Pocket Utopia
191 Henry Street, between Clinton and Jefferson
East Village / Lower East Side
April 29 - May 25, 2012
Reception: Sunday, April 29, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Pocket Utopia’s reopening show, a one-evening exhibition of Donald Steele’s photographs under the title The Queen and I, is followed by the gallery’s first exhibition proper, one that might also have been called The King and Others. Spanning more than three centuries of French printmaking, it assembles portraits of subjects as diverse as François I, the French king and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, and Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” as a shy six-year-old boy, to a whole parade of painters, sculptors, and engravers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Once celebrated, some of them working in the service of the French court, all but a few of these characters have since been forgotten. But not, of course, Charles Baudelaire, the poet of la vie moderne, seen here in two etchings by Marcel Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon from around 1918.