui est à l’origine des œuvres qui les font rêver.

Les Docks (Cité de la mode et du design), situés dans le 13ème arrondissement, un quartier résolument tourné vers l’innovation, s’imposent avec leur architecture avant-gardiste et iconique comme un lieu parfaitement adapté à l’univers de l’Art Ludique.

Le Musée accueillera tout au long de l'année de grandes expositions temporaires consacrées à l'Art Ludique, évoquant les artistes figuratifs narratifs influents et les artistes contemporains de la bande dessinée, du manga, du cinéma, de l'animation et du jeu vidéo à travers le monde.

Les visiteurs pourront également se familiariser avec les nouvelles technologies numériques utilisées par les artistes d’aujourd'hui, et mieux percevoir la dimension artistique majeure nécessaire à la réalisation d’un film d’animation ou d’un jeu vidéo. Des signatures, conférences, débats et master class auront lieu très régulièrement au sein du musée afin que les passionnés, les étudiants ou les professionnels puissent rencontrer les plus grands artistes de l'Art Ludique.


A propos d’ART LUDIQUE Le Musée :
 Imaginé et conçu par Jean-Jacques Launier et son épouse Diane, qui en sont respectivement Président et Directrice générale, ART LUDIQUE Le Musée a été créé en 2013, en partenariat avec La Compagnie des Alpes et le soutien de la Mairie de Paris.
Jean-Jacques et Diane Launier ont également fondé à Paris en 2003 la galerie Arludik, première galerie au monde à exposer et vendre des dessins originaux issus de la bande dessinée, du jeu vidéo, des mangas, du film d’animation et du cinéma.
Ils sont aussi les concepteurs et organisateurs de l’exposition "Miyazaki-Moebius" qui a eu lieu au Musée de la Monnaie de Paris en 2005 et de nombreuses expositions telles que L’âge de Glace à La Baule, l’art de John Howe pour "Le Seigneur des anneaux", "Hommage à Toy Story" à Angoulême ou " L’art de Moi Moche et Méchant" à Annecy.
Jean-Jacques Launier a également écrit un roman "La Mémoire de L’Âme", dont chaque page est illustrée d’un dessin de Moebius (Anne Carrière-Stardom), et coécrit le livre "Art Ludique"  (Sonatine éditions)


http://artludique.com/musee.html

BEFORE THE IMPRESSIONISTS, THESE ARTISTS DOMINATED THE PARISIAN ART WORLD


BY DEMIE KIM

In around the year 1890, a group of French artists gathered for dinner at the house of a Parisian art dealer and pondered the following question: “Who, in 100 years, will be thought to have been the greatest painter of the second half of the 19th century?” As described in Lorenz Eitner’s An Outline of 19th Century European Painting, they came to an agreement on two names: William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier.

More than a century later, we know that this guess was way off the mark; the two academic classicists are far lesser-known than their Impressionist and Post-Impressionist counterparts. But the dinner party hypothesis was not unfounded at the time. In the late 19th century, Bouguereau and Meissonier were the superstars of the art world, then centered in Paris. As their fame spread around Europe and across the Atlantic, they sold their work for high prices and graced the collections of wealthy buyers around the world.

Where these artists are mentioned in art history books today, however, it’s often as lofty establishmentarians at odds with the radical inventions of the avant-garde, from Courbet and the Realists to Monet and his fellow plein-air Impressionists. Though artistic styles have gone in and out of vogue throughout history—a continuous ebb and flow—the extent to which 19th-century icons like Bouguereau and Meissonier quickly fell out of favor was particularly pronounced. Who were these artists and why did they go out of fashion?

