No season of architectural blockbusters would be complete without a loving look back at the modernist who most presaged today’s bout of hedonistic formalism. Et voilà, a Niemeyer retrospective at the Jeu de Paume. The show, curated by Daniel Abadie with Cecilia Scharlach and Michel Ricard, promises two full rooms of Brasiliana—revel yet again in the synthetic splendors of a Jet Age city in the bush!—and several spaces in which we will discover, through letters and photographs, Niemeyer’s “implications.” For this we need a trip to a gallery? It would be easier to go to a newsstand, where a few flipped pages of a magazine reveal that the Niemeyer formula—pictorial curves, sensuous prisms, light politics, cool heroism—is, like the man, alive and well.

— Philip Nobel