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On the roads of Samarkand

Wonders of silk and gold

Sumptuous gold-embroidered chapan coats and accessories from the Emir’s court, painted wooden saddles, silver horse harnesses set with turquoises, precious embroidered suzani hangings, carpets, silk ikats, jewelry and costumes from the nomadic culture as well than about fifteen orientalist paintings: over a course deployed over more than 1100 m² are deployed nearly 300 new pieces, representative of the treasures of Uzbekistan.

“On the Roads of Samarkand” magnifies the renaissance of the splendor of craftsmanship in the 19th and early 20th centuries, constitutive of Uzbek identity. Textiles, like the powers of the Islamic world, play a key role in this; Bukhara embroidery, in particular, occupies a special place among the many art forms of Uzbekistan. It was during the Emirate of Bukhara (1785-1920) that gold embroidery reached its peak and its fame in terms of technique, quality and above all creativity. A number of splendid and monumental productions – chapans, dresses, headdresses, saddle cloths mixing colors and gold – reserved for the court and for diplomatic gifts were exclusively made in the private workshop of the emir and bear witness to his opulent art of living.

Many other pieces are to be discovered throughout the exhibition, offering a broader perspective of the society of the time, including the famous ikats and their anthology of colors, weavings resulting from ancestral techniques, and regional stylistic specificities. from Khorezm, the Ferghana Valley or the Karakalpak region, where accumulations of jewelry extended the female wardrobe.

At the turn of the century, Turkestan – a territory that covered the future republic of Uzbekistan – was the destination of choice for many artists from Central Asia and Russia. New art schools were created in the 1920s; an Uzbek school is born, of which Alexandre Volkov (1886-1957) takes the head. The painters will discover this territory and find in the richness of the landscapes, shapes, colors and faces of Central Asia a unique inspiration. This is how we find, in the subjects worked, the carpets, suzanis, chapans and ikats presented in the exhibition, each artist approaching this quest for elsewhere and exoticism by following his own style.

November 23, 2022 – June 4, 2023

IMA

1 rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard 75005 Paris

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Splendors of the oases of Uzbekistan

The Louvre Museum takes you to the heart of Central Asia, where the names of Samarkand and Bukhara still resonate today, revealing the splendours of the oases of Uzbekistan. Through the selection of nearly 180 masterpieces, the museum goes up the Silk Road, along the caravan routes from the Far East to the Mediterranean to restore more than 16 centuries of merchant history.

Based in particular on an authentic version of Marco Polo’s fabulous Book of Wonders, the museum brings back to life the time of the middle kingdoms, restoring the magic of a territory coveted by Alexander the Great as well as by Genghis Kahn and the Caliphs of Baghdad.

A wide selection of these masterpieces never left the country and specially restored are presented in this exhibition, such as the monumental murals of the palace of the ambassadors of Samarkand and its region, pages from one of the oldest monumental Korans of the beginnings of Islam from Katta Langar, in Sogdiana, and other gold treasures from Bactria (Dalverzintépé), silver, silk, ceramics. It is also an opportunity to admire some masterpieces of the famous miniature painting of the Bukhara school of the 16th century.

Thus, also thanks to exceptional loans from major European museums, the exhibition brings together nearly 130 works and invites us to travel through space and time.

November 23, 2022 – March 6, 2023

MUSEE du LOUVRE

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Ossip Zadkine

A life of workshops

The sculptor Ossip Zadkine and the painter Valentine Prax, his wife, spent almost forty years together, from 1928 to 1967, in the house, workshops and garden on rue d’Assas. Forty years is precisely the age celebrated this year by the Zadkine museum, which opened in 1982 in this same place, thanks to the bequest of Valentine Prax.

To celebrate this anniversary, the museum is presenting an exhibition that takes the visitor to the heart of the studio of the two artists, which, for forty years, was the place of life and creation of the couple of artists. Nearly a hundred works make up the route of the exhibition, which includes a fine selection of masterpieces by Zadkine, but also rarely shown paintings by Prax and numerous previously unseen photographs, some by great photographers, such as André Kertész or Marc Worth. It occupies all the rooms of the museum in a renewed scenography, which evokes “the spirit of the workshop”.

From the first studios that Zadkine filled with his sculptures upon his arrival in Paris to the studio in the garden that the sculptor had built after the war, the route of the exhibition follows a chrono-thematic principle. An introductory part recounts the first workshops in which Zadkine lived and worked, in the heart of the Montparnasse district. The second chapter is devoted to the house-workshop on rue d’Assas where he moved in 1928 with Valentine Prax, whom he married in 1920.

Both a physical place and a mental space, as much a nest, a shelter as an observation post, this foyer-studio unfolds as a habitat for the works. Scene of creation, it also serves as a framework for the memoirs of Zadkine and Prax, and a setting for the many photographs that are part of the museum’s archives today. The third and final section offers an immersion in the process of creation and the bustle of workshop life.

November 11? 2022 – April 2, 2023

MUSEE ZADKINE
100 bis rue d’Assas 75006 Paris

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Années 80

Fashion, Design, Graphics in France

A historic decade that resonates in France as a political and artistic turning point in the fields of fashion, design and graphic design, from the election of François Mitterrand in 1981 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The 1980s saw the birth of a new generation of designers – Olivier Gagnère, Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, Philippe Starck, Martin Szekely… – in a context conducive to freedom of expression.

The silhouette, too, is freed from style injunctions and some fashion designers are elevated to the rank of “superstars” such as Jean Paul Gaultier or Thierry Mugler. Advertising, graphic design and audiovisual experience their boom years with Jean-Paul Goude, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Étienne Robial. From new wave music to post-punk via hip-hop: it’s a whole history of the party that is written in mythical places frequented by night owls from all over Paris.

