Paris Revealed Page 21

  And it’s not only the driving style that is typically Parisian. The film gives a perfect example of how drivers behave at the Étoile roundabout, even at legal speeds—that is, go exactly where you want to and don’t give a damn what other people are doing. The movie also pays tribute to the city’s cleanliness—almost the only vehicles about are refuse lorries.

  And then there’s the conclusion. A Parisian male can’t just drive through Paris for the hell of it (or can’t admit that’s what he was doing)—it has to be to meet a femme. Personally, I enjoy the film for its views of 1970s Paris and its sheer Parisian-ness. The streets are almost empty, especially out in the posh areas around the Arc de Triomphe, because Lelouch made his film in August. It’s a testimony to how many Parisians desert the city during that month—and to how bored a Parisian can become if he’s forced to stay at home.

  Favourite number two is a film called Le Grand Blond avec une Chaussure Noire—The Tall Blond with One Black Shoe. It’s a comedy made in 1972 starring Pierre Richard, a sort of French Charlie Chaplin of his day—an actor with a gift for slapstick and a poignant edge, who almost always plays the same character, a curly-haired, accident-prone seducer.

  Le Grand Blond is a romping spoof of a spy movie with lots of street scenes and a highly Parisian plot. The two rivals for control of the French secret service are battling it out in a dirty chien eat chien war. To distract the pretender, the current head of the Sureté orders his men to go to Orly airport and choose a total innocent with whom they will ‘make contact’, thereby suggesting to their rivals that this is a master spy. The victim is a hapless classical violinist (Pierre Richard), the kind of social inadequate who wears odd shoes and doesn’t realize that he’s being followed by secret-service agents, even when they start shooting at each other.

  What is so typically Parisian about that, one might ask? Well, he may be a misfit, but the violinist is having an affair with his best friend’s wife (bien sûr), and when a femme fatale is sent to seduce him into revealing his (non-existent) secrets, he is so good in bed that she falls in love with him. Every Parisian male’s ideal Parisian. Furthermore, the femme fatale’s dress is a Guy Laroche creation that is 1970s Paris personified—from the front it looks like a long, formal evening gown, but when she turns around, she reveals a décolleté that swoops down to expose a good inch of buttock cleavage. A million times sexier than Sharon Stone revealing all in Basic Instinct.

  More importantly, perhaps, all the actors (including French screen greats Jean Rochefort, Bernard Blier and Jean Carmet) are superb, and there’s a strong ’70s Paris ambiance, with plenty of smoking, seduction and witty repartee. It’s just a shame that the city doesn’t inspire new films like it.

  Liberté, Égalité, Ciné

  Paris doesn’t want films like C’était un Rendez-vous and Le Grand Blond to be forgotten. It wants to educate Parisians about cinema culture, which is why, as well as screening the latest releases, many cinemas also run frequent mini-festivals. They will show the current box-office hits at the same time as having, say, a Cary Grant week, an Almodovar night, or a Suspense cycle. Just days after director Claude Chabrol’s death in September 2010, five cinemas got together to organize a twenty-film retrospective.

  The city has also created its own institution to make sure that film-lovers get a varied, balanced diet. Deep down in Les Halles, in a subterranean plaza a few dozen metres from one of Paris’s biggest multiplexes, sits the Forum des Images, a film library and five-screen cinema financed by Mission Cinéma. The Forum shows classics, new independent films and obscure foreign productions from countries you didn’t even know had a movie industry. It also has a direct educational role, inviting in school groups—a recent ‘children’s programme’ included a movie by New Wave director François Truffaut. They start them young in Paris.

  The Forum has a library of over 7,000 films, the oldest dating back to 1895, and cinéphiles can either go along to one of the showings advertised in the listings magazines or simply decide to nip underground and ask for a private screening of anything in the catalogue. The Salle des Collections has individual screens, sofas where two can snuggle up to watch a love story (though even in Paris there are limits on the degree of snuggling allowed) and small salons where up to seven people can gather for a collective movie experience. And in the evenings after 7.30 p.m., it’s free. Yes, Paris provides legal video piracy—with comfy sofas.

