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“... theft, or a transformation into something new? The question was posed by Borges in his story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939), whose protagonist sets out to write – rather than merely copy – a few chapters of Don Quixote, with his text corresponding to the original word for word. An identical passage – banal and trite when written by ...”

“... living painter in the world’.A conversation of January 1950, reported by Staël’s friend Pierre Lecuire, does something to attenuate, or at least to account for, the seemingly paradoxical character of Staël’s commitment to abstraction. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a glue-pot and an ashtray, ‘here are objects, and this is just what I don’t ...”

“... of the past had yet to be thoroughly purged of its ambiguities: the Nation. This task fell to Pierre Nora. In his editorial on the tenth anniversary of Le Débat in 1990, Nora had hailed the ‘new cultural landscape’ of the country, and within another couple of years, he completed his own monumental contribution to it. Originating in a seminar at the ...”

“... Saillans show how the gilets jaunes’ demands for direct democracy might be put into practice? As Pierre Bafoil wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche on 1 January, ‘The gilets jaunes dream about it. Saillans did it.’ Since their election, Saillans’s 15 councillors have tried to encourage transparency. Instead of delegating responsibility hierarchically, they ...”

“... almost comically, in Cover Girl (1966). A photograph from the Observer magazine of a model in Pierre Cardin dress and Vidal Sassoon hairdo is transformed into a dead-eyed totem beneath a silkscreen of Bowling’s Variety Store. Origin and endpoint – Bowling’s childhood home and his new city – are juxtaposed but also flattened; their mutual distance ...”

“... special exhibitions is closed at the moment while Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908-22 and Pierre Huyghe: Celebration Park are being installed) you get good views down into the Turbine Hall and out to St Paul’s Cathedral and the City. The success of Tate Modern as a viewing platform, like that of the Pompidou Centre, has never been questioned. But in ...”

“... during his experiments in iPad art, he was beaming new pictures of flowers daily to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, where they reappeared on the screens of iPads in a show called Fleurs Fraîches. That was a proper ...”

“... 1780s that fill the first room are notes made on the spot. There are no concessions to high style: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s Cow-shed and Houses on the Palatine Hill is composed as stolidly as a picture postcard; Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples is as uncompromisingly frontal as a surveyor’s photograph for an insurance claim: all you see is a wall, a ...”

“... comparison of limited significance) resemble those of Tachiste contemporaries. Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages were both painters whose work she could have seen exhibited in Scotland. More to the point are the abstracted landscapes of Nicolas de Staël and Soutine’s crumpled, wavy transformations of Céret (he was another painter with a single landscape ...”

“... We are shown a photo from a 1961 Paris Match of Jeanne Moreau baring her teeth at Pierre Cardin in a starry sort of way: an image that never made it into the painting repertoire, though two curly brushstrokes besmirch the actress’s hair like livid topknots. It could be supposed that this was an idle brush wipe, or it could be interpreted as ...”

“... upon a Time in the Resistance, for instance, or David Lean’s Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Shadows of the Army. The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as it happens) on the soundtrack, and the words ‘Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France’. Not Occupied France, you notice, or even ...”

“... to end the monarchy. The Simon brothers belonged to a family of five children; their parents, Pierre Simon and Ann Germain, were Huguenots, whose own families had escaped to Guernsey to avoid either the Inquisition in the Spanish Netherlands or persecution in France. The family attended what was known colloquially as the ‘French Church’ on ...”

“... female bodies, a series of built-in drawers where breasts, belly and vagina should be. The critic Pierre Restany referred to Nicola L.’s sculptures as ‘object lessons’. The body, we’re meant to understand, is a receptacle into which things can be stuffed, and from which things can be taken away. These sculptures resemble giant bobbin dolls, as if ...”

“... and even greater is the danger of narrative monotony. The latest writer to tell the story is Pierre Berton in The Arctic Grail. Berton accepts the challenge with a boldness worthy of a Robert M’Clure or a James Clark Ross. Not only does he tell the story of the Franklin Expedition and the search for it, he tells the story of all Arctic exploration in ...”

“... modest and not, as they usually are, possessive. The most modest of all Borges’s storytellers is Pierre Menard, ‘the author of Don Quijote’, who after great labours produces two and a bit chapters of a text which already exists. Not the same text at all, urges Borges, because Menard’s verbatim feat was achieved nearly three centuries after Cervantes ...”