Exhibitions

Les Bijoux de Dieter Roth
Until May 11
Dieter Roth earned international renown for his innovation as a painter, sculptor, musician, and director. The Swiss artist transferred his radical sensibility to jewellery making in collaboration with the Icelandic goldsmith, Hans Langenbacher. This exhibition showcases a selection of the designer’s most striking pieces from the 1960s and 1970s. €6.50-8.
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 107, rue de Rivoli, Paris 1. Mº Palais Royal. 01 44 57 50. www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr

Pierre Paulin, “Le Design au Pouvoir”
Until July 27
The recently reopened Galerie des Gobelins pays homage to Pierre Paulin, the renowned contemporary French designer. Furniture buffs will instantly recognize iconic pieces selected from past collections, such as the 1965 Ribbon chair, and relish the chance to view his most recent work. €4-6.

L’Âge d’or du romantisme allemand
Until June 15
The era of Goethe (1749-1832) saw an immense development of skill in drawing, which came to dominate the practice of fine arts in Germanic countries. This show presents the fruits of this extraordinary flowering with an ensemble of sketches and watercolours by some 60 artists, including prominent figures like C. D. Friedrich, P. O. Runge, and J. G. von Dillis. €5.50-7.
Musée de la vie romantique, hôtel Scheffer-Renan, 16, rue Chaptal, Paris 9. Mº Blanche. 01 55 31 95 67. www.vie-romantique.paris.fr

Louise Bourgeois Retrospective
Until June 2
The exhibition examines how the French artist, now living in New York, developed her distinctive visual language. On display are around 100 works dating from 1940 to 2005, including drawings of her well-known impressive metal sculptures. €8-10.

Most people know Patti Smith as the ultimate “rock chick.” But her artistic production is not limited to music. Mixing photographs, drawings, and films with personal objects, an intimate exhibition at the Fondation Cartier at the end of March reveals the multidisciplinary dimension of Smith’s 40-year-long career.

Among the exhibits are Smith’s early 1967 photographs used in collages and later ones, taken from 1995 with an old Land 250 Polaroid camera, which captured her travels and various objects linked to other artists: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter…

La matière de l'étrange, Jean Carriès (1855-1894)
Until January 27
Jean Carriès died at the age of 39 full of the fierce energy and strange imaginings that informed his blurring of sculpture and objets d’art. The Petit Palais has assembled around 200 of the artist’s most important pieces, from grotesque busts to odd hybrid animals, to his later Japanese-influenced work in sandstone. €4.50-9.
Petit Palais, avenue Winston Churchill, Paris 8. Mº Champs Élysées-Clemenceau. 01 53 43 40 00. www.paris.fr

Lee Bul, “On Every New Shadow”
Until January 27

Love, Sex, and Wars

At the Musée de l’Armée, a fascinating exhibition investigates love and sex during the two world wars. Official posters, photographs, press, and film archives, mixed with private letters and diaries, give a rare insight into the effect of conflict on relationships between men and women. Over 480 documents are shown—a photograph of Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, a German propaganda puzzle depicting a pretty English blond girl looking at a mirror and seeing an ugly brunette with a crooked nose, a delicate statue of a French soldier and a woman hugging each other. From sexual violence to intimate encounters, propaganda and reality, the exhibition, supervised by three research professors, covers the complexity of the topic with tact and cleverness.

“Amours, Guerres et Sexualité, 1914-1945.” Until December 31. €4-6

Warm up this winter: Go to Hell. In December, the public (those over 18, that is) is invited to penetrate the dark and steamy world of printed desire. For the first time, the Bibliothèque nationale will display its infamous and mysterious collection known as l’Enfer, or Hell, its section that contains blacklisted printed materials. Revealed in “L’enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au secret,” are over 350 pieces, from famous works by the Marquis de Sade to scabrous anonymous pamphlets, from orgiastic engravings to pornographic photographs…

Forget about paying vast sums for bottled water: A survey conducted by the City of Paris in 2006 reveals that a majority of Parisians think water straight from the tap is just fine. In fact more than half of Parisians drink this water and 81 percent of these everyday users are satisfied with its quality, pressure, clarity, and freshness.

Such tidbits of knowledge are revealed at the Pavillon de l’eau, a new exhibition space that opened last June and is dedicated to water—Parisian and worldwide. Data-thirsty visitors can get information about the city’s water treatment and sources, about the vast delivery system that carries drinkable water to homes, businesses, and industries, about their bill… They can also access information about the preservation of this natural resource, which is becoming the socio-political issue of the future.

A naked woman lies supine in languid repose, her white body defined against a velvety black background. But this contrast of colour is the only trace of violence in La Femme au divan noir (1869) – if the figure’s pallid skin and complete stillness render her corpse-like, this is death refined to an incorruptible perfection; beauty raised to a metaphysical ideal. The latest exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Face à l’impressionnisme: Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905), is full of such stock Romantic images. Whilst the Impressionists were shocking the academy with technical innovations, Henner retreated into the past, inspired by the masters he studied during his stay at the Villa Medici after winning the Prix de Rome in 1858. However, the painter’s outmoded sensibility is saved from mawskishness by the beauty of its execution.