While planning my visit to a special exhibit about Rembrandt at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I discovered the DIA had partnered with the Louvre on it — a French connection.
Since joining TheFrameworks, I’ve become more conscious of Detroit’s connection to France. One of our biggest clients is a French company, Dassault Systèmes. I even have the tremendous pleasure of working with two French colleagues here in the Detroit office.
Remembering some of my local history lessons, I hit Google to track down some more interesting connections:
- The city of Detroit was born from a French fort and missionary outpost called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, founded in 1701. The original settlement was named after Riviere D’etroit, which means “River of The Strait” in French.
- During the late nineteenth century, Detroit was nicknamed the Paris of the West because of its architecture and open public spaces.
- One quadrant of the flag of Detroit honors France with gold fleurs-de-lis on a white field.
- Major streets in Metro Detroit carry French names like Dequindre, Beaubien, Cadillac and Lafayette.
- According to the French-American Chamber of Commerce, operations for about 300 French companies are located in Michigan. Additionally, other French companies do business in Michigan in industries such as automotive, aerospace, retail, luxury goods, food and wine products, high technology and medical products.
- French-American architect Paul Philippe Cret designed the Detroit Institute of Arts. One of the most renowned and respected art museums in the world, the DIA’s collection contains famous works by many French artists, including Monet, Degas and Matisse. Currently, through a partnership with the Musée du Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” is appearing at the Detroit Institute of Arts through 12 February. It demonstrates that in posing an ethnographically correct model and using a human face to depict Jesus, Rembrandt overturned the entire history of Christian art.
These artistic, cultural and industry connections to France are only a portion of the significant ties metro Detroit holds to Europe, so it’s no surprise TheFrameworks saw the area as a great place to open its U.S. office.
Our London HQ is to be found in a cozy little creative hub near Tower Bridge. We are neighbours with the Design Museum - who are just around the corner – and with Conran across the road. And we do occasionally see Sir Terrance as he pops into his office – or at least catch a lingering whiff of one of his impressively large cigars.
The Design Museum and Conran have always been linked – he was instrumental in establishing the museum in 1989. And now the museum is marking Sir Terrence’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain.
From creating the first flat-pack furniture in Britain, promotion of the duvet, the chicken brick (yes, really) and of course, Habitat, he has arguably done more than anyone to bring design into the mainstream.
You can visit the exhibition until 4 March next year. If you do decide to go along – why not pop in to say hello to us too!
A fantastic new exhibition has just opened at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Johnnie Shand Kydd is an acclaimed documentary photographer perhaps best known for his portraits of artist friends such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst. In 2000 he embarked on a longterm project to capture the dramatic and chaotic world of Naples. Having never visited the city before, he soon developed a relationship with it that he described as ‘akin to a drug habit’, returning again and again over the next eight years.
Naples is known as the ‘Siren City’ because of the legend of Parthenope who, having failed to seduce Ulysses with the beauty of her song, threw herself into the sea and was washed ashore at the place that was to become Naples. Documenting the city’s streets, culture, traditions and people, Shand Kydd was seduced by its contradictory and complex nature – sinister yet humorous, sacred yet profane, theatrical yet real. He observed a darker side to Naples, related not only to its infamous corruption and criminality but also to the city’s inherent pagan character. Whilst seeing Naples as a tough, noisy and anarchic city he also finds beauty and a particular light-heartedness which, he argues, can be ‘discovered in the detail rather than the overview.’
‘Siren City: Photographs by Johnnie Shand Kydd’ runs until 12 September 2010. All exhibition materials have been created by TheFrameworks.
Featured recently in various news articles, and most recently in yesterday’s Evening Standard, this work of art, by artist David Hockney, has been created entirely using the iPad and an application called Brushes. I love this creative use of the iPad, which counts David Hockney as a fan: “I do love it, I must admit,” Hockney told Bloomberg. David Hockney also talks about how applications like this could provide a way for traditional drawing to make a comeback and that technology such as the iPad, provides new platforms for artists to experiment with.
Enter the current MYFJ.com promotion to WIN an iPad and you could be creating your own digital masterpieces. All you need to do is sign up to MYFJ and add the iPad as one of your favourites – don’t forget to invite your friends as every friend who joins earns you an extra chance to win.
Follow this link for full details:
http://www.myfj.com/promoter/ipad.php?f=&p=IPAD1.
MYFJ is a social networking website powered by TheFrameworks.
The new exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is ‘Another Country: London Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art’.
Another Country brings together ten highly respected contemporary painters: Tony Bevan, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci and Thomas Newbolt.
Although the artists have exhibited together previously in Italy, they have come together through friendship rather than any shared style or technique.
For Another Country, each painter has opened a visual dialogue with an Italian artist from the twentieth century. The stunning series of paintings resulting from this establish and highlight connections, in terms of both ideas and practice, with artists represented in the Estorick Collection, or closely connected to them.
The approaches taken by these artists to the project are rich and various. The link between them and their chosen interlocutor is often subtle and understated and each of the painters has written a personal text for the exhibition catalogue exploring further their relationship with the twentieth-century Italian artist they have chosen.
The exhibition represents a fascinating encounter between cultures. As Brendan Prendeville says in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: ‘It is in painting that the transforming power of art is most evident, for it can draw on what we might regard as a natural and universal faculty for seeing something as other than it is… Accepting that this potential in painting is universal, we might encapsulate its “Italian” realisation in an aphorism: painting takes us to another country.’
Another Country runs from 28 April to 20 June 2010. All exhibition materials have been created by TheFrameworks.
