ART
An American in Paris
A happy convergence here in the final week of the month Count Basie celebrated so joyously. Lots of friends were in town—Debbie Meier, the schoolmarm extraordinaire with an entourage; Hank DeZutter of Chicago journalism fame and his pal Barbara Field; my cousin Bob Salita, the peripatetic software mogul; and, unexpectedly, Alyse Booth, former Daily Newswoman with her new husband Steve.
Add in my regular, twice-yearly visitors Howie Becker, the sociologist-jazzman, and his wife Dianne Hagaman, photographeuse exceptionelle, and you’ve got a cocktail party followed by dinner at La Regalade, the first—and to many the best—of the moderately priced, new-wave bistros begun here by chefs who started out in more feted, big name restaurants.
Not that I am avoiding the multi-starred, multi-priced restaurants. Debbie and I supped at the newest one just the other night, which is run by Joel Robuchon—still perhaps the greatest French chef of the past three decades. Fortunately, it took only a small mortgage on my apartment to pay for the chef’s special tasting menu, lubricated with a swig or two of Puligny Montrachet and an upstart Bordeaux. But it was worth every Euro.
Then, a few nights later, two of my best restaurant-testing guinea pigs, The Beckers, gamely ventured out to the northwest corner of the city with me to check out another modestly priced bistro—L’Abadache. It turned out to be well worth the trip. Although it has apparently been discovered by the neighborhood folk (and appears on some websites,) we didn’t hear much American spoken, which is a good thing too, because the place is tiny and fills up quickly.
Enough about the food? Hardly, because the next day I found another adventurer in sculptor Caroline Lee, who journeyed with me to the southwest corner of the city to investigate L’Os a Moelle (the marrow bone.) We found its mid-priced menu degustation to be another winner—especially the langoustine cream soup and a splendid slab of skate with an olive jus and balsamic reduction. Also delectable was an exceptionally tasty slice of veal. But let’s pause on that thought to consider other aspects of my April in Paris.
Jews and politics
As it happens, it was Passover week when I arrived, giving a bit more incentive to check out the newest museum in town, the Shoah Memorial (“shoah” being the term of art increasingly used to distinguish this Holocaust from the proliferation of other self-defined holocausts.)
This museum/memorial/Jewish center in the heart of the Marais was initiated in the 1950s to document the persecution and deportation of French Jews under the Hitler occupation and Vichy government of WWII. It was refurbished several times then long shut down for major revision, rehabilitation and technological updating, finally reopening in January of this year.
Neither as vast nor architecturally exciting as the Holocaust museum in Washington or the Jewish museum in Berlin—or as extensive as Yad Vashem in Israel—there are still many dramatic stories and exhibits here. They start with a “wall of names,” actually a large, open concrete chamber of monoliths etched with the names of all French Jews who were deported—mainly to Auschwitz. Its impact is best compared with the Vietnam memorial in Washington.
More gripping, in a quiet way, is a gigantic marble star of David lying flat in an adjacent area with an eternal light burning in its center. Beneath it are the ashes of hundreds of Jews murdered at Auschwitz, mixed with soil from Israel. Even this atheist’s eyes filled a bit at the thought.
Then there’s a room dotted with video stands, each telling a bit of recent Euro-Jewish history, and a large screen documenting French and European anti-Semitism through the centuries. The dismal French role in WWII is told unblinkingly in several exhibits—plus there’s a section on how Jewish labor was used to construct the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Much of the material here is bilingual, very helpful for those of us who can barely ask directions to the washroom.
On the topic of Jews, I have been struck this year by what seem to be fewer reports of contemporary anti-Semitic actions and episodes in France. Yes, there was a cemetery desecration late last year in a Paris suburb. But there seem to be fewer attacks since the death of Yassir Arafat, which was occupying the news here during my last visit. Maybe the tide, such as it was, is stemming with seeming progress in the Israel/Palestine situation. One friend suggests it is just a lull. On the other hand, a younger woman tells me she still feels insecure in a crowd when wearing her star or her “chai” around her neck; so she removes or conceals them when she gets on the metro. She has friends who were hassled and heckled, though not physically attacked, she says.
Politics in general here seems more low-key, despite the approach of what may be a monumental election at the end of May to adopt or reject the European constitution. This may have dampened concerns about Iraq, Bush or whatever. It also turned out that for the first time in recent memory there was no massive May Day demonstration.
