Some Aspects of the Activities of the Gallery Berès, Paris, France

The report examines some aspects of the activities of the Gallery Berès which is one of the most important french galleries, run by a third generation of gallerists. The gallery is located at Quai Voltaire 25 in Paris. The history of both the gallery and the Berès family, who are significant collectors and gallery owners is traced. The profile of the gallery, which specializes in two different areas: Japanese art and French painting from the 19th and 20th centuries is analyzed. The report examines some of the strategies of the gallery and in particular the participations in art fairs such as Brafa Art Fair, Tefaf, Biennale des Antiquaires and others. The report also analyzes the structure of the gallery, as well as the work of the team. The study also focuses on the role and the importance of the France’s National Antique Dealers Federation, which president is Anisabelle Berès-Montanari. The issue of the necessary certificates for export and authenticity that a work of art must have, depending on its value and other legal requirements related to the gallery activity in France is also considered.

With an Icon and a Knife: About the Semio-Aesthetic Causes of А. Balashov’s Vandalism

The article deals with semiotics of the vandal action of Abram Balashov in Tretyakov gallery aimed at the damaging Iliya Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 14 November 1581”. We compared two acts of Russian vandals who attacked the canvas on 1913 and on 2018. There is considerable difference between Igor Podporin’s reckless ideological action and Balashov’s actions which were carefully planned. Balashov was an icon painter, but wanted to be a painter. Like M. Voloshin we insist that his mental disorder is caused by provocative Repin’s painting. The shocking effect of this artwork caused a similar reaction of Russian viewers on 1885 disgusted and amazed by naturalism and expression of the painting. Repin’s work was inspired by his own bleeding trauma experienced in childhood, by the European paintings of the bleeding Christ, by Russian antimonarchist radicalism, by N. Karamsin’s gothic version of tsar Ivan activity, finally by «le genre féroce» of the modern French painting. Repin added to visual look of Ivan the Terrible some demonic features and to his son figure some Christ features. Balashov belonged to subculture of Russian Old Believers in turn was inspired by hagiography of Old Believer martyr Morozova and by icon like painting “Boiarynia Morozova” of Surikov. Balashov’s vandal act is a typical Russian «fool for Christ» gesture. Probably he followed the tradition of damaging devil's faces in books and on icons.

Revisiting Harrison and Cynthia White’s Academic vs. Dealer-Critic System

The field of art market studies is based on a famous opposition, coined by Harrison and Cynthia White in 1965, regarding the “academic” system, as opposed to the “dealer-critic” one. Published in 1965, their book, Canvases and Careers, Institutional Change in the French Painting World, was qualified by Patricia Mainardi and Pierre Vaisse, but their criticism dated back to the 1990s. In the meantime, the development of digital methods makes possible a broader reassessment of Harrison and Cynthia White’s theory. Based on a corpus of Parisian auction sales, from 1831 through 1925, this paper uses econometrics to call into question the antagonism between the academic and the dealer-critic system, and comes to another conclusion: the academic system was crucial to determine the value of artworks and its efficiency did not collapse in the 1870s, nor in the 1880s, but rather after the Great War.

ЛІТЕРАТУРНІ СЮЖЕТИ В ТВОРАХ Е. ДЕЛАКРУА – “ЗАГИБЕЛЬ КОРАБЛЯ ДОН-ЖУАНА” ТА “ПІСЛЯ КОРАБЕЛЬНОЇ АВАРІЇ”

In this article, we have studied problems associated with features of the painting development in the Romantic era. We have highlighted questions on the interrelationship between literature and painting and considered new trends in the development of the French painting in the first half of the 19th century. Artists of this era, in particular E. Delacroix, searched for new subjects actively by finding interesting themes in works of the world literature. E. Delacroix was inspired by works of Dante, L. Ariosto, T. Tasso, W. Shakespeare, J. Goethe, G. Byron, F. R. de Chateaubriand, W. Scott etc. Among them we should make the English writer G. Byron stand out: His character personified the romantic ideal of the whole era and his heroic life became a role model for young generation. In Byron’s works Eugène Delacroix was searching for new themes and his romantic hero and every time finding the relevant ways for his artistic solution system. Е. Delacroix’s works show us the integrity of romantic ideas clearly and the close mutual influence of the Western European literature and French painting allows speaking about the uniqueness of this era.

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 August–15 November) include the Palestinian hip-hop documentary Palestine Underground; the viral spread of one Great March of Return protester's photo, which was extensively compared to the famous French painting Liberty Leading the People; and Palestinian celebration over the resignation of Avigdor Lieberman as Irael's defense minister, which generated the hastag #Gaza_tantasir (Gaza_victorious).

Seurat, Georges-Pierre (1859–1891)

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.

Heron, Patrick (1920–1999)

Patrick Heron is recognized by many as a key figure in the history of post-war British art, both as a practicing artist and as a prolific writer and critic. Influenced in his own work by artists such as Matisse, Bonnard, and Braque, he acted as key conduit between British art and the continent—particularly French painting, typified by the École de Paris. Like his fellow British painters Roger Hilton and William Gear, he was predisposed toward the bold use of color and a free play with oscillating perspectival cues in the more figurative of his works. An example of Heron’s earlier linear lyrical abstract work, Christmas Eve, was included in the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition, 60 Paintings for ’51. Heron also organized several key exhibitions during the 1950s, which marked key touchstones in the development of abstract British art, including Space in Colour at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1953 and Metavisual, Taschiste, Abstract at the Redfern Gallery, London, in April 1956. Influenced by the Russian-French artist Nicholas de Staël, and perhaps somewhat by American Abstract Expressionism, after 1955 his works were primarily non-representational, but preserved subtle and equivocal references to the landscape surrounding his home.