  * These are fees per working day. In true French administrative style, Paris City Hall considers that films should be shot from nine to five, Monday to Saturday. Overtime costs 85 euros an hour, and Sundays, holidays and nights are 50 per cent extra. Some locations require the hire of a city worker, un agent de la ville, who will be paid 31 euros an hour overtime if a shoot overshoots.

  ** Note to self: get contract to add glass bubble to top of Eiffel Tower so it looks like a giant thermometer, and make fortune.

  The Italian painting section of the Louvre, back in the good old days when you could actually get quite close to the Mona Lisa. But it is possible to see great art in Paris without fighting the crowds.

  11

  ART

  Le fou copie l’artiste. L’artiste ressemble au fou.

  (The madman copies the artist. The artist looks like a madman.)

  ANDRÉ MALRAUX, WRITER AND

  FORMER FRENCH MINISTER OF CULTURE

  What’s Louvre got to do with it?

  PARIS IS the spiritual home of Impressionism and Cubism and has played host to pretty well every other artistic -ism. It was the city where Picasso blossomed from a gifted teenager to a modernist giant and where Van Gogh turned himself from a gloomy Dutchman into a frenzied Frenchman. Before the First World War, it was practically impossible to sit in a Parisian café without being offered a cheap portrait by a future genius for the price of a glass of absinthe. In short, Paris is so arty that even Mona Lisa has set up residence here.

  Well, that’s the image that the city likes to project. And there are artists and galleries everywhere, doing their best to convince us all that the art scene is as vibrant as it was between the 1870s and the 1920s, when Monet, Manet, Morisot, Matisse, Modigliani and co. were painting so productively that Paris seemed in danger of being overrun with barely dry canvases. In fact, though, it’s largely a myth—those good old days weren’t really so good at all. In their early careers, almost all the city’s most famous artists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were ignored or shouted down by Parisians.

  When Gustave Courbet first began exhibiting his paintings in Paris in the early 1850s, for instance, his attempts at realism shocked the public and critics alike. They wanted art that depicted princes and heroes, re-enactments of legends or historical scenes, and Courbet was offering them just plain people—not graceful or godlike, but merely human. His 1853 painting Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) features one fat lady getting out of a river or lake, and another taking her stockings off ready for a dip. People were aghast at the tastelessness of the nude bather’s fleshy buttocks and at the mud on the other woman’s bare foot, which was interpreted as a symbol of immorality. The mud didn’t symbolize anything, though—according to Courbet, it was plain old riverbank silt, and people weren’t used to such literalism.

  Others, including Édouard Manet, followed Courbet’s realist lead, and had the doors of the artistic establishment firmly slammed in their faces. In 1863, so many artists were refused permission to exhibit their paintings at Paris’s annual art fair, Le Salon, that they set up an alternative show, Le Salon des Refusés, with the blessing of Emperor Napoleon III, who agreed that the public should be allowed to decide what they liked. They did just that—the show was a total flop, and the critics had a field day. One called the paintings ‘sad and grotesque’, but added that ‘with one or two exceptions, you laugh as heartily as at a farce at the Palais-Royal’ (home of the Comédie Française).

  Fifteen years later, the critics were even more horrified. A young man called Claude Mon
et, who had been invalided out of the army after catching typhoid, began expressing his relief at being alive by painting what he saw in front of him, preferably outdoors instead of staying cooped up in a studio. And given that life was short, he felt the need to paint quickly, capturing the moment, and preferred to finish his paintings there and then rather than touching them up later. This inevitably made his work look hurried and blurred. Take his Impression: Soleil Levant (Impression: Sunrise) for example. In a swirl of blue-green mist, we can just make out the masts, cranes and smoke stacks of Le Havre harbour. A black silhouette hovers in the mid-distance. It seems to be a boat carrying two men, although it might also be a walrus doing backstroke. And in the centre of the painting sits a bright orange splodge—the sun. No subtle gradations of colour here, no tapestry of dawn light woven into the clouds—it’s just a splodge.