The French Painting Tradition

If an artist’s success today is determined in large part by the market, in 19th-century France it was dictated by institutions—namely the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a body consisting of 40 elected life members, including 14 painters, 8 sculptors, 8 architects, 4 engravers, and 6 musical composers. Conservative and exclusive, the academy only accepted new candidates for membership upon the death of an incumbent.
Many members of the Academy ran private studios to train students hoping to be admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux Arts, the official art school. There, students followed a rigorous curriculum that emphasized drawing—first after prints and casts, then live models—and included the mastery of composition, perspective, and expression. As the fine arts section of the Institut de France, the national academic establishment, the Academy was also politically motivated, guiding the state on matters of policy, patronage, and purchasing related to art. Most significantly, they chose what hung on the walls of the Salon, the annual exhibitions reviewed by the Parisian journals and attended by the public.

It was this tradition that Bouguereau and Meissonier—and others like Paul Delaroche, Alexandre Cabanel, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema—grew out of, and like most successful painters at the time, it was the Salon audience that they had in mind when choosing their subjects. They painted for the middle class, who wanted their art, like literature and theater, to provide a moral lesson or an emotional experience.


Painting for a Salon Audience

Considered one of the best history painters of his day, Delaroche had a knack of condensing key events in English history—a subject that was then in vogue—into dramatic scenes, such as The Children of Edward (The Princes in the Tower) (1831) and Cromwell Contemplating the Corpse of Charles I (1831). Exhibited in 1834, his painting Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) caused a sensation with its dramatic depiction of the blindfolded 16-year-old English queen at the threshold of death after only nine days on the throne. Delaroche is thought to have achieved wider fame in the mid-19th century than Ingres and Delacroix, who are both now glorified in the art-historical canon……..


https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-impressionists-artists-dominated-parisian-art

CHARLES PERCIER (1764 – 1838) ARCHITECTURE ET DESIGN ENTRE DEUX RÉVOLUTIONS


Du 18 mars au 19 juin 2017

Présentée au Bard Center Gallery à New York à l’automne 2016, puis à Fontainebleau, l’exposition est la première du genre consacrée à la figure et aux créations de Charles Percier, architecte reconnu et dessinateur hors-pair. Contrairement à Pierre Fontaine, son fidèle associé dont le journal relate son extraordinaire trajectoire du Consulat jusqu’à la fin de la Monarchie de Juillet, Percier ne laisse pas d’écrits mais d’admirables dessins, légués à l’Institut de France.
Formé à l’école gratuite de dessin puis auprès de l’architecte Peyre, Percier obtient le premier Prix de l’académie royale d’architecture en 1786, distinction qui lui vaut de séjourner en Italie et d’étudier les monuments de l’Antiquité. Sur le chemin du retour, il explore l’architecture italienne, comme le palais du Té à Mantoue, et en prolonge l’émerveillement au contact des grands ensembles décoratifs de Fontainebleau. Percier s’adonne à une archéologie poétique et participe à l’invention du patrimoine.


De Malmaison aux projets de réunion du Louvre aux Tuileries, du percement de la rue de Rivoli, de l’arc du Carrousel et du palais du roi de Rome, Percier participe aux plus grandes entreprises du Consulat et du Premier Empire.
Rassemblant près de 150 œuvres, tels qu’arts graphiques, ouvrages, objets d’art et d’ameublement prêtés par les musées français (Louvre, Versailles, Compiègne, Malmaison), le Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York et des collectionneurs privés, avec plusieurs dessins inédits, l’exposition s’attache à faire surgir l’individualité de Percier. Elle présente le cercle d’amitiés au sein duquel celui-ci évolue, en évoquant l’importance de son séjour italien, et explore la diversité de son oeuvre. Fort de la plus importante collection d’arts décoratifs du premier tiers du XIXème s,  le château de Fontainebleau met plus particulièrement l’accent sur l’apport de Percier dans le domaine intérieur et de l’ameublement tout en soulignant avec quelle appétence celui-ci observa les décors anciens du château.
Commissariat : Jean-Philippe Garric, professeur de l’histoire de l’architecture, université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, et Vincent Cochet, conservateur en chef au château de Fontainebleau.


http://www.chateau-fontainebleau-education.fr/charles-percier-1764-1838-architecture-et-design-entre-deux-revolutions/

TINTAMARRE ! INSTRUMENTS DE MUSIQUE DANS L'ART, 1860-1910


Exposition du 24 mars au 2 juillet 2017

Les débuts de l’impressionnisme coïncident avec l’arrivée de nouveaux instruments de musique et une présence de plus en plus forte de la musique dans le quotidien, avec l’ouverture notamment des cafés-concerts, des bals ou des opéras.