Hank, Barbara and I waited around the Bastille for quite a while, but to our astonishment no marchers showed up. We later learned there had been three or four mini-marches in different parts of the city because the factions couldn’t agree on a theme—and the left was split on the constitution. The largest left (and center) majority says “Oui!” The CP, Trots and other left sects join with the ultra-nationalist right to say “Non!”
Last fall, just after the US elections I had a sense that the French were moving from merely being anti-Bush to a new strain of anti-Americanism. They once excused us for having “accidentally” elected Bush and figured we would correct the error. But once we re-elected him they essentially asked “What sort of bizarre people are these who would return him to office?”
Well, they have other concerns now. Up to mid-May the polls showed a solid majority against the European constitution---but suddenly there was a shift in opinion for it. We shall see.
It is still a few weeks off as I write this, but several friends here, of differing but not radical political persuasions, are very leery of this question of the larger European confederation. First, the constitution itself is much too long, 20 times the sizes of ours, and is a huge compendium of legislation—some laws at odds with existing French law—rather than a simpler statement of broad principles, as a constitution ought to be.
They also question the ultimate workability of the European confederation because it is an overly large, unwieldy mixing of many different social and economic cultures. They fear it may become one of those artificial nations created after WWI that shortly fell apart. Others question whether the European central bank will be inflexibly monetarist (and therefore unable to cope with the special needs of member states) or unwilling to provide a dose Keynes when circumstances warrant.
The British election took place during my stay in Paris—all turning out pretty much as expected. Bush pal Blair emerged victorious but with a sharply reduced majority. One vigorous election-night speech shown on Euro TV came from George Galloway, a former Labour MP who quit the party because of the war then ran as an independent in east London and won big. “Mr. Blair,” he said. “This is for Iraq… All the people you killed, all the lies you told have come back to haunt you!”
Around the galleries and all that jazz
On a lighter note, a few of the current art exhibitions sparkled if they didn’t totally dazzle. One was a series of nearly 200 pen or pencil drawings by Gustav Klimt, the great Viennese Secession artist, my second favorite of the era after Kokoschka. These were pure erotica, some perhaps bordering on porn, but oh! so exquisite. Naked and near naked ladies everywhere. Some posed provocatively, opening their vulvae to you so invitingly; some coupling with men, some coupling with women, some coupling with themselves.
The delicate lines and tones you see in Klimt’s paintings are boiled down to their essence here. Hard to believe, but, as in some of those explicit Japanese prints, the sex actually runs second to the art. Or maybe they are indistinguishable from each other. This show was at the Maillot Museum near St. Germain. The museum is often overlooked by visitors rushing to the Louvre or, but continues to come up with worthwhile shows such as this and a Christian Schad retrospective two years ago.
And just when you think you’ve got Matisse pretty well encapsulated in your brain, a show such as “A Second Life” at the Luxembourg Museum gives you another glimpse into the master’s craft.
Devoted to works between 1940 and Matisse’s death in 1954, it included a pair of subdued—for Matisse—tapestries titled “Haitian Sky” and “Hatian Sea”; a mural-sized (maybe 10 by 12 feet) “tree” of those signature “leaves” he played with for a decade or more; a 20-plate sequence titled “Jazz” that seemed for all the world like his rendition of a long jazz improvisation, riffing along making abstract images into a new pattern very like Charlie Parker might do with his horn. (It was dated 1947. Could Matisse have been familiar with some Parker works?)
Finally, the show had a wall of four vividly colored interiors with bold black outlining that demonstrated the genius of Matisse at his late-life, free-swinging peak, confidently telling the world “this is what I know and this is how I do it!” Just smashing.
Every time I come here, I find a show that’s a real revelation, pointing up the works of a little known or under-appreciated but totally impressive artist. This time it was a large collection of Richard Lindner, a German-born, French-trained artist who came to the States just as the war was starting and developed as a progenitor of pop art, influencing Warhol, Lichtenstein and others.
His own work, often incorporating sex fetishes, embraces flat, distorted, bright, candy-colored figures that seem to have emerged from Leger by way Magritte. Think a colorful early R. Crumb. Think of the art of “Yellow Submarine”—much of the latter almost totally lifted from his style. One of my favorite pieces in the show was a half-naked Allen Ginsburg in an Uncle Sam hat staring out at you through an open window. With luck the exhibit will find its way back to the US, as many of these do. It, too, was at an oft-overlooked venue, the Vie Romantique (romantic life) Museum in Montmartre.
I also discovered another unknown (to me), the Belgian Georges Lemmer (1865-1914) at a showing of neoimpressionists at the Orsay. There, among scores of Seurats and Signacs, were only two of his works, but each jumped right out at you in their rooms—one a vibrant, pointilliste seascape in pulsating blues and purples; the other, two rooms away, a totally different, haunting portrait of two young girls in ochre and yellow.
