The Paris summer exhibition of the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923 - 2004) features more than 200 photographs, demonstrating the scope of Avedon's production, from the glamorous world of fashion through the more psychologial portraits to reportage-oriented shots.

In the 1960s, Avedon also ventured into photojournalism, covering such hot subjects as Civil Rights campaigners in the American South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, patients in a mental hospital and the Vietnam war — both in the country itself, where he photographed military officers and napalm victims, and back home, where, a pacifist himself, he covered the hippie protests against the war.

In 1974 Avedon exhibited a series of his father, then dying of cancer, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this decade he continued his fashion photography and reportage, and also produced a series of 73 portraits of America's political elite for Rolling Stone.

The early 1980s saw Avedon produce a long series of 700 portraits of middle class and poor Americans from the 17 western states. As if to refute the myth of the American West, these portraits, all taken outdoors against a white ground, show closed, tense and introverted faces with an intense but subjacent emotional power. At the end of the decade, a commission from the French magazine Égoïste gave Avedon the chance to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The show includes portraits of Truman Capote, Charles Chaplin, Henry Kissinger, Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, The Beatles, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Twiggi, Dovima with Elephants and many more.

Jeu de Paume
1 Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris

This exhibition gathers together more than 250 works of Polynesian art from the 18th and 19th centuries, from the collections of the great European museums but which are rarely exhibited: astonishing divine images, ivory ornaments, war bonnets, decorated textiles… The exhibition therefore explores the Pacific Islands at the time of their first contact with European travellers, missionaries and colonists.

In Polynesia valuable objects were made and exchanged with the goal of establishing and maintaining important relationships – between family groups, between chiefs, and between mankind and the gods. 

Between 1760 and 1860, Polynesia’s cultural landscape fundamentally changed.  Before 1760, there was regular contact between the Polynesian people on different islands.  They ignored Europe, metal, firearms and Western religion.  With the arrival of the first boats from the West, most of the Polynesian Islands built a colonial, or pre-colonial, relationship with the European powers.  In less than a century the majority of the Polynesian people had suffered various epidemics and had been converted to one of the competing forms of Christianity.  However, paradoxically, strong Polynesian cultural identities survived and further developed. 

Art and Divinity in Polynesia concentrates on this turbulent period, from 1760 to 1860: a period of contact with European navy officers, crew members, traders, whalers, missionaries, travellers, colonists, administrators and artists.

Musée du quai Branly
37, quai Branly
75007 Paris

Directed by Robert Carsen with choreography by Jean-Claude Gallotta, this production of French baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully's Armide at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in October is sure to be a hot ticket.

Set in a prologue and five acts, Armide, from 1686, is regarded as one of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s greatest masterpieces. The libretto by Philippe Quinault is based on the Renaissance poem Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso. This lyric tragedy tells the story of a sorceress’the warrior princess Armide ’ torn between hatred and attraction for the Christian knight Renaud. The music is elegant yet passionate and, at its most dramatic, portrays the full range of Armide’s emotions’from hostility to tenderness, from sensuousness to despair. From declamatory recitatives to elegant "airs à la française," the music is an opera lover’s delight. Baroque dance plays an important role in the drama too, whether poetic, dramatic, or, finally, in the Grande Passacaille that concludes Act V, profoundly majestic. Armide was first produced on the stage of the Académie Royale in Paris in 1686.

Jean-Baptiste Lully: Armide

William Christie, conductor
Robert Carsen, director

Jean-Claude Gallotta, choreography
Gideon Davey, sets and constumes
Robert Carsen et Peter Van Praet, lighting

Cast:
Claire Debono: La Gloire, Phénice, Lucinde
Isabelle Druet: La Sagesse, Sidonie, Mélisse
Stéphanie d’Oustrac: Armide
Nathan Berg: Hidraot
Paul Agnew: Renaud
Marc Mauillon: Ubalde, Aronte
Marc Callahan: Artémidore
Andrew Tortise: Le Chevalier Danois
Laurent Naouri: La Haine
Anders J. Dahlin: Un amant fortuné

Choeur et Orchestre Les Arts Florissants

The vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants is one of the most renowned and respected early music groups in Europe and around the world. Dedicated to the performance of Baroque music on original instruments, the ensemble was founded in 1979 by the American, William Christie, and takes its name from a short opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Les Arts Florissants have been largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in France in 17th-century French repertoire as well as in European music of the 17th and 18th centuries more generally. This was repertoire which had, for the most part, been neglected but which is now widely performed and admired.

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The Highlanders
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