ART
A Letter from Paris
The weather has been drizzly and chill for May, but it doesn’t stand
in the way of ambling in and out of the galleries, finding some fine meals
and other such Parisian rituals.
My good friend Marc PoKempner, the photographer, dropped in
after a big family wedding in Greece just in time to catch the annual Paris
Fair—which this year did not include the excellent jazz festival of
the past four years.
We were, however, able to catch a rollicking Afro-Caribbean band and an hour’s
worth of frenzied ethnic dancing at the “Pavillion of the Tropics.”
The massive French regional pavilion—my other favorite venue—was
still there, featuring foods and wines from all areas of France. And this
was followed by a pig-out dinner at the Alsatian sector, featuring some of
the richest, pure foie gras you’ll ever put in your mouth.
Marc was delighted to learn that Paris has no fewer than three museums devoted to photography. We made a couple of visits to the largest of them, for a retrospective of the great photojournalist Marc Ribaud.
Ribaud did that iconic photo of a young woman at the 1967 Pentagon demonstration against the Viet war, offering a flower to a line of troops with bayonets at the ready. Thirty-five years later he captured the same woman at an anti-Iraq-War demo in London.
But the most memorable picture in this show is his shot of a man high up in interstices the Eiffel Tower, painting a girder in a posture somewhere between Buster Keaton and a ballerina, his body curved in soft contrast to the angularity of the girders.
Visiting galleries with a pro in the field can be remarkably enlightening -- Marc was able to broaden my appreciation of several photos by pointing out little highlights, tricks and turns used to create effects in the final print. I’ve had some of the same advanced illumination visiting sculpture exhibits with Caroline Lee, who is always able to show me some special detail or technique used in the works we’re viewing.
Caroline had an interesting piece in the Salon du Mai, the city’s major group exhibition held every spring on the outer rim of the city. This is an invitational showing, run by a committee of artists, displaying more than 150 different, wide-ranging works. Another former Chicagoan, Leon Golub, also had a small painting included.
Caroline, Marc and I also saw an unusual exhibit of self-portraits by a couple of hundred 20th Century artists, ranging from Picasso and Matisse, of course, to Magritte and Leger, to Chuck Close and Cindy Sherman—even Norman Rockwell.
A large number of them went well beyond actual portraiture into deeply interpretive, inventive canvasses. Intriguing to see them all as they see themselves—or would like us to think that they see themselves. Malevitch, for example gives us two views of himself, one as a stolid Russian, the second, inexplicably, as a Florentine duke.
On a parallel plane, another huge exhibit at the Grand Palais entitled “The Grand Parade: Portrait of the Artist as a Clown,” brought together a couple of centuries worth of works depicting circuses and clowns by hundreds of artists from Goya and Daumier up through some disquieting contemporary videos by Paul McCarthy. Along the way were beauties by Picabia, Beckman and an especially poignant Hopper. Excerpts from the films “Freaks” and “Children of Paradise” were also included.
The long philosophical manifesto justifying the collection was perhaps a bit overdrawn, theorizing that most artists see themselves as clowns, outsiders and whatnot—very French hypotheses—but the works themselves really didn’t need any further justification.
Before Marc left he not only got to dine at Jean Christiansen’s lovely avant-garde restaurant L’Atelier Berger, but he also was treated to the world’s greatest falafel sandwich at L’As a Fallafel (the ace of falafel) in the Jewish quarter.
A day after Marc left I went to lecture at an English language/American culture class at Evry University, in a southern suburb. Marie Glazar’s old expat schoolmate, Gina Rogalska, who’s been teaching here for many years, has managed to rope me into several such dialogs with her students—some of whom seem to see Osama bin Laden as a Che Guevera-esque hero.
Some of the subtleties between a socialist revolutionary and a repressive, fundamentalist Islamist seem lost on them. I pointed out with some success, however, that another of their heroes, Saddam Hussein, murdered more Muslims than anyone else in the 20th Century—and that Clinton actually went to war to save the Muslims of Kosovo from genocide. This went down fairly well since I earlier established myself as a strong opponent of the Iraq war.
The town of Evry—40 minutes outside of Paris—is struggling to come to grips with multiculturalism. Its nearly 100,000 inhabitants are almost half Muslim now and odd issues emerge. For example, a local supermarket franchise operation was bought by a Muslim group and stopped selling alcohol and pork products—essentials to the French—thereby creating an uproar that even the mayor couldn’t resolve. Daley the Elder would’a got the ham and wine back in the store pronto.
Back in Paris following my lecture, Gina and I dined at one of the new hotspots, La Fontaine de Gaillon, a delightful, quite elegant and upscale bistro recently purchased by Gerard Depardieu—who installed his own chef and is said to occasionally putter about the kitchen himself, though we had no sighting. This, however, is no star-fuck experience.
The food, such as a gloriously seasoned cold gateau of fresh crab and crisply sautéed red mullet with baby artichokes is damn good (about $75 per person with a chilled, light Anjou red wine) and I expect it might earn a Michelin star soon.
Caroline and I supped late one night at L’Ami Jean, a popular Basque bistro near the Orsay museum. It was recently taken over by a chef from La Regalade, the first of the great new-wave bistros. Stephane Jego does twists and turns on classic southwestern dishes, such as eggs shirred in a cocotte with a large dollop of lightly spiced piperade sauce. Also an exquisite John Dory roasted with a thick, chunky puree of aromatic vegetables. A fine buy—about $37 per person with a regional wine.
Still on tap for my final week: a large Joan Miro show, another of Francis Bacon’s works, Georg Baselitz, treasures of the museums of China and yet more fine dining. Might even take in a movie. Back in a week or so--Don
