All posts tagged: France

Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday

Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday

June 13, 2018

By GREGORY CURTIS

The towers of Church Saint-Sulpice.

Paris, France

I found a book by Georges Perec called Tentatived’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien, or An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris. I like Perec very much. He loved word games and wrote crossword puzzles, and very often invented challenges for himself in his writing. In 1969 he wrote a book—La Disparition—in which the letter “e” does not appear. It was translated into English, also with no “e’s” but since the literal translation—The Disappearance—has three “e’s”, the English title is A Void. In 1972 Perec wrote Les Revenents, in which “e” is the only vowel in the book. Perec died of cancer in 1982 when he was only forty-six.

Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday
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The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors

The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors

April 25, 2017 , , ,

By ARDEN HENDRIE

The paintings may be best known for what they are not. They were made on the heels of work now considered Matisse’s most groundbreaking, the paintings from the period between 1907 and 1917 when he engaged with the early perceptions of modernism. His trajectory through these years widened his ambitions and shows him becoming more cutthroat within them, first leaving behind the saturated exuberance of fauvism, then, by degrees, flattening color and form into strange and austere near-abstractions.

The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors
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Shining Red in the Torrent

Shining Red in the Torrent

November 1, 2015 , , ,

By SYLVIE DURBEC

Translated by DENIS HIRSON

Go to meet redness.
Reach it with all the necessary brutality.
Refuse facile images. Self-portraits. Portraits of any sort.
But go without reserve, crushing water underfoot, unyielding to the childlike pleasure of splashes against naked legs.
Go as a painter.
Roll up trouser legs, remove espadrilles and dig your will into the torrent: meet the red there, take it captive. Bury your madness in the icy water.
Without dying of this.
Without speaking of it either.

Shining Red in the Torrent
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NATÜRLICHER / VIS-À-VIS LAND, ANIMAL

NATÜRLICHER / VIS-À-VIS LAND, ANIMAL

July 23, 2015

By BRANDI KATHERINE HERRERA

Author’s Note

These “color swatch poems” are taken from a larger work in progress called Mutterfarbe, a book of experimental translations and poems using Goethe’s Theory of Colors as a primary source.

Each of the colors and their names were pulled from the landscapes and built environments I inhabited during my travels throughout France in early 2015. The nine images at the top correspond with each color swatch poem, and represent those landscapes/built environs. The “Anhang” (appendix) at the end features lines I translated from Goethe’s text on color theory—each numbered line corresponding with one of the color swatches to create a new poetic text.

 

NATÜRLICHER / VIS-À-VIS LAND, ANIMAL
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Like Breath

December 10, 2014

By TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

We are standing in front of Mark Rothko’s Black, Red Over Black on Red at the Centre Pompidou.

“I love Rothko,” says my companion. “I am not crazy about modern American art, but Rothko is different.” A painter himself, my companion is a talkative man behind whose frail body and white hair is an energetic, sometimes erratic mind. “Look,” he says, as he moves closer to the painting, the guard keeping a polite watch over us. “The way he has layered the painting—as if he were breathing it.”

Like Breath
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Petite Fleur

Petite Fleur

December 3, 2014

By TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

In the Paris Métro last summer, heading to the Chatelet station on my way home after a wayward day, I caught the sound of a saxophone and that familiar melody from decades past, Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur. I could tell the music was coming from a source close by, perhaps only a few rows behind me. I froze, not knowing what to do as though I were in the grip of something large and timeless.

Petite Fleur
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