Manet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot, Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard ont été à la fois témoins et acteurs de ces changements à l’ère du développement des loisirs. Parallèlement, l’émergence de cette « nouvelle peinture » correspond à l’avènement d’une « nouvelle musique ». Une rupture s’opère avec les codes de la tradition et un vent de modernité et de liberté souffle sur la musique. Les peintres défendent cette évolution dans leurs oeuvres.



La centaine d'œuvres présentées raconte cette histoire d’une musique de plus en plus présente dans la peinture. Les représentations publiques – fanfares, cirques, cabarets, orchestres, opéras, fêtes – côtoient des scènes plus intimes comme la musique au salon ou les leçons de musique. Cette exposition illustre les relations étroites qui s’affirment à cette époque entre peintres et musiciens.



http://www.mdig.fr/fr/tintamarre-instruments-de-musique-dans-lart-1860-1910

JOANN SFAR - SALVADOR DALI, ONE SECOND BEFORE AWAKENING FROM 09 SEPTEMBER 2016 TO 17 APRIL 2017

Extension until April 17th

In 1939, Dalí published the "Declaration of Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness" in response to censorship. Consequently, he used his freedom of expression, combining ideas with spontaneous images, to instill his artworks with a unique imaginative power.

Espace Dalí has given free rein to Joann Sfar, one of today's most talented storytellers, famous for his comic book, "The Rabbi's Cat" and his film, "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life", to imagine the scenario for an artistic encounter with the one whom Brassaï called, "the bold and lucid explorer of the irrational."

Joann Sfar, who studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, proposes a sketched path from within what he imagines as Dalí's brain. He encourages the viewer to get lost, wandering among the monstrous figures. The most important thing for Sfar is that the exhibition be as captivating as a fairy tale.



The exhibition is an invitation to take a "motionless journey" of a painter and his models, through dreams and reality as Joann Sfar's sketched story unfolds. Discover more than 200 original drawings, sketches, drafts in an enchanted setting surrounded by surrealist sculptures and objects by Dalí and the Haute Couture designs by Schiaparelli that inspired the artist.


https://www.daliparis.com/en/exhibitions/exhibition/11/Joann-Sfar-Salvador-Dali-one-second-before-awakening

jueves, 30 de marzo de 2017

A SPACE ODYSSEY: MAKING ART UP THERE

By FRANK ROSE
If you’re an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, you spend much of your time running science experiments. Among the jobs for Thomas Pesquet, a 39-year-old Frenchman currently there on a six-month stint: using virtual reality to gauge the effects of zero gravity on his hand-eye coordination, trying out a suit designed to keep weightlessness from stretching out his spine, analyzing the microbes in his water and directing a robot in the Netherlands from about 240 miles up. In his spare time, he posts photos on Twitter and Instagram of what’s passing beneath him: Mount Etna erupting, the artificial islands of Dubai, the Australian Outback, the entire country of Denmark.



