All Photos by Frank Browning

Renzo Piano, notwithstanding his Pritzker Prize, seems a gentle man as his name might suggest. He speaks in a soft voice and listens carefully to the questions posed to him. It was especially so at the inauguration...

Here's the problem: Whadya do when you own the most elegant department store in the world, which happens also to be the second biggest tourist draw in Paris, and you're stuck with a non-descript 19th century building...

Every year for the last seventeen, France's grand Chateau Chaumont celebrates several of the world's most creative gardeners and landscape designers with a monumental garden festival that aims to blend contemporary art with flowers, shrubs, herbs and sculpture--all engaged on a single...

Think of San Francisco in 1963, but replace the steep hills and the chilling fog with bright sun, a winding river and an ancient barge canal. That is Toulouse, possibly the friendliest town in southern France and the host to one of the country's most interesting and wide-ranging international art...

War Art Peace: II

People have written recently that the standoff between Vladimir Putin and Barrack Obama over Ukraine has placed the world in greater danger of nuclear war than at any moment...

War is in the air again.

Be it in Ukraine, surrounded by the second largest stash of nuclear weapons on earth outside the U.S., or among the legions of child soldiers in Somalia, Congo and Sudan, or with bad luck, back on the...

When darkness fades in the North, those of us in the Middle Zones frequently twist our heads upward towards the 60th parallel: the ski slopes are still crisp and powdery while crocuses have popped up and the spring cod rush is...

Photo (c) Jean Pigozzi/Centre Pompidou-Metz

Was it rape?

Or was it art? And when?

A strange and strangely provocative spring exhibit on the century long history of Star Photography and photographers -- or Paparazzi as Frederico Fellinni named them --...

Outside it was raining, but down deep in the crypt it was merely chilly. The slightly fey, round-spectacled chief of historic monuments, and the kindly young hipster "artist" in shades and a plastic hat explained to the mostly docile klatch...

Travel agencies are cranking up for the summer season, and Paris as always is high on visitors' lists. The usual stuff will always be here: domes, towers, bridges, palaces. But those who dare to dance with their...

Bombshell by James Reich, Softskull 2013; I, Judas by James Reich, Softskull 2011

Though I made my first visit to San Francisco's Tenderloin District about the same time that Valerie Solanas was drafting her famous uber-feminist SCUM Manifesto, we never crossed...

Why shouldn't Imperial Lions play like kittens as they make mischief with the world?

And what would happen if all the steel and stone horses that bore our hallowed soldiers, presidents and dictators bolted out from under their riders?

--Photo by Frank...

Lens, France --

"Why would we print an article on an archaeological exhibit of 3000 year old vases in a museum in a dead mining town?" That's the reaction one of my fellow journalists got from a major weekly magazine concerning the...

Middling southern towns possessed of baroque and kinky histories suffered terrible dilemmas in the 1950s and 60s: how to grow and gain respect in the booming post-war era without flushing their rich heritage down the town branch. Lexington,...

Hotels, etymologically speaking, are a French invention, sheltering structures whose function was to provide care and nurture--as in the famous and endangered Hotel Dieu in Paris beside the Seine. Next month, the 21c "art hotel" in downtown Cincinnati, celebrates its first anniversary, and the current exhibition show does anything but...

The more we intrude upon each other on our so-called smart phones, babbling to each other wherever we are, not knowing if the other is reposing on a temple throne or on the toilet, the more alone we...

Sometimes a nail is just a nail. But what if a drill is really a pencil? And what is it that makes a pencil draw?

Yazid Oulab, who grew up in Algiers with family in Marseille was full of these musings when he was...

I couldn't have been more than 10 or 12 when I first heard tales of the Midi, recounted by my fruit-growing father in Kentucky, about his sun-dappled, post-college dreamlife...

What do you do with a dying town?

For two decades Nantes, once a major slave trading port and for most of the last century France's key Atlantic maritime center, saw its future in steep decline -- maritime and maritime-related industries disappearing....

It's three years since the world-famous Pompidou Center of Modern Art opened its branch in the old industrial city of Metz, a couple of train hours east of Paris. The six-story wood and glass tent is far smaller -- and some believe...