French artist Henri Rivière (1864–1951) was one of the first to attempt to replicate not just the visual vocabulary of the Japanese masters, but also their printing methods.
The trompe l’œil has an image problem. The genre – in its narrowest sense a group of works that create an optical illusion, typically tricking the viewer into mistaking the representation of an object for the object itself – has long been relegated to the ranks of ‘low art’.
In October, a small but steady stream of negative comments about Paris began to appear on X posts about art events in France.
Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements, that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique.
Les Malheurs des immortels (The Misfortunes of the Immortals) was an altogether more experimental collaboration, one that challenged traditional conceptions of what illustrations could or should do.
In October 1895, a curious announcement appeared in The Lark, a now-defunct literary magazine based out of San Francisco.
When the Brigade de Sûreté was set up in Paris in 1812, it was a first of its kind: a criminal investigation bureau composed of undercover officers, which would later evolve into France’s national police force.
When I was a child, my dad used to tell a funny story about my brother falling out of a window. Louis was five at the time, and they were at my grandmother’s flat in the north of England. It was an ex-council housing complex, the ceilings were mean and low, but it was the second floor nonetheless…
When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view.
I slept in Jane’s bed three months before I met her. She was nameless Jane the first time, plain Jane the second, a cruel half-smile on Jack’s lips who supplied this and only this and little else, leaving me reading the rest in the spines on the bookshelves and the herbal tea selection by the kettle.
Over the last forty years, contemporary French poetry has been living in a state of crisis. Pronounced dead – or worse, irrelevant – it has sought to reassert its value, define its current specificity, and delineate its difference from the poetic practices of the past.
The French author discusses autobiography, formal experimentation and her Man Booker shortlisted book “The Years.”
The idea was to create a project that would depict the way these ethnic minority groups live, what their daily lives look like, as well as how the government watches them 24/7.
At first glance, it is difficult to conceive of Nos Invisibles (1907) as a controversial text. Its pages contain dreamy ruminations on the quest for spiritual serenity and “the mystery of eternal life”, interspersed with elegant illustrations by the Italian watercolourist Raffaele Mainella that conjure celestial bodies and the healing power of nature.
A review of Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party
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