Primavera Europae

Modern art at Rome: MAXXI & MACRO

It’s nice to have stayed long enough in Rome altogether to be able to take some time off from checking out the most important historical landmarks, and focusing for more contemporary offerings of the city for a while. It’s crazy how many big & important exhibitions there are in Rome at the same time, rivaling the cultural metropoles like Paris and New York easily. Helsinki would be considered lucky to be able to host just one of those exhibitions per year. Right now there would have been displays of American modernism from Guggenheim collections, Miro, Dali, Russian avant-garde, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Steve McCurry - just to mention the biggest names.

We checked the two new museums for modern & contemporary art in Rome: MAXXI and MACRO. Both are interesting not only for the exhibitions but also for their architecture. MAXXI is at least architecturally better known of the two, being designed by the superstar Zaha Hadid. On the outside it doesn’t look too special, but the insides are very interesting and also highly functional - there’s a good flow inside the building leading from one exhibition hall to another. Content-wise there’s an interesting mixture of architecture, installations, paintings, video works and photos in display at MAXXI. Also there are preparations on the way for the setting up the installation from recycled clothes by the Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen, whose exhibition we miss by just two days.

MACRO is quite a bit more confusing as an exhibition space than Zaha Hadid’s building, but at least as interesting visually with bold shapes and colors. We actually came here for Steve McCurry’s photo exhibition, only to learn that it was at the other MARCO location (yes, apparently there are two…). But the works in display were worth the walk anyway: interesting samplings from the permanent collection and massive video/installation works in one of the largest exhibition halls I’ve ever seen.

All and all glad to see that the contemporary culture in Rome is alive and well to say the least, on top of the couple of millennia of history….

Vive le cinéma!

This is where it all began, in Lyon. Cinema, that is. Here the Lumiere brothers had home, offices and a factory - the very same factory whose workers were captured in the first ever film recorded. There’s a really fascinating Musée Lumière housed in the former home of the Lumiere family (right next to where the factory used to be also, but that has been since demolished) - lots of old original equipment from the turn of the century (from various techniques ranging from 360 degree panoramas to 3D) together with family photos and memorabilia. I hadn’t realized that the Lumiere company also basically started photojournalism by sending out groups of people all over the world to record the events and everyday life of people in countries from Switzerland to Egypt to Morocco to India etc. What an amazing life it must have been in those days to be able travel the world photographing and cinematographing foreign cultures! And the Lumiere company also were the very first ones to capture color photos. To see turn-of-the-century era in colors seems to bring the time and people to life in almost magical way compared to the b&w we’ve used to be seeing.

Lyon has not forgotten its long heritage with cinema: there’s also a surprisingly good collection of movie props, sets, models, miniatures, animatronics etc from various European and American well-known movies. So Musée des Miniatures et Décors du Cinéma is definitely an imagination-inspiring place to visit for cinephiles such as myself. Again one can only wonder what a wonderful job it must be to design spaceships, bring to life ancient Roman warrior costumes and to explode miniature buses on a daily basis. Somehow seeing those artifacts and thinking about all the people who worked hard for those to make the dreams come alive on screen made me love and appreciate film as a creative form even more….

There was also a large collection of non-cinematic miniature scenes in the same museum, with lots of cutesy and somewhat boring dollhouse-kind-of stuff but also some really striking, artistic miniatures especially from a guy called Dan Ohlman. Stylewise Ohlman’s work was very cinematic even though they had no direct connection to any movies, and many also resembled great still photographs - but were all hand-crafted with painstaking amount of details on top of clearly great artistic vision. I had never before thought of miniatures as an art form, but after seeing Ohlman’s pieces I must update my perspective.

Fondation Victor Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence

No, this is not a movie set from an 60s/70s scifi-flick, but an art museum in the suburbs of Aix-en-Provence. The building from 1970s houses a collection of works from the Hungarian/French op-artist Victor Vasarely. The broad scale & mathematical precision of the works and cold concrete of the building could not be in stronger contrasts with the belle époque prettiness of the rest of the city. Fascinating place.

MAMAC - Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice

A surprisingly high-quality and varied collection of modern art in an hideously ugly and already run-down 1990s building (but the building offers great views over Le Vieux Nice from the rooftop terrace).

Didn’t know Yves Klein was from Nice too, but kind of makes sense with that “Yves Klein blue” considering the hues of the sea & sky in Provence…