Palette Productions

A fast-paced documentary about a second generation of punk rockers living in Toronto. It offers insight into this segment of culture by videotaping in the streets, bars, and homes of punks. Conversations are intercut with the music of the punk bands at the core of the scene.

Using a funerary portrait from the Fayum preserved at the Louvre Museum, this documentary explores the art of portrait painting in Roman Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. These strikingly realistic faces, painted on wooden panels and placed on mummies, reveal a multicultural society shaped by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions. Through this single portrait, the film reflects on identity, memory, and the human relationship to death.

An image that appears ordinary, with a highly explicit subject, can carry troubling undertones. Is it not most strange that this painting may have been created during a religious scene? This final variation on the opposition between sacred love and profane love brings several centuries of religious painting to a close and opens a new era: eroticism is no longer the domain of ancient gods but is shared here and now, in the most everyday setting. With Fragonard, the bedroom and the bed become the most fantastical settings, where accessories—lingerie, cushions, drapery—reshape, on the margins of the action, the folds and recesses of a new, metaphorical geography of love.

The Crucifixion is a rather surprising painting of Picasso's. The painter has in fact very rarely painted religious subjects. And, in the place of a convertional representation of Calvary it shows very strange figures. The sacrifice becomes a sort of initiation ceremony or one of exorcism. Picasso uses, for him, unusual colours, reds, yellows, raw greens which combine in mingled shapes with violent contrasts of colours. Once again the graphic palette and special effects used in the film help to interpret the painting. The work is made up like a puzzle full of allusions and references to the profound personal crisis Picasso was living through at the time. His private and intimate life is joined to the universal drama.

The description of the Greek world that Homer gave in the 8th century B.C. was long considered as a purely mythological account. However, in the 19th century, Schliemann's archeological finds at Mycenae and Troy changed the picture : it seems that the places described by Homer really did exist. In the early 20th century, Victor Bérard (educated at École normale supérieure, member of the French school of Athens and translater of the Odyssey) undertook to travel round the Mediterranean with the Genevan photographer Boissonnas. His aim : to show that the literary countries of the cyclopes, Aeolus, Circe, Charybdis and Scylla have a geographical reality. His hypothesis : the epic poem about Ulysses must be a sort of "manual" of information for settlers who emigrated to the East in vast numbers at the time of Homer. An invitation to travel? Jean Baronnet could not resist and put his film into the double wake : of Ulysses and of Victor Bérard...

One of the Louvre’s star paintings, with a dizzying composition. August 1794: David is 46 years old and in prison. Compromised by his association with Robespierre and his allies, he risks the guillotine. He reads the classical authors, and an episode from the founding of Rome inspires the idea for a painting. Once released, he regains his studio, his students, and his former fame. The painting would not be completed until 1799. Shown as part of a paid exhibition—the first attempt of its kind in France—the canvas attracted a considerable crowd. The scene depicts the moment when the Sabine women, who had become the wives of the Romans after being abducted, intervene between Romans and Sabines and bring an end to the war between the two peoples. In this work, David incorporates not only his passion for ancient Rome, but also a strong element of political allegory.

Blue period, blue traces, blue sponges... Yves Klein deserved his nickname of "Yves the monochrome". Even though he used many other colours, it is the colour of the sky that he chose above all, used over and over again and that he made into not just a mode of expression but a sort of spiritual energy. Klein had the idea of using directly the naked bodies of his models as "living paintbrushes", inventing by his strange sessions, between ritual and striptease, a whole catalogue of new forms. At the same time, intuitively, almost naively, he went through both the history of legendary pictures, the history of the peculiarities of nature and the noble history of nudes in painting. The Anthropométries are both a meditation on imprint, trace, disappearance and coloured variations on the theme of incarnation.

Stefano Di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta from the 18th century onward, painted this polyptych in Siena between 1437 and 1444 before delivering it, in accordance with his contract, to the Franciscan convent of San Sepolcro near Arezzo. The altarpiece was dismantled starting in 1578, and its various fragments were sold and dispersed. Twenty-six fragments are now scattered across ten museums in London, Berlin, Moscow, and New York… The Louvre Museum holds three of the five panels that made up the main face, as well as two small panels from the predella. Each of these fragments contains numerous clues that make it possible to reconstruct the history of the polyptych and sometimes even to determine their original placement within the whole. Graphic tools and video techniques allow the puzzle to be reassembled and different hypotheses of reconstruction to be presented—hypotheses on which specialists themselves remain divided.

A plunge into the strange and fascinating world of Francis Bacon, whose painting struggles to exorcise violence and death. The anguished and very intimate universe of one of the greatest 20th century painters reveals multiple allusions to classical painting.

