ART
A Letter from Paris
By Don Rose
In 1934 the great Henri Matisse was viewing an art exhibit at the Smithsonian
in Washington, DC. Pausing before a Pierre Bonnard painting, he studied it
carefully, turned to his hosts and declared, “He is the greatest of
us all!”
Just two years older than Matisse and 14 years Picasso’s senior, Bonnard was adored by almost all the modern masters. A 90-painting retrospective of his work at the newly refurbished Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris made it easy to see why.
He was a supreme colorist with an amazing eye for patterns and detail. You can’t just scan these oils quickly—they reveal themselves to you slowly as he blends plastic space with traditional perspective and elliptical distortion with near photographic realism.
Here you see an indoor-outdoor scene, with the floral print of a woman’s skirt merging into the flower garden just outside the doorway. Soon a shepherd on a distant hill becomes visible through the haze. The painting almost comes alive in slow motion.
Another painting shows his wife, nude in her bath, viewed from above as the water distorts her figure like a lens, while the bathtub itself sort of melts at the corners like an Claes Oldenberg soft sculpture. Another views a woman head-on seated at the dining table, but the table, covered by a patterned cloth, is shown from yet another perspective — a virtual aerial view — distorting without disorienting. He makes your eyes work. If this show gets to the States, make it your business to catch it—well worth a trip.
It was one of three exceptional exhibits that brightened
my recent ramble through post-riot Paris—a visit shared with a rolling
wave of guests from Chicago and New York. All, of course, in search of the
art, food and related hedonistic pleasures.
The friends and cows
The first guest, poor Judy James, got sick on the second day of her week-long stay and didn’t leave the apartment until it was time to go back to Chicago. At least she had the pleasure on her first night of dining at Pierre Gagnaire’s fascinating new seafood restaurant, Gaya. (Clearly not the cause of her illness!)
It’s the first spinoff restaurant of the most inventive three-star chef in all of France. Fortunately for our bank accounts, it costs only about a quarter of the epic $400-$450 per person you pay in his flagship spot off the Champs Elysses.
Speaking of the Champs Elysses, as I rarely do, that fairway and numerous plazas all around town were marked by the astounding sight of dozens of deliriously painted, acrobatic cows—standing, sitting, flying, riding bicycles and mounting each other.
Yes, Paris has finally caught up with Chicago’s public art of several years ago and is offering Vaches en Promenade! Now all Chicago has to do is catch up with Paris politically and elect a gay socialist mayor as the Parisiennes themselves did a couple of years ago. A fair exchange for a sister city, non?
The day Judy departed I caught up with Anne Dowling, another old Chicago political pal who’s been camped out in the Big Apple for the past 30 years or so. We spent the day touring my local market street, then briefly catching the opening of an exhibit by Roseline Granet.
Granet does figurative steel sculptures, their rough, skinny, elongated bodies delicately poised in space, some balancing one upon the other in gravity-defying poses. This exhibition was at the Darthea Speyer Gallery, where our late friend Ed Paschke was showing when he died so suddenly last year.
Dinner with Anne was at one of my half-dozen favorite bistros, Au Gourmand, serving the world’s greatest pork chop (that’s an absolute). Sadly, after dinner we learned that the lovely four-year old dining room was going to close its doors in only three days. Quel domage! I hate to see it go—but one will never want for excellent bistros in this town. (If you are one of the possessors of my list of “great Paris eating places,” be sure to cross out Au Gourmand!)
As Anne was winging her way back to NYC the next day, a Chicago neighbor and reporter--whom I shall call "Mlle. X"-- was landing on my doorstep for a two week encampment-and she was joined two days later on the other living-room couch by Dr. Leon Gussow, the noted toxicologist and gourmand who made the trip expressly to indulge in gustatory delights, including many fruits of the vine. No relationship to toxicology here. We would later spend time with Charlie White and Ellen Hunt, who arrived here on the final leg of a round-the-world trip. Among many other accomplishments, Charlie once shared the dining beat with me at the Sun-Times. My cousin Bob Salita, who lives here even more of the year than I do, was along for many of the food and art excursions.
