January 2009

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André Derain is best known as a Fauve and a Cubist painter. He is less known as a sculptor, although he shared Braque and Picasso’s passion for African sculpture (and also collected Greek, Roman and renaissance sculpture). The artist sculpted throughout his life, initially in wood and then stone – even using wartime shells and shrapnel as well as sheet metal. In the 1930s he began also to make clay masks and figures from earth in his garden at Chambourcy that were discovered only after his death in 1954, when they were cast in bronze. Some 15 of these powerful, almost primordial masks and figures will be unveiled at the Galerie de la Presidence, priced at €9,000-€40,000. For those who prefer their ‘primitive’ sculpture not to be European, the Biennale obliges with most of the world’s finest tribal art dealers: Bernard Dulon, Entwistle, Alain de Monbrison and Galerie Mermoz.

Of course, it is not only dealers at the Grand Palais who are staging events and exhibitions in Paris in September. Indeed, regular visitors will note a number of major absences from this year’s fair. What promises to be the most remarkable of these satellite events is Axel Vervoort’s ‘Academia: Qui es-tu?’ at La Chapelle de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, from 10 September to 23 November. Ever ambitious, this portentous-sounding exhibition is the second part of a trilogy that began with ‘Artempo: When Time becomes Art’ in Venice last year and will conclude there next year with ‘l’Infinito del Non Finito’. Attempting to answer – or at least explore – this question is an impressive group of international contemporary artists, among them Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cragg, Cai Guo Qiang, Thomas Houseago, Anish Kapoor and Luc Tuymans.

London dealer Sam Fogg offers this exceptional and rather regal alabaster Virgin and Child set on an elaborately carved traceried throne. Both figures sit upright and dignified, and the Christ Child appears to be giving his mother a loaf of bread. There has been nothing like this piece of Spanish sculpture on the market in years. It is attributed to Gil de Siloé, who worked for Isabella de Castile in Burgos in the last quarter of the 15th century – indeed, the figure of the Virgin even resembles Isabella. The Virgin’s long arms and the deep folds in her robes are typical of the master’s work, and the group has been compared to the figures of the Virtues and Vices carved around the tomb of Isabella’s parents, Juan II de Castile and Isabella of Portugal, in the charterhouse of Miraflores near Burgos.

For more information on the Biennale des Antiquaires, visit www.bdafrance.eu

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