Last month, however, there was a more unusual item on Mr. Pesquet’s agenda. Working with the earthbound artist Eduardo Kac, he created an artwork in space. It was a simple piece: nothing more than could be done with two sheets of paper and a pair of scissors. “Since the goal was to be born in space, it had to be created with materials that were already in the space station,” Mr. Kac (pronounced katz) explained in a telephone interview from his home in suburban Oak Park, Ill. Transporting art materials by rocket ship was not in the plan.
 The artwork — a piece of paper cut into an M, and another piece of paper rolled into a tube and stuck through the middle of the M — might look a bit silly on Earth, where gravity would accentuate its flimsiness. But floating weightlessly in the space station, it looks fragile, even magical — not unlike the planet beyond.
 Viewed with a certain amount of imagination, the paper construction can be said to spell “moi.” Mr. Kac, a professor of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, means this not as an individual “me” but in the collective sense: His “moi” stands for all of us. The piece itself is called “Inner Telescope,” for reasons that become clear only when you look through the O formed by the paper tube and view a tiny portion of Earth. “We point a telescope to the stars,” he said. “But this is a telescope that from the stars we point to ourselves.”
  Mr. Kac’s artwork was made possible by the Space Observatory, an office of France’s National Center for Space Studies that focuses on the cultural aspect of space exploration. Beginning Friday, March 24, the observatory is hosting its annual celebration of art and space at the center’s headquarters in central Paris, just opposite Les Halles. Among the participants will be Mr. Kac, who will show a 12-minute art video of the paper cutout being assembled and floating through the space station.
  “It’s a simple, powerful work, evocative of language and poetry,” Gérard Azoulay, the director of the Space Observatory, said by email in French. The contrast between the humble materials required to make it and “the ultra-technological context in which it was realized intensifies its emotional power,” he said. “And it’s only meaningful in a state of weightlessness.” Outside the Earth’s gravity, it can move freely, he added.
 This is hardly the first time Mr. Kac has done something out of the ordinary. In the 1990s, after graduating from college in his native Rio de Janeiro and earning an M.F.A. at the Art Institute, he made a name for himself as a progenitor of “bio art,” meaning art made with living matter. For his 1999 work “Genesis,” he created a so-called “artist’s gene” by writing a sentence from the Book of Genesis first in the dots and dashes of Morse code and then in the four-letter alphabet of DNA, creating an artificial gene that was subsequently incorporated into bacteria. By shining short-wavelength ultraviolet light on the bacteria, viewers online were able to alter its genetic code. When that was translated back into Morse code and then into English, a mutation occurred in the sentence from the Bible.
 The following year, Mr. Kac enlisted scientists at the French National Institute of Agronomic Research to splice a genetic sequence that produces green fluorescent protein into the DNA of an albino rabbit. The result was “GFP Bunny,” a white rabbit that glowed green under blue light. The bunny, also known as Alba, was one of many such lab-generated creatures. Though the process that created her is now widely used in medical research and the scientists whose work made it possible were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the idea that this could be art generated considerable controversy at the time. Mr. Kac considers the whole thing hypocritical, given that painters have been sealing their canvases with rabbit skin glue for centuries. “Behind every da Vinci, Velázquez, Goya or Picasso,” he said, “there are countless dead rabbits.”
 Mr. Kac’s focus on transgenics — the transfer of new genes into existing organisms — has long been matched by a fascination with escaping gravity. In 2007, he published “Space Poetry,” a manifesto in which he called for writing “that requires and explores weightlessness.” In Western languages, he points out, you read from left to right, in others from right to left. But almost universally, you read from top to bottom. As with writing, so with art. “Look at the splatter paintings of Pollock,” he said. “The entire history of art has operated under an unspoken guiding force, which is gravity. So I started to ask myself in the ’80s, what if we could remove this restraint?”
 Other countries, it is safe to say, were not falling all over themselves to support space poetry. But Mr. Azoulay, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Space Studies — known by the French acronym CNES — had founded the Space Observatory in 2000 as a “laboratory of the arts and sciences.” The idea, he said, was “to encourage the world of culture to create, in addition to stories of science and history and politics, stories of space.”
 There is, of course, no shortage of space stories, from H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” (1898) to “Star Wars” (1977) to last year’s “Arrival.” But for the most part, Mr. Azoulay said, “directors and screenwriters use their imagination to construct a story and then try to give it credibility by tapping into the available literature in magazines or on the internet, or by interviewing experts,” as Ridley Scott did for “The Martian.” A film like “Hidden Figures,” based on a little-known, real-life story, is closer to what Mr. Azoulay has in mind.