  Today, this is considered a masterpiece, but in 1874, when it was first exhibited, the art critic (and unsuccessful painter) Louis Leroy slammed it in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, inadvertently creating history when he lambasted Monet and his friends for being incapable of painting things in detail, and damned them all as mere Impressionistes.

  And in 1876, at the second public showing of the new artists’ work, a critic went even further:

  The rue le Peletier is a street of disasters. At the Durand-Ruel gallery, an exhibition has just opened that is alleged to contain paintings. I entered, and my horrified eyes beheld a terrifying sight—five or six lunatics, including one woman, have got together to exhibit their work. I have seen people shake with laughter on seeing these pictures, but my heart bled when I saw them. These would-be artists call themselves revolutionaries. They take a piece of canvas, splash on a few random daubs of colour, and then sign it. It is a huge fraud, as if the inmates of a madhouse had picked up stones by the roadside and imagined they had found diamonds.

  The gallery-owner, Paul Durand-Ruel, was so frustrated at Paris’s inability to understand the Impressionists that he took his trade elsewhere, opening premises in London, Brussels, Vienna and New York, all the while paying artists like Monet, Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro a monthly salary so that they wouldn’t starve.

  It wasn’t until the early-twentieth century that these Parisian painters started to get recognition at home, and even then, it was largely thanks to private collectors, many of them foreign, who were coming to Paris to snap up Impressionist canvases for a song.

  By then, a new generation of artists, including Henri Matisse and the recent immigrant Pablo Picasso, were suffering the same fate, being jeered at for their ‘childish’ style and desperately courting rich ex-pats like the writer/heiress Gertrude Stein. They would troop along to her dinners and cocktail parties, hoping to sell a painting that would not only pay the rent but would also hang on Gertrude’s wall and be spotted by other rich ex-pats. Again, the mainstream Paris art establishment turned its back on the local talent, and even alleged that people like Matisse were creating rubbish for gullible American tourists.

  All this sounds horrific, but one could argue that at least the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and all the other innovative ‘-ists’ had something to react against. Opposition gave them energy and a sense of purpose; it goaded them into perfecting their ideas so that everyone would become convinced of their validity.

  These days, on the other hand, more or less anything goes, and—in my humble opinion—Parisian art as a movement has stagnated. The focus is more on the artist than the art. This was true of Picasso, too, but he was so incredibly productive and innovative that he never seemed to let the cult of personality get past his studio door. For some new Parisian artists, though, personality is everything. Their art is all about moi …

  Look at my navel

  Parisian-born Sophie Calle, for example, has made her life her art. She is highly intelligent and therefore comes up with clever ideas. For example, in the early ’90s she had an exhibition of photos of the spaces left on museum walls by stolen paintings. Yes, it’s a funny concept, but it’s a bit of a one-liner. Once you’ve seen one empty space, haven’t you seen them all?

  The most recent example of this style of ‘clever’ art in Paris was an installation called Monumenta 2010 at the Grand Palais. For this, the artist Christian Boltanski filled the 13,500 square metres of the Grand Palais’s immense, glass-roofed central hall with clothes. Visitors walked around piles of rumpled old coats, shirts, pullovers and trousers, heaped in one central stack and a grid of small squares that looked like plots in a cemetery. Meanwhile, booming out of loudspeakers was the slow thump of human hearts beating, a chilling sound because subconsciously everyone is afraid it will stop at any moment. And although this was taking place during one of the coldest winters in recent years, the heating was turned off so that spectators could experience the full desolation of what they were seeing—a monument to the victims of genocide. An honourable intention, no doubt, but its effect as art was slightly diminished given that reviews of the exhibition were sharing newspaper space with reports of homeless people freezing to death in the streets of Paris—due to lack of warm clothing. It was bit like organizing a sound installation of ocean waves on the day after a tsunami.

  Surely, though, new Parisian art can’t have disappeared completely into a black hole of its own pretension?

  The answer, fortunately, is non. There are still Parisian artists out there creating work that tries to titillate the eye as well as the intellect, and one of the best ways of seeing them is to go to their studios.