The scenography of the exhibition, conceived as a pileup of shapes and colors, was entrusted to designer Adrien Rovero. The exhibition is punctuated by three themes that reflect the great telescoping of ideas and forms specific to the decade: a new political and cultural era, design in turmoil and the look of the 80s. Inaugurating the journey in the galleries on the Tuileries side, the election of François Mitterrand in 1981 announced a decisive change.

It was under the impetus of the emblematic Minister of Culture Jack Lang that the Fête de la Musique was inaugurated on June 21, 1982. He also worked for public recognition of fashion with the creation of the Institut français de la mode (IFM) in 1986, the organization of fashion shows in the Cour Carrée du Louvre, the Oscars de la mode… Fashion is marked by the distribution of ready-to-wear, which affects the whole of society and replaces the status of couturier with that of designer. The look becomes the expression of a personal language. In the field of advertising and graphic design, these years marked the departure of global visual communication, which was then divided between the growing marketing of advertising agencies and public utility graphics emanating from graphic designers’ workshops.

The media and audiovisual are experiencing unprecedented growth. Étienne Robial created the concept of television packaging for Canal+ then for M6 or even 7. This multiplication of television channels led to the golden age of advertising film with emblematic directors such as Étienne Chatiliez, Jean-Paul Goude or Jean- Baptist Mondino. The written press is transformed: Claude Maggiori rethinks the covers of “Liberation” and the “art” of the slogan invests all areas.

In this period of effervescence, the creator of the 80s mixes several aesthetics, just like the world of fashion. A modernist design with high-tech accents rubs shoulders with neo-baroque and primitive universes that exalt know-how. The action of the VIA (Valorisation de l’Innovation dans l’Ameublement), initiated in 1979 by the Ministry of Industry, awards “Cartes Blanches” to a whole generation of young designers.

Unlike past decades, rather than schools or currents, it is brilliant individuals who are highlighted: François Bauchet, Martine Bedin, Sylvain Dubuisson, Olivier Gagnère, Andrée Putman, but also Philippe Starck or Martin Szekely. The VIA brings in its wake the opening of avant-garde places dedicated to contemporary creation: the Perkal, Néotù, Yves Gastou, En attendant les barbares, Avant-Scène and Gladys Mougin galleries.

A wind of celebration and freedom blows over the 1980s: fashion shows turn into spectacular shows, paving the way for crazy parties in places that have become legendary : Le Palace and les Bains Douches.

In these clubs where appearance is essential and eccentricity the rule, the whole of Paris dances to new wave, rock and hip-hop music. Young people are diversifying the groups they belong to, giving rise to a multiplicity of subcultures with their own looks.

From Antiquity to the 1930s, a revival phenomenon took hold of fashion. Thierry Mugler or Claude Montana are then inspired by historical silhouettes when Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood or Chantal Thomass parody them.

Conversely, Martin Margiela or Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons attempt to deconstruct the notion of clothing. The athletic bodies of the models are molded in the creations of Azzedine Alaïa or Marc Audibert, while the ample forms of Issey Miyake or Anne-Marie Beretta are intended to be architectural and become a real medium of expression for Elisabeth de Senneville and Jean -Charles de Castelbajac.

Fashion is taking over the men’s wardrobe like Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous marinière. Consumer brands flood the urban space with their advertising campaigns such as Naf Naf, Kookaï or Benetton. At the same time, from the then rapidly changing Les Halles district, agnès b. designs the timeless wardrobe of the Parisian. The great anniversary parade of the French Revolution in 1989, to which Jean-Paul Goude gives all its brilliance, concludes the route.

The Museum of Decorative Arts, by retracing the highlights of a period that upset codes, honors its own history: the Museum of Posters and Advertising, created in 1982, and the Museum of Arts of mode, in 1986 – collections now attached to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs – are an offshoot of the policy of the Mitterrand and Lang years. The exhibition recalls how much the 80s were those of the pileup of styles, spontaneity and freedom.

October 13, 2022 – April 16, 2023

MAD

107 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris

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Rodin, Rêve d’Egypte

If Rodin studied all his life the arts of the past, those of Greece, Asia, the medieval arts, he was also passionate about this distant and mysterious civilization, which was seen at the very end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century as a symbol of modernity.

Obtaining supplies from Parisian antique dealers and merchants based in Cairo, he assembled an exceptional collection in number and quality in his studio at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon. From 1908, and even more so in 1911-1912, he also surrounded himself with monumental works with the idea of exhibiting them in the Hotel Biron in Paris, in prefiguration of the future Rodin Museum.

This exhibition is an opportunity to discover for the first time the major pieces of his collection made up of more than a thousand pieces from the pre-Pharaonic era to the Arab era. The 400 or so objects selected offer a varied journey, sculptures, bas-reliefs, masks, figurines, drawings, photographs, archives evoking the relationship that Rodin had with “his friends of the last hour” such as Rainer Maria Rilke or Isadora Duncan who , unlike him, made the trip to Egypt.

They bring out figures of smugglers, writers, artists, antiquarians and Egyptologists, who guided the artist towards Egypt by feeding him with visual sources, stories or objects. The constitution of Rodin’s collection thus reveals the history of the art market and antique dealers of this period. It is part of the commemoration program for the Champollion year, organized under the aegis of France Mémoire.

It also presents the resonance of Egyptian art in the work of the sculptor, through his research on the representation of the human body, the simplification of forms, the fragment or the monumentality with in particular with the Monument to Balzac (1898) which he said “Balzac is the Sphinx of France”. It is more for the sculptor to “be Egyptian” than to be inspired by Egyptian art. The exhibition benefits from major loans from the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the Bourdelle Museum and private collectors.

October 18, 2022 – March 5, 2023

MUSEE RODIN

77 rue de Varenne 75007 Paris

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