The Palais de Tokyo, a recently (2002) renovated space designed for contemporary art on a massive scale, exhibited several intriguing and boldly inventive installations. The best was by Katharina Grosse, a youngish Berlin-based artist. She works on a 15-foot high, 175-foot-long, curving wall, spray-painting wide swaths of bright color an action mural, then mounds heaps and heaps of colored earths in front of the wall, laying down more swaths of color in front of the earth. Standing in front of it, you had the sense of being at a strange shore overlooking an alien but dreamily familiar terrain.
On the disappointing side, the city’s newest contemporary space, Le Maison Rouge, devoted its exhibit space entirely to a multi-room, multi-level work by Ann Hamilton. It involved hundreds of color photos, a swooping video, many fabric accoutrements and an audio dimension—all of which left me totally cold, to say nothing of puzzled. Trying to read the program notes of what she was trying to achieve turned into homework. If I hadn’t gotten in free I would have felt ripped off. But perhaps I’m a bit dense.
For an arts break, I also took an afternoon off to reminisce and trade stories with Jimmy Gourley, the expat jazz guitarist, in a nearby suburb. He left Chicago around 1952 to become a pillar of the scene here, playing and recording with Lester Young, Clifford Brown, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Duke Ellington, Zoot Sims and just about every major figure to work this town. Quite gray and leaner than ever these days, he’s still gigging about and playing festivals and sounding quite good as a recent disc he made with his guitarist son Sean attests.
The bridge of size
No trip to Paris is complete without at least a long weekend with my friends Dennis Ginosi and Kathleen Pendergast in Lodeve, a village near Montpellier. Their “estate,” midst mountain scenery, replete with rock gardens, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, glassed-in terraces and wisteria-hung outdoor terraces is a small marvel. Fanny SanDonato, the young Frenchwoman who stayed with us in Chicago, and her family spent a sun-drenched, five-hour lunch with us under the wisteria on a Sunday.
But
the true highlight of the visit was a drive to Millau, 55 kilometers away,
to see this elegant expanse of steel and concrete known as “le viaduc.”
More than a mile and a half long, it spans a deep valley and the relatively
narrow Tarn river below. It was built as part of a highway from Paris to the
south of Spain; the original route took you down into the valley, through
Millau and up again, leading to epic traffic jams in the town that could add
an hour or more to the trip.
The steel-based roadway—prefabricated to precise tolerances—is supported by seven evenly-spaced concrete pillars that rise nearly 900 feet from the valley. Then, from the road, seven bifurcated pylons rise another 240 feet as extensions of the pillars. At the peak, from river bed to spire-top, it’s 138 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. The pylons come together at the top like church spires; from these, the suspension cables angle down to the roadway in an inverted V.
The effect, as you approach on the road, is of seven symmetrical sailing ships lying ahead of you; but the best views are from areas on nearby roads that reveal the full majesty of this structure. As clean and modern as a Mies building, it still blends perfectly into the countryside, elegantly and harmoniously. It is a piece of absolute visual logic. If, as Goethe said, architecture is frozen music, this is a Bach cantata.
Down memory lane
In Paris again, on or about the 51st anniversary
of my first visit to Paris (May, 1954), I strolled through Montparnasse to
Le Select, which was “my” café back then. (It was Hemingway’s
as well before that!) Carol, my wife du jour, and I stayed for more than a
year just around the corner in a $1-per-night hotel. The area has been largely
gentrified in recent decades, but back then you got to know the waiters by
name and they knew you—sometimes giving you a nickname. I was Monsieur
Chocolat to Raymond and Maurice and Gaston because of my addiction to hot
chocolate in the morning.
Here we might spend hours, mornings and evenings, joining the likes of Gourley,
Jimmy Baldwin and the once well-known African-American painter Beauford Delany.
One time we joined a table that included Sam Beckett, who had just published
what I considered a very weird story in Merlin, a new little literary magazine,
so I never pursued the acquaintance. (Yes, I am really dense.) Once we had
a Faulkner sighting at a nearby table but were petrified at the idea of shaking
his hand, even though I considered him America’s greatest novelist.
And still do.
Anyway, I found my old seat on the terrace—or an approximation thereof in the expanded, remodeled area—and sat with the ghosts for more than an hour, sipping tea, listening to Charlie Parker on my i-Pod and staring out at that still marvelous Parisian street scene. This is just one of the things that keeps me coming back again and again.
-Don