  To do this, it is not necessary to hang around in Montmartre cafés chatting up anyone with paint brushes stuck behind their ears. At various times of the year, usually in spring and autumn, all the artists in a certain area of the city hold a weekend of open days.

  The biggest concentrations of artists’ studios are up in the north of Paris, around Montmartre and Belleville, and there are also open days in the south, in the 14th arrondissement. You can consult listings on the internet at www.parisgratuit.com/ateliers.html, but unless you’re looking for a specific artist, the best thing often is to go to the hub of the neighbourhood and follow your nose, or rather your ears—Parisian artists rarely seem to create without musical accompaniment, preferably either old French chansons, Bob Marley or bleeping techno.

  Open the porte

  The steeply rising rue de Belleville has long been a neat little Chinatown, with end-to-end restaurants, but the streets immediately to the east and north have suffered from the kind of urban regeneration that involved demolishing old buildings and then saying, ‘Hmm, what shall we do now?’ In most cases, the answer was, ‘Stick up a cheap, ugly apartment building that will start to crumble in ten years.’ Elsewhere, it was more a case of, ‘Let’s brick it up and leave it to decay, and then maybe someone will give us a grant to build a cheap, ugly …’ etc.

  The destruction was caused by a city plan at the end of the 1980s to turn the area into a zone d’aménagement concerté, literally a concentrated redevelopment zone, but after several years of demolition, the plan was shelved, leaving the area scarred but at least half intact.

  More recently, many empty buildings have been squatted by artists, and lots of the old shops have also been taken over by créateurs of various kinds—jewellers, clothes designers, lampshade makers and the like. The artiness has even spread to some of the surviving traditional shops—a plumber’s showroom and a grocer’s both have façades that have been decorated by graffiti artists, with the consent of the owners, that is.

  The rue Dénoyez, in which half the buildings are bricked up, is now a permanent outdoor gallery, with whole façades painted over. On the open day I attended, there was a large painting of a rhinoceros being pleasured by a gorilla and a crocodile, while itself doing erotic (but very painful-looking) things to a monkey with its horn. Its title was Belleville Zoophilie, or Belleville Bestiality, not something that most of us would want to commission for our living rooms, but very P
arisian—there aren’t many cities where such public displays of animal amour would be tolerated, even in the zoos.

  It was also a reminder that, these days, many of Paris’s most creative young artists work in a comic-book style. The French love bandes dessinées, or BD, and the cultural establishment is even beginning to acknowledge this form of art, so that the launch of a big French BD gets as much—and as respectful—media coverage as a new Monet exhibition.

  Next to the rhino-led orgy, a young man was up a ladder, daubing blue paint over the walls and windows of a low-rise building. I watched as he made long, swooping strokes with his roller on a stick, and slowly a blue elephant came into soft focus, apparently charging at the owner of the café next door, who was watching anxiously, as though worried that the animals might stampede across his windows.

  Wandering further along the street, I visited a ceramic artist called Guy Honore. Using an apartment-block motif, he had made sculptures of dream-like cities, one of which was painted white and lime green, and had large leaves overrunning the urban scene, like the ideal French nouvelle ville. And for art lovers with no space on their mantelpiece for a ceramic new town, he had used the same motif on a cute cubic teapot.

  A few doors down was a kind of Parisian Andy Warhol who had taken the photos-to-paintings theme and given it a French twist, creating Pop Art portraits of the poet Arthur Rimbaud and singers Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens. Not exactly an original style, but Rimbaud’s photo definitely deserves to be as iconic as anything that Warhol adapted.

  Next I ventured into a dark studio hung with lengths of coloured fabric, some of them spliced down the middle with a splash of metal. The artist was sitting in a chair staring at me as I gazed around, and replied to my greeting with a questioning ‘Bonjour?’ Then I realized why she looked confused—it was a haberdasher’s shop, and the metal-spliced pieces of material were zips. I apologized and left, though if I’d been a conceptual artist, I’d have bought the whole place, haberdasher and all, and sold it to the Musée d’Art Moderne as an installation symbolizing the way the modern French cultural establishment is zipped shut to truly iconoclastic ideas (except my own, of course).