To that end, he has opened the archives of CNES and even established an artists in residence program. There are 10 or so artists on the roster at the moment. Among them is Bertrand Dezoteux, whose recent video “Waiting for Mars” used marionettes to portray astronauts who in 2010 and 2011 spent 520 days in an isolation facility in Moscow on a simulated mission to Mars, and the novelist Christine Montalbetti, who published a book last fall about Sandra Magnus, a NASA astronaut who was on the final mission of the United States space shuttle program.
 It was as an artist in residence several years ago that Mr. Kac started developing “Inner Telescope.” To him, a key aspect of the project is “how this work speaks to a future that has yet to be invented” — 30 years from now, when space travel could be as common as air travel is today, he said.
 What will this future be like? “Imagine we find ourselves floating — it’s going to be an amazing sensation. Looking at the Earth will be amazing. But by the third day, you’re going to start asking other kinds of questions. I wonder, what can you do in space that you cannot do on Earth? What would space cuisine be like? What would space theater be like? What would space poetry be like, in terms of developing something that is truly unique to that environment? Because now we’re talking about the cultural dimension of space in a different sense” — not how space affects culture on Earth, but how culture will evolve in space.
 At 55, Mr. Kac is unlikely to go to space himself, and when he started talking with Mr. Azoulay, it was anyone’s guess when another French astronaut would go. Mr. Pesquet had long dreamed of space travel, but at the time he was an airline pilot, flying the Airbus A320 passenger jet for Air France. In 2009, however, he was selected for the European Space Agency’s training program, and in 2014 he was assigned to a mission on the International Space Station. Mr. Kac was introduced to him a year later at the Paris Air Show. In 2016, they met again to rehearse the operation — how to cut the paper, how to record the experience on video — at the European Astronaut Center outside Cologne, Germany. “I trained him,” Mr. Kac said, “and he trained me.”
 Mr. Pesquet — who jogs, sails, skis, plays basketball and squash, enjoys mountain biking and has a black belt in judo — is clearly more jock than artist, though he does play the saxophone. Still, he has taken to the “Inner Telescope” project with evident enthusiasm. In November, shortly before blasting off on a Soyuz rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on the steppes of Kazakhstan — the only spaceport capable of sending astronauts to the International Space Station — he took a moment to describe his mission for posterity. His choice of words was perhaps inevitable: “It will be a small step for man,” he said, “and a giant leap for art.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/arts/design/eduardo-kac-inner-telescope-space.html?_r=0

THE LOVE LETTERS OF MANLY MEN

By KATE MURPHY
Flowers, trinkets, borrowed sweaters and other reminders of our romantic past may get tossed out. But love letters, for those lucky enough to receive them, are different. They are more likely tucked in a wallet or safeguarded in a box under the bed.



Increasingly rare in an age when affection is more often expressed with a kissy-face emoji, actual, hold-in-your-hands love letters are special even to people who weren’t the intended recipients. Indeed, collectors tend to value love letters written by famous figures more than other kinds of correspondence. Which is why the auction this week of love letters by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the British diplomat David Ormsby Gore has made headlines. The price of love in this instance? An estimated $125,000 to $187,000.

“When you have a letter destined for only one very special person, you know it’s going to be intimate, and there may be thoughts and feelings that the writer might not have revealed to anybody else,” said Devon Eastland, the director of fine books and manuscripts at Skinner, a Boston auction house, which in May will offer a collection of 40 love letters by the artist Andrew Wyeth to his girlfriend, Alice Moore. The collection is expected to fetch $80,000 to $120,000.

According to historical manuscript dealers and appraisers, the hammer prices, or winning bids, for love letters in recent years tend to correlate with the fame of the writer, rarity and the condition of the document. But most of all they depend on the revelatory nature of the content. If in real estate it’s all about location, for love letters it’s all about heart.