On the right, a very dark tree clings to the slope of a hill. At the center stands Saint Anne. She wears her hair in braids, her eyes lowered, smiling. Seated on her knees is the Virgin Mary, dressed in a low-cut, billowing pink gown. She leans toward the Child Jesus, a two- or three-year-old baby. Naked and very curly-haired, he is stepping over a rearing lamb. Behind them, the landscape reveals mountain peaks and glaciers from which roaring waters emerge. Anne seems to envelop Mary; Mary wraps her arms around Jesus, yet he escapes from his mother’s embrace, as if symbolizing a new birth. Painted between 1500 and 1515, The Virgin, the Child Jesus, and Saint Anne accompanied Leonardo da Vinci when he settled in Amboise in 1517 at the invitation of Francis I. The painting never returned to Italy and entered the Louvre in 1801.

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

Three cards in hand, gold on the table—we are in the middle of a game of prime, a precursor to poker. Eight gold coins lie before the female player, about a dozen before the young man: the stakes are very high. This painting depicts three card players and a servant; their mouths are closed, their gestures and gazes suspended. The cheat looks directly at the viewer, an ace of diamonds hidden in his belt—his face alone is fully illuminated. His diamond cards suggest money and sexual commerce, while those of his opponent, spades, evoke misfortune and a struggle against fate. In La Tour’s time, several edicts were issued against dice cheats and swindlers. This painting, like The Fortune Teller, illustrates a saying common at the time: “Love, wine, and gambling have ruined more than one man.”

From his very first paintings, Rembrandt stages himself. Thereafter, at least a hundred times, he would take his own face as the sole subject of an engraving, drawing, or painting. Such persistence, unique in the history of art, has been interpreted in many different ways. Some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits might appear to express an extravagant man. Yet the objects depicted in them can often be deciphered in quite another way. Through canvases and panels, one can indeed follow the entire history of Rembrandt’s face, but also read the full symbolism of a humanist Europe undergoing profound transformation.

In 1630, Rubens who is settled in Anvers marries in a second marriage Hélène Fourment. In the huge studio he has had built, he paints several portraits of Hélène, in the garden, in furs, in a carriage, which are minutely analysed in this film. For he does not content himself with making a simple portrait but tries to portray she whom her admirers had compared to Homer's Helen and to transcribe in allegoried form, all the attributes of the femininity.

Dedicated to one of the major paintings by Auguste Renoir, created in 1876, this documentary combines a meticulous analysis of the artwork with engravings and photographs showing the true “face” of Montmartre Hill at the end of the 19th century.

Scandal at the 1865 Salon. Édouard Manet shows a pale, naked girl lying indifferently on a divan. "What is this odalisque with a yellow belly, an ignoble model picked up God knows where, who represents Olympia? The crowd gathers as if at the morgue before M. Manet's overripe Olympia..." She is Victorine Meurent, one of the painter's favorite models. She posed for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, for Woman with a Parrot, just as she would pose ten years later for The Railway. A peaceful body, yet a free and independent woman. The painting is a kind of homage to the traditional studio model who has haunted the desires of painters since the Renaissance. It is also a modernist provocation. The references, the mythological and classical allusions, are put to the service of a contemporary scene made all the more scandalous for its unmistakable evocation of the brothel.

Composed in Nice, at the Hôtel Régina where the painter had been living since 1949, The Sadness of the King, a 1952 painting nearly four meters by three, is one of the last great works of Matisse. It was created using the cut-paper technique: the painter, immobilized by illness, cuts shapes from sheets of paper previously coated with gouache. He directs an assistant who pins them and moves them on the wall until the desired balance is achieved. Scissors, handled with dexterity, thus henceforth replace pencils and brushes. The pure tones used in the composition eliminate all shading and allow the painter to play solely on the relationships between colors and, above all, on contrasts: black and white (considered by Matisse as colors in their own right), red and blue, green and yellow...

A square format market by the rhythms of its many obliques (the frame of the glass window, the guardrail in the foreground) and its brilliant colours (ultramarine, emerald, orange, pink and the bright yellow of the mimosa), L'Atelier is one of Bonnard's last great paintings. It is also one of his masterpieces, magnificient and enigmatic, meriting in itself a detailed analysis.

A hanging composed of the six most famous tapestries in the world. These pictures, reproduced everywhere and in all possible forms, have become the emblems of a certain form of romantic art of the late Middle Ages. Beautiful ladies, fabulous animals, abundant flowers, sparkling colours, everything in these tapestries brings pleasure to the eyes. But once the first marvelling is past, the visitor asks questions. What are these blasons that are so obstinately repeated ? What scenes exactly are these hieratic ladies playing ? Why is there each time a lion and a unicorn ? What do these trees, flowers, various animals scattered all over the surface mean ? And who had these splendours woven ? And for what use? Which artist designed the models ? Questions burst out everywhere. Several of them have surprising answers.

It was a French prelate who commissioned the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of Saint Louis of the French in Rome, dedicated to his patron saint, Matthew. But he died long before he could know that the result would be three paintings, executed with astonishing speed around 1600 by a young Lombard painter known as Caravaggio, who was thereby creating his first religious cycle. The faithful enter between two large canvases facing one another: The Calling and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. On the high altar is a third, smaller work: Saint Matthew and the Angel. Three episodes intended to edify the Catholic conscience of the French pilgrim and to inspire emulation through the power of the image, in accordance with the principles of the Counter-Reformation during this era of religious wars.