Fri 10th Nov, 2006, On the cusp, Dali, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Bernard

Impressionist? No, just a parrot

Christophe Petyt is a likely customer for Dafen, that art-copying colony in China.

He’s been collecting fake paintings for ages and his L’Art du Faux Collection, established in 1992, is in the Guinness records book as the world’s biggest.

He doesn’t seem embarrassed in the least. His new website, complete with enormous photographs of him, suggesting a tendency to narcissim (though he does hold charity auctions), boasts of more than 2,500 paintings “of the most prestigious artists”, though Guinness credits him with 3,500.

The latter number, Christophe’s site seems to say, applies to his L’Art du Faux Foundation, the output of 82 artists around the world – “only the best artists can become members”. See the rest.

Thu 2nd Mar, 2006, Picasso, Cezanne, Rodin, Renoir, Braque, Pissarro, Bernard

2006: The Year of Cézanne, part 2

25: Melun
From May 1879 through February 1880 Cézanne alternated his life and work between Paris and Melun. It was before nature, Nicolas Pioch writes, that Cézanne was seized by a sense of the mystery of the world to a depth never expressed by another artist. He saw that nothing exists in isolation: an obvious insight, yet one that only he could make us see. Things have colour and they have weight, and the colour and mass of each affects the weight of the other. It was to understand these rules that Cézanne dedicated his life. See the rest.