« Histoire de l’Art »
My « Histoire de l’Art » [Art History] was recently published by the Coherent States label based in Athens, Greece.
« Histoire de l’Art » receives catalogue number CS.44, and it is available as a digital download, but also as a carefully crafted and packed CDR.
The official release date is July 14th, 2022. In France that is a national holiday. Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille two hundred and thirty three years ago, on July 14th 1789. The then there political prison, a symbol of autocratic cruelty, was stormed by (let’s say) the people, and subsequently destructed: it’s what got the French Revolution going.
Nowadays the Place de la Bastille is a vast, polluted and dusty roundabout. Not a single stone of the former prison remains. At its very centre rises the so-called July Column, 47 meters high, crowned by a nude golden angel standing on one leg on top of a gilded globe: the “Spirit of Freedom” (Génie de la Liberté). And yes, yes! Our génie indeed makes a fist, he is jumping and crying, he is dancing bizarre…!
The history of art is a history of repetition.
Like the history of man, like the history of worlds.
The cover of « Histoire de l’Art » is a mash-up that one confined evening was cut-and-pasted together by Chen Yungwei. It combines into a single scene two paintings by renowned French artists that both were ‘children of the revolution’.
It is a scene that makes immediate sense.
The original works are on show side by side in the Salle 940 on the second floor of the Sully wing, in the Louvre in Paris.
Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864) made the Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer, figure d’étude (Study of a young male nude seated beside de sea) during his residency in Rome, in the years 1835-1836.
