The French government has appointed a French art historian and a Senegalese scholar to lead a feasibility study into an initiative by President Emmanuel Macron to return African cultural artefacts currently held by museums in France, a move that one French historian said will 'make European curators quake in their boots'.
Customs officers uncovered Les Choristes, an 1877 painting by French artist Edgar Degas valued at close to 1 million euros, in a random search of a coach luggage compartment on a motorway services stop close to Paris, nine years after it was stolen in Marseille.
During an inventory in 2009, the Geneva Museum of Art and History (MAH) discovered it had for many years been holding in storage four paintings (pictured) deposited with it by an Austrian art collector who had disappeared without trace. Suspicions about the origins of the works grew when it found they were part of a huge collection amassed by Ludwig Losbichler, who British intelligence services identified as a Nazi agent during World War II and who died in 1989. Other works from his reputedly massive collection lie hidden in a Zurich museum, and many more are believed to be held by others across Europe. Mediapart's Geneva correspondent Agathe Duparc reports on the MAH investigation which, seven years on, is still trying to crack the mystery surrounding Losbichler, who once claimed to own the original Mona Lisa.
As of the late 18th century, artists began depicting war as a disastrous event rather than a glorious one, when the horrors of the battlefield and the destruction of environments began gradually replacing majesty and heroics. The long evolution of this trend to its dominant position in the present day is illustrated in ‘The Disasters of War, 1800-2014’, an exhibition now on at the Louvre-Lens, in north-east France, and which will last until the autumn. Joseph Confavreux takes a tour of the show.
Just as New Caledonia, the furthest-flung French territory, is about to embark on the final steps for self-determination, the Quai Branly museum in Paris has timely put together a rich and wide-ranging exhibition of the art and culture of the archipelago’s indigenous Kanak population that reveals a people debunking 160 years of colonialism and redefining themselves. Joseph Confavreux outlines the political context of the show, and calls on anthropologist Alban Bensa, an authority on Kanak culture, to decode the exhibition’s vast array of exhibits.
Gigantic creations by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos adorn the Palace of Versailles this summer, bringing feminist caricatures of macho attitudes to women to this pinnacle of male power, the Sun King's residence. But although the palace is now presided over by a queen – Nicolas Sarkozy appointed a former advisor, Catherine Pégard, to run it – not all Vasconcelos’s conceptions were welcomed with open arms. Mediapart’s Philippe Riès reviews the exhibition.
