Art et Marges Musée; Outsider art in Brussels

We discovered this little museum on a trip to Brussels back in April. Housed in a rather nondescript unit in a row of shops, with its entrance at street level in a brick and concrete slab block, it's easy to overlook. The museum is dedicated to "outsider art": work created by untrained artists outside the mainstream, often with social problems, learning difficulties or psychiatric problems. 

During our visit, there was a joint exhibition by Guy Brunet and Josselin Pietri, both self-taught artists and cinema enthusiasts.

Guy Brunet (b 1945, Viviez-Aveyron, France) is the son of cinema operators. After doing a variety of jobs, and becoming unemployed in the 1980s, he decided to become a one-man filmmaker. He produces his own handcrafted films, writing his own screenplays, and using cardboard cutout characters and sets constructed from cardboard. 

Josselin Pietri (b 1973, Parilly, near Lyon, France) creates sculptures and pictures, also using cardboard and also inspired by the movies.

It was an amazing display. The artworks were beautiful and wonderful creations, made from the most commonplace of materials. The exhibits perfectly captured the spirit of the movies. Many of them had lots of charming details, and all were very inventive.

The first floor gallery showed works by other artists. I'm ashamed to say I failed to record the names of many of them, but it was a marvellous and varied display, of which this is a selection.

I was particularly taken by these guns and rockets by André Robillard (b 1931):

When you visit the museum (which you must), look in on the nearby Cité Hellemans, a beautiful art nouveau-influenced social housing complex built in the early 20th century. Also close to the museum are the eclectic furniture and antique shops on Rue Haute and Rue Blaes.

Art et Marges Musée

Rue Haute, 314

1000 Brussels

http://artetmarges.be/en/musee.html

Cadorin exhibition at the Fortuny Museum

Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949) was born in Spain but settled in Venice, and is best known as a designer of beautiful textiles. He was also a stage and lighting designer, painter and a designer of interiors. His house and studio in Venice was given to the city by his widow in 1956, and is now a museum. It is used for temporary exhibitions during which works by other artists are displayed alongside Fortuny's own work, fabrics, and other objects he owned and produced.

This must be one of the most beautiful interiors in Venice. It is also a nice place to be reminded that artistic production continued in Venice after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797.

The museum is only open for temporary exhibitions. We visited it during an exhibition dedicated to the Cadorin family, which was marvellous, as are all the exhibitions held at the Fortuny.

For more details, see the Fortuny Palace website.

Here are pictures taken during our visit, presented without any further comment.

Palazzo Fortuny

Campo S. Beneto, 3780, 30126 San Marco, Venezia VE, Italy

http://fortuny.visitmuve.it/en/home/

Venice, the festa of the Salute, and the Palazzo Mocenigo

A post from abroad. 

We're just over half way through our week in Venice, and it's been very enjoyable so far. At this time of the year, compared to the warmer months, there are much fewer people. And no mosquitos, which is a great relief. It's now final week of the biennale, and on Saturday it's the festival of the Salute, marking the end of the great plague of 1630 - 1631. A pontoon bridge has been constructed across the grand canal to the eponymous church at its entrance. On Saturday, people will walk across it to the church, and there will be stalls and fireworks. The traditional dish for this festival is castradina, or salted lamb, boiled and served with savoy cabbage. I haven't seen it on any menus so far, but I made it on a previous trip in our rented apartment and rather liked it. This time round I don't think I'll go to the bother of cooking it myself, but I'm still on the lookout for a restaurant that will serve it.

Earlier during the trip, we visited the Palazzo Mocenigo. This is a house dating back to the gothic period but extensively rebuilt during the early 17th century. The last surviving member of the illustrious Mocenigo family donated it to the city in 1945, and today it is a museum and study centre for the history of fabrics and costumes. The museum with its architecture, furnishings, paintings, and other objects evokes the life of the Venetian nobility during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as displaying the clothing of the period.

There is also a section on perfumes with a display of the raw ingredients that you can sniff, and a lovely collection of perfume bottles. For those who are interested, they also conduct perfume making workshops.

18th century Venice is the era depicted in the views of Canaletto and Guardi, and in the genre paintings of Longhi. This is sometimes thought of as a decadent age, when the thousand year old republic went into decline and became the playground of wealthy tourists and pleasure-seekers. The truth is of course always more nuanced, and during this period the arts continued to flourish, while life in the city remained relatively prosperous and comfortable by the standards of the time.

The Palazzo Mocenigo museum is well worth a visit for anyone interested in this period. Smaller and more intimate than the other better known museum of the 18th century, the grand Ca Rezzonico, and giving an insight into the more modest life of the very rich, as opposed to the stupendously wealthy.

The day after, we visited the Fortuny museum, a stunningly beautiful place, but that's for another blog post.