Instructive is a letter from Abraham Lincoln to his first fiancée, Mary Owens, which sold for $700,000 in 2002, then the highest price ever paid for a Lincoln letter and still the highest paid for a love letter. The well-preserved document is one of only three known that he sent to Owens and reveals the future president as ambivalent and insecure, seeking reassurance that she really does want to marry him despite his meager income: “I know I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you.” Compare that with a newsier letter he wrote to her earlier in their relationship. Lacking emotional depth — “I have been sick ever since my arrival here” — and the paper being a bit more discolored, it went for $110,000 last September.


Data provided by American Book Prices Current, which tracks rare book and manuscript auction results, show that, after the Lincoln letter, the highest prices paid for individual love letters are predominantly for those written by military men. Take the one from Napoleon Bonaparte to Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1795 or 1796, during the three-month affair that preceded their marriage. The letter, which was sold in 2007 for $467,958, follows a quarrel. Napoleon admits to being cross but declares his love: “I send you three kisses — one on your heart, one on your mouth and one on your eyes.”

A letter written in 1800 by the British naval hero Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton describing an erotic dream — “I kissed you fervently and we enjoy’d the height of love” — sold for $175,050. And then there’s the love letter Winston Churchill wrote in 1899 to Pamela Plowden, who has been called the first great love of his life, which sold for $113,782. In it, he wrote, “Marry me — and I will conquer the world and lay it at your feet.” By contrast, a draft of a letter from Churchill to Stalin on the “Polish troubles” went for $30,165.

“What draws people to letters in general as things to buy is that feeling of making a really direct connection with a historical figure,” said Thomas Venning, director of books and manuscripts at Christie’s in London. “You’ve got a piece of paper, it was a blank piece of paper when that person put it in front of them, and they filled it with a part of themselves.” In the case of grand military figures’ love letters, he said, the allure is perhaps more intense because “you see the unexpected vulnerability at the heart of them.” (This may be one reason letters from famous women tend to carry lower price tags: When women talk of love, it doesn’t defy our stereotypes.)


Tenderness hidden behind a tough guy facade may explain why an immaculately handwritten love letter from the slugger Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe went for far more ($62,500) than any of the several typewritten love letters to her from the playwright Arthur Miller ($1,024 to $9,728). Miller had an easier time expressing his feelings, but his prolixity comes off, perhaps, as more annoying than enchanting. For context, one of Ms. Monroe’s brassieres went for $16,000.

But sometimes peering into someone’s heart is not a selling point, as with 44 love letters written by Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who created Snoopy, that failed to sell at auction in 2012. At the time the letters were written in the 1970s, Schulz was middle-aged, married and engaged in what reads as a rather puerile pursuit of a woman more than 20 years his junior.

“When you have the unvarnished moment of two people corresponding in an intimate way, it could definitely cross into ‘ick’ territory,” Ms. Eastland said. “Schulz fans might find those love letters a little repugnant.”

But then, one person’s “ick!” might be another person’s “awesome!” An explicit letter written by the rapper Tupac Shakur to a female admirer while he was in jail in 1995, which mentions bondage and lollipops, sold this year for an unexpectedly high $28,000.

Love letters sold in a bundle that give a sense of the arc of a relationship are also highly prized, particularly if they mention the writer’s work or creative process. An example is a collection of 53 letters between Albert Einstein and his wife, Mileva Maric, with references to his scientific endeavors, that sold for $400,000. Ten letters the Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger wrote in 1969 to his girlfriend, Marsha Hunt, sold for $234,500. One letter incorporated lyrics for the song “Monkey Man” with three additional lines.

The buyer of the Jagger-Hunt series was Anne-Marie Springer of Nyon, Switzerland, a prominent collector of love letters. She owns some 2,000, including letters written by Frédéric Chopin, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, Elvis Presley, Napoleon and Frida Kahlo.