The events
One of the first big events turned out to be a nonevent. For the second year
in a row, the usually massive May Day march did not take place as its disorganized
organizers could not get their themes together. Does this signal the end of
this once proud coming-together of the Left? Or will it take another threat,
such as a political re-emergence of the right-wing Le Pen, to give us all
common cause?
Absent a stirring parade to view, a small band of us made our way across town to the annual Paris Fair (Foire de Paris). A huge fairground at the edge of the city is laid out with all manner of pavilions devoted to technology, housewares, automobiles and god-knows-whats. Another houses an immense display of wares from all over the world including Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The goods range from typical airport souvenirs to some serious fabrics, rugs, and ceramics.
But the target pavilion for our group was the one devoted to—you guessed it—food and wine from all across France and Italy. Here you are inundated in mountains of foie gras plus acres of fine cheeses, sausages and cured meats. There are scores of booths presenting the very best of wines from every region of the country. We picked out several cheeses, sweets and oversized jars of foie gras from some of the better producers to take home—provided we didn’t gobble up along the way.
The giant hall is also ringed with mini-restaurants offering regional specialties. Among our stops were an Alsatian tent offering tarte flammande, a crispy, filo-thin cheese and bacon pizza baked in a special oven, washed down by one of those lovely, rich Alsatian beers. Later we would consume cassoulet from the Perigord region and a bottle of Bergerac wine. And on and on.
Several of our party enjoyed it so much they returned for further gluttony a few days later. Interestingly, this fair is almost unknown to British and American tourists—you rarely see mention of it in the guidebooks—but I have been returning every May for years now and it’s always great fun.
"Mlle. X" and I also made a brief day-trip to Giverny for a stroll through Monet's home and glorious gardens. It was her first trip there and we were totally caught up in spectacular sunbursts of flowers, vines and blooming trees. Follow the garden path and soon you are at the famed lily pond with the Japanese bridge he loved and painted so often, so well. Damn near like being in one of those movie sets where a painting morphs into three-dimensional reality-only here you can really smell the lilacs and the bouquet of hundreds of blooms.
The lovely old house itself contains no original paintings, but displays scores of the impressionist master’s Japanese prints—his continual inspiration. His studio, of course, has been turned into a museum gift-shop. Our tight train schedule didn’t give us more time to wander the rest of the tiny town, which these days includes a museum of American art, established by the Chicago billionaire Dan Terra.
She and I also spent a long weekend with our expat friends Dennis Ginosi and Kathleen Prendergast at their gorgeous retreat in Lodeve, a small village near Montpellier in the southwest. I’ve written before of the little paradise they’ve carved out there after nine years of backbreaking labor and bank-breaking expense. Now that most of the work is done they can more easily enjoy—as we did—their wisteria-hung terrace, their glassed-in patio, their fruit and olive trees, vegetable and flower gardens, rock garden and little waterfall. Plus, of course, a visit to the weekly town market and some fabulous dinners KP assembled therefrom.
More art
Another expat friend, the sculptor Caroline Lee, who just won another major French lifetime-achievement award for her work, invited us to the opening of the Salon de Mai, the most important contemporary group show of the year. This is the traditional of-the-artists, by-the-artists exhibition, displaying more than a hundred pieces of the best of what’s going on in the local art world. One of Caroline’s welded steel sculptures was prominently displayed, right by the entrance.
Two more blockbuster exhibits to go along with the Bonnard were a huge retrospective of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who is the all-important bridge between neoclassisism and modernism in French art, and Henri Rousseau, the early primitivist-modernist whose work slowly moved from jeers to cheers in his lifetime. Each in his own way influenced and was deeply admired by Picasso.
