Mannequin d'artiste, mannequin fétiche

Le XVIIIe siècle fut témoin de l'essor de la peinture en plein air. Les jeunes artistes venus à Rome pour parfaire leur formation y jouèrent un rôle prépondérant, explorant la campagne italienne pour exercer leur regard et leur main à traduire les effets de la lumière sur la nature comme sur l'architecture. Devenue une composante essentielle du travail artistique, la pratique se diffusa dans toute l'Europe au cours du XIXe siècle. La présente publication met, en lumière le désir qu'avaient les peintres de restituer l'immédiateté des phénomènes naturels observés sur le vif. Au nombre des artistes dont les oeuvres sont ici exposées, on comptera Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille Corot, André Giroux, Théodore Rousseau, Edgar Degas, Simon Denis, Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Anton Sminck Pitloo, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann Jakob Frey et bien d'autres encore. Les études témoignent du talent et de l'habileté dont ces artistes faisaient preuve, restituant avec brio les effets atmosphériques et les données géologiques et topographiques observés, dans la fraîcheur de la première impression.

Touch is our fi rst sense. Through touch we make art, stake a claim to what we own and those we love, express our faith, our belief, our anger. Touch is how we leave our mark and find our place in the world; touch is how we connect. Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, this book explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking. In a series of lavishly illustrated essays, the authors explore anatomy and skin; the relationship between the brain, hand, and creativity; touch, desire and possession; ideological touch; reverence and iconoclasm. A final section collects a range of reflections, historic and contemporary, on touch. Objects range from anonymous ancient Egyptian limestone sculpture, to medieval manuscripts and panel paintings, to devotional and spiritual objects from across the world, to love tokens and fede rings. Drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture by Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carracci, Hogarth, Turner, Rodin, Degas, and Kollwitz are explored, along with work by contemporary artists Judy Chicago, Frank Auerbach, Richard Long, the Chapman Brothers, and Richard Rawlins. The events of 2020 have made us newly alive to the preciousness and the dangers of touch, making this exploration of our most fundamental sense particularly timely and resonant.

David Hockney is the best known and most widely admired painter in the world. This vibrant catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the The Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery in Cambridge, as well as the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands. Throughout his long career, David Hockney has insistently explored diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from their cherished assumptions The exhibition and accompanying book are the first to focus on this central theme in his art. "Western art" from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to be accomplished by direct looking (called "eyeballing" by Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such as cameras ? Hockney has experimented with the full range of existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera lucida. Yet he has come to reject the photograph as the definitive image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a "camera culture'' in European painting from 1400, arguing very controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan van Eyck are the product of optical devices. His book, Secret Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed the central aspect of painters' practice. The "Hockney thesis" has been received more favourably outside the professional world of art history than in it. His own artistic practice has been in vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual world without perspective and other conventional techniques. This quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole span of Hockney's varied career and at the nature of the optical devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing. The first section of the book looks at his thrilling experiments in seeing and representing in broad historical and contemporary contexts. This is followed by discussions of pre-photographic devices for capturing the appearances of things by optical means. The third section includes essays on Hockney's experiments from the perspectives of neuroscience and computer vision. In short, it reveals in a new way the working of Hockney's unique eye.

Il deviendrait difficile d'expliquer, plus tard dans sa vie, ce qui au juste était acceptable à l'époque et ce qui ne l'était pas. Après quoi on s'enferrerait immanquablement en disant que le fait d'avoir une quelconque idée sérieuse, pour ne rien dire d'une quelconque ambition, ou peut-être même que le simple fait de lire un vrai livre risquaient d'être considérés comme suspects. "Alice Munro est née en 1931 au Canada. Elle est considérée comme l'un des plus grands écrivains anglo-saxons de notre époque. Fugitives, Trop de bonheur et Amie de ma jeunesse sont notamment disponibles en Points. Elle a reçu le prix Nobel de littérature en 2013." Le génie subtil d'Alice Munro : celui de célébrer le mariage de l'inattendu et de l'inexorable. "Le Nouvel ObservateurTraduit de l'anglais (Canada) par Jacqueline Huet et Jean-Pierre Carasso