She said what appeals to her is “these so-called superstars are just as shy, emotional and endearing as we are when it comes to affairs of the heart.” Perhaps money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you the solace that no one, not even the most prominent figures in history, is immune to the humility and heartbreak of love. It blesses and afflicts us all.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/the-love-letters-of-manly-men.html?_r=0

IN MEMORIAM: SERGE DOUBROVSKY

Our former colleague professor emeritus Serge Doubrovsky died last Thursday, March 23, 2017.

Docteur-ès-Lettres and a former student of l'École Normale Supérieure, Serge Doubrovsky became Professor of French Literature at New York University in 1966. He subsequently taught at Harvard University, Smith College, Brandeis University, and at NYU-Paris from 1972. In 2012, he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the Center for French Civilization and Culture.


Serge Doubrovsky was a known scholar of 17th-century France, critical theorist, and writer. He forged the term "autofiction" to describe his work of fictionalized autobiography and published numerous volumes of autobiography, including Fils (Galillée, 1977), Le Livre brisé (Grasset, 1989), Un homme de passage (Grasset, 2011). His critical work includes Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Gallimard, 1963), and Autobiographies. De Corneille à Sartre (PUF, 1988).

JEAN NOUVEL : « POUR SAUVER LES BANLIEUES, IL FAUT CONTENIR L’EXPANSION URBAINE »

 Dans une tribune au « Monde », l’architecte expose les deux défis essentiels qui attendent le futur chef de l’Etat : sanctuariser les terres agricoles et forestières ; réinvestir la banlieue et y faire le choix résolu de la culture.

 Hier, la politique était définie comme la science de l’organisation de la cité. Aujourd’hui, il suffit de voyager de ville en ville, tout autour de la terre, pour être frappé par la violence du saccage des paysages urbains et naturels, pour être sidéré par le mépris de la géographie, de l’histoire et de l’homme. Les mêmes causes, produisant les mêmes effets, abîment en profondeur l’image de nos villes et l’âme de notre pays.
Sur un territoire comme la France, marqué par un patrimoine architectural ancestral et des sites admirables, cette attitude est sacrilège. Le président de la République est le premier des dirigeants politiques. Il peut difficilement se déclarer insensible ou impuissant, dans ce grand domaine qu’est l’organisation de nos cités. L’urbanisation, ce phénomène incontournable, doit être dosée et gérée. C’est le rôle du politique de le constater, de l’analyser et de le prévoir, et c’est évidemment sa responsabilité d’imaginer dans quelles conditions il va installer et faire vivre pour longtemps tant de nouveaux arrivants, de nouvelles familles et souvent de nouveaux Français.
Ubu-urbanisme planétaire
Depuis un siècle, les décisions sur ce sujet ont été prises dans une urgence répétée, à la petite semaine, à la petite échelle des communes et des mandats… Décisions déléguées le plus souvent à la technostructure et à l’administration qui ont mis en œuvre un système simpliste : l’application aveugle de règles abstraites, la ségrégation des fonctions sur des zones avec des densités et des hauteurs arbitraires. C’est l’Ubu-urbanisme planétaire dont la stupidité ne réside pas uniquement dans le saccage visuel mais aussi dans toutes les conséquences vécues : temps de transport déraisonnable, pollution souvent mortelle, ségrégation sociale, fonctionnelle et spatiale, taille des appartements de plus en plus réduite…
C’est ainsi que le mal-vivre est programmé avec la bonne conscience de l’inconscience. En France, il atteint des sommets dans les « quartiers » dits « sociaux », dans les zones urbaines dites « sensibles ». Depuis un demi-siècle, les gouvernements de gauche et de droite se succèdent et laissent pendante cette situation, depuis longtemps dénoncée par les sociologues et les urbanistes comme une véritable Cocotte-Minute prête à exploser sous la pression toujours grandissante des injustices sociales…
La classe politique considère cette situation comme normale et fatale, elle est atteinte de...


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