Ingres (1780-1867) may be the least well known of the great French masters back in the USA. His show at the Louvre shows the subtle development of modernism in the early 19th Century. Ingres seemingly played by all the rules of the classic academy but slyly subverted them. His historic and mythological paintings, for example, show the goddesses not as distant, “statuesque” figures, but softly modeled, contemporary erotic women. One of his evolved neoclassic works with overly-rounded heads was the clear inspiration for Picasso’s own neoclassic period.
The Rousseau show at the Grand Palais was a pure delight, displaying all those wonderful, crayola-colored jungle scenes with lions and tigers and monkeys with their comic-book faces. There were also many lesser-known but exciting paintings of turn-of-the-20th-century Paris done in the fauvist manner. We learn from the excellent bilingual annotations that Rousseau never actually left Paris—his jungles were figments derived from regular visits to the local botanic garden and natural history museum.
Honorable mention and more than a footnote to the blockbusters was a delightful show of Rene Magritte’s works on paper at the often-ignored Maillot Museum. Perhaps a hundred pieces including pencil sketches, gouaches, watercolors, etchings and posters from my favorite surrealist—many of them studies for his more famous oil paintings. This trickster can drive you pleasantly nuts attempting to figure out the relationship between his titles and the works themselves—so don’t bother. Enjoy.
More food
Glowing nights at several of my standby bistros (Petit Pontoise, Le Pre Verre, Le Troquet) never disappointed. The Whites were especially taken with Le Troquet's contemporary, Basque-inspired dishes. "Mlle. X" is still talking about her luscious roast quail at Pontoise, while I thought a grilled slab of liver seasoned with fresh ginger at Pre Verre was absolute genius.
Similarly, four of us were entranced at another relatively new favorite, Mon Vieil Ami on the always delightful Ile de St. Louis. It’s owned by Strasbourg’s three-star chef, Antoine Westermann, who developed the menu. A terrine of foie gras was accompanied by glazed red onions and celery remoulade; a crisped sea bream was swathed with garlic and onion confit and pinot noir wine sauce; a double breast of veal was roasted to a well caramelized turn and inundated with baby fava beans and a ton of vegetables.
New experiences were even more stunning. In one case, a three-star chef, Alain Senderens, shocked the gastronomic world by converting Lucas Carton, his sanctified Art Deco citadel, into something closer to a bistro—stiffer than bistro prices, but a far cry from the previous $350 per person tab. He retains one of his menu masterworks—butter-poached fresh foie gras wrapped in a steamed cabbage leaf—then gives us new openers such a lobster salad with mango tarted up by a reduction of banyuls vinegar and orange juice. The latter is served with a lightly sweet Engelgarten wine from Alsace.
Another terrific story: Yves Camdeborde, the chef who started the modern bistro craze in 1992 with his La Regalade—believed by many to be the finest bistro in Paris—sells that place two years ago and buys a small hotel in the Odeon area. The hotel comes with a tiny, 18-seat restaurant he calls Le Comptoir at which he serves sandwiches and simple fare by day, then at 8:30 pm converts to a single, 5-course menu. No choices—take it or leave it, but it is supreme at about 50 bucks US per person plus wine.
You have to reserve up to 6 months in advance (I placed mine in mid-December). But it’s well worth the effort—and is probably the best value-for-dollar fine-dining experience in Paris, perhaps all of France.
Who knows what may be on the menu at any time, but we had such stuff as fresh green asparagus served with plumped dried tomatoes, two kinds of caviar and a flaky, cork-shaped pastry. This was followed by a crabmeat mousse topping veal parts, followed by a roulade of suckling lamb with parsley butter and baby artichoke in an intense veal broth. And did I mention the cheese platter they set down? About a dozen selections, all perfectly ripe at the correct temperature—take all you want and then take some more. I won’t even talk about the desserts—not one, but two. I better make reservations now for my return trip in October!
I am now off, on my last day here, to have dinner with John Morris, the head of Democrats Overseas, to match political notes. We are, of course, hoping to win back the House and maybe the Senate in November. But that’s another story.
A bientot.
--Don