Michel Nuridsdany

The Speaker

Michel Nuridsany, who was decorated in France’s national merit system as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, has been working in the fields of visual arts, cinema and literature since 1962. From 1980 to 2000, he helped promote and organize more than twenty expositions worldwide, including biennial festivals in Paris (1980), Sao-Paolo (1985), Cairo and Alexandria (2001), Egypt. He was also director of the Festival of Arles in 1995. He serves as contemporary art critic and book reviewer for Figaro Magazine, where he worked alongside Bernard Pivot, from 1971 to 2002.

From 1984 to 1991, Michel Nuridsany was also an editor with the French publishing giant, Flammarion, with the National Press and with the publisher Citerion.  He has authored many books on art and photography, including most recently, L’Art Contemporain Chinois [Contemporary Chinese Art], published in 2004 by Flammarion. In 2006 and also from Flammarion, he published Cent chefs-d’oeuvres de la peinture [One Hundred Chefs-d’oeuvres] and in 2008, he released “Pietà”, Le dernier tableau de Titien [“Pietà”, Titian’s Last Painting]with French publisher Huitième Jour.

He has also written biographies on Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalì, both published by Flammarion and is finishing up another biography on Caravaggio, which is scheduled to be released in 2009. He is a frequent guest on radio programs, such as France Culture, and writes for various French magazines covering the visual arts, including ArtPress, Beaux-Arts magazine and Connaissance des Arts.

He is also a talented filmmaker. From 1997 to 2000, he made several short films on artists such as Christian Boltanski, Sarkis, Bertrand Lavier, Pierre Klossowski, Annette Messager, Paul-Armand Gette and Jean Le Gac. He also helped write the screenplay for the 1975 female vampire film, Leonor, directed by Juan Luis Buñel and starring Michel Piccoli and Liv Ullmann.

Lectures

Warhol: His Artistic Role of Passing between Two Worlds
In the aftermath of World War II, artistic exchanges between European and American surrealists were never greater and or more equally balanced. Rauschenberg learned to paint at the famed art school La Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. Ellsworth Kelly showed his work at Maeght, a Parisian gallery devoted to contemporary art. But no artist illustrates the artistic ties and exchanges established between New York and Paris better than Andy Warhol. Strongly influenced by Europe in the sixties, Andy Warhol himself later became a reference point and a source of inspiration for European artists in the eighties, including Gilbert and George in England and Boltanski, Parreno and Fabrice Hybert in France.

While it is widely acknowledged that Hollywood movies played a role in Warhol’s work, it would be a mistake not to also highlight the influence that Duchamp and Dali had on him, both of whom he knew well and metwith often. Duchamp’s dandyism and Dali’s silent distance both went into creating the Warhol we have come to recognize and were a central and integral component of his work.

Looking at Ten World Masterpieces
As an extension of his book on Cent chef-d’oeuvres de la peinture [one hundred masterpieces of world art] and as a way of introducing art to the uninitiated, Michel Nuridsany offers to help understand the uniqueness of each of the masters presented and have a better understanding of what is going on in each piece. It has been said that in his book, Michel Nuridsany “brings to light not only the history of art in the Western world, but is open to the larger world, to the immense world of Chinese art, including calligraphy, which is at once writing, poetry, and painting. This stance accompanies a broadening of horizons, of how we see painting, and is in sync with the globalization that governs our lives. Here we have, in a hundred masterworks, an imaginary museum that was conceived out of what lay in clear view and was brought to the light of day, a rediscovery of patrimony, an opening to the world.”

1. Fayoum (Egypt): The European (117-138)
2. Fan Kuan (China): Travelling trough torus and mountains (1000)
3. Giotto (Italy): The kiss of Judas (1305)
4. Jan van Eyck (the Netherlands): The Arnolfies (1434)
5. Leonard de Vinci (Italy) Mona Lisa (1503)
6 Caravage (Italy) : Saint Mattew’s martyrdom (1600)
7. Vélasquez (Spain): Les Ménines (1656)
8. Watteau (France): The two cousins (1716)
9. Monet (France): Impression, rising sun (1872)
10. Picasso (France/Spain): Young ladies of Avignon (1907)

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