If you have never heard of the French artist Fernand Pelez (1848-1913) you are not the first. His work on display until January 17, 2010, at the Petit Palais in Paris is a retrospective of his beginnings as a traditional, academic artist to his bold later works that resemble photography.

In conjunction with this exhibit, a free concert “Concert Paris 1900” will be held Tuesday, December 22 at 3 p.m. in the auditorium. Three musicians from the Orchestre National de France are performing a variety show from cabaret to opera. Reservations are unnecessary, but only 182 seats are available.

A major exhibition at the Grand Palais through January 4 displays Renoir’s later work and demonstrates his influence on Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard and other early modernists. In 2010 the show travels to Los Angeles and Philadelphia, offering viewers an extraordinary opportunity to better understand the artist poet Apollinaire called “the greatest living painter.”

From November 6, 2009, through March 7, 2010, the Jewish Museum of Art and History in Paris features an exhibition about a prominent and relatively little-known Jewish family who could have figured in Marcel Proust’s great opus In Search of Lost Time.

For a few years so long ago that I thought purple bell bottoms were dress pants, I lived with a woman and her two young children in Vermont. The girl had a facility with stories --- they tumbled out of her. The boy liked to draw --- oh, how he could draw,

Often in my frustrated moments—more and more frequent as the years pass—I tend to refer to France by my pet name for it: “Talk-a-lot.” I know of no other nation whose citizens can spend so much time, energy and often anger debating how many angels on the head of a pin.
 

I’ve been walking around for days now telling all my friends and associates that I actually know people who exhibited their art work in the Carrousel of the Louvre. The thing about it? It’s true. Last Sunday, October 15, in conjunction with Expatica, the IVY Artists group, which is sponsored by Bonapart Consulting, did indeed take over a part of what is arguably the world’s most famous museum. I crawled out of bed that day, pushed through the guide-book carrying tourists and ventured over there with my son.

In 1962 photographer Bert Stern was on a plane, from Rome to New York, having photographed Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra. “I was feeling very chipper. “Follow that Stern, I said to myself, who can I do next?”  Stern’s fantasy was Marilyn Monroe who he pitched to Vogue as soon as he got back to New York.

In case you haven’t noticed—and it would be hard not to notice in France at the moment—this year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of France’s famed nature painter Paul Cèzanne who came haltingly to the fore in the era of impressionism but became, in his latter years, one of the forerunners of cubism..