In Paris, history is the present
I thought, why not tell them at least 10 things to see in Paris? Naturally, I haven't been to Paris, but I got help from Farah Nayeri's cultural correspondent New York Times which was in Paris for the FIAC, the Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain, which just ended.
In Paris the past is always declined to the present and you can see it right from the space that the Ville Lumière dedicates to contemporary art, in this moment that contemporaneity has the bitter taste of the first oil.
Ephemeral? Like the Eiffel?
There is little to say about FIAC since it is now closed. But there's a lot to be said about the building that housed it. Not the usual Grand Palais, under renovation, but a temporary building that dialogues with the Eiffel Tower and leaves you speechless: the Grand Palace Ephemeral. An intriguing and post-modern name for the new astonishing 10 thousand square meter Latin cross structure designed by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte and costing the French government 40 million euros.
In 2024 it will host the Judo competitions of the Summer Olympic Games. The structure could really be defined as liquid: it uses materials that are entirely recyclable, disassembled and easily reconfigurable like lego pieces.
The appellation “éphémère” makes you smile a little, thinking of the nearby Eiffel Tower which should also have been “ephemeral”. Perhaps the only real "ephemerality" of this very modern Grand Palais concerns the durability of the materials over time. But are Parisians so interested in the future?
Calder's dragon
Still linked to the FIAC, but visible until 2 January 2022, is thehuge installation (17 meters long by 10 high) by Alexander Calder in Place Vendôme at the base of the tall column of the same name. And the flying dragon assembled by the New York artist in 1975, the year before he died.
It looks like an alien aircraft that crashed into the heart of Paris due to a breakdown. Maybe it comes from a Mars, now a Chinese colony. But Paris is not afraid of the Chinese, Paris is not afraid of anything.
The column-dragon combination is a bit kitsch and one might say “but go to the dôme”… but looking and looking again one is conquered by it. Paris is like this, it is the omnivorous entity de The Enchanted City by Hayao Miyazaki: Swallow it all.
Picasso, oppressed foreigner
For 40 years Pablo Picasso was under special surveillance by the secret police from across the Alps. On November 4, an exhibition opens at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, in the premises of the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, with 200 works by the artist, film material and documents concerning police reports, citizenship practices , correspondence with his mother and other personal belongings of Pablo Picasso during his stay on French soil in the period 1901-1940.
Picasso, considered by the police "an artist of little merit", was associated with Spanish anarchist and communist circles. Furthermore, he did not speak French, he came home late at night, read foreign newspapers and painted beggars and women of the people.
Only in 1958 did France realize the value of the artist: it offered Picasso citizenship and the Legion of Honour. The artist rejected them both. A story, that of Picasso and France, of ingratitude and also of vexation (which lacks the space to tell it).
Georg Baselitz, the foreigner honored
Impossible not to stop at the Center Pompidou, the "refinery" of modern art. There you can find us until March 7, 2022 a big one retrospective by a painter for whom the French have a soft spot, the German Georg Baselitz.
A rare act of reciprocity from the French and Paris towards the (no longer) problematic neighbour. Let us remember that the Germans, i.e. the Nazis, wanted to destroy Paris; in this regard there is the beautiful film of 2014, Diplomacy – One night to save Paris, its Prime Video.
The Dresden artist represented, with his cold and disturbing palette and with his upside-down paintings, the total destruction of Germany (things and consciences) following the war. Everything had turned upside down.
Baselitz, now 83, has received the greatest French recognition in the field of art: the appointment as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a non-French artist, a recognition that had previously been awarded to Andrzej Wajda and Federico Fellini .
At the Pompidou, works covering more than half a century of the artist's activity are exhibited in chronological order.
The spleen of Paris portrayed by another Dumas
On the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay, exposes a contemporary artist to be discovered. It is the South African painter, of Boer origin, Marlene Dumas who pays homage to the most celebrated French poet of the 200th century, Charles Baudelaire, XNUMX years after her birth.
L'Orsay offers 14 paintings by the 68-year-old Cape Town painter, all inspired by The spleen of Paris, subtitle of the Petits Poems en prose, written by Baudelaire between 1855 and 1869.
Only Baudelaire could tell us about the sense of drunkenness that Paris transmits to those who become a prisoner of its spleen! Published in Italy by Feltrinelli; only €1,99 in Kindle store. In its permanent collection, the museum displays three other important works by Dumas.
Africa again; still an artist celebrating a poet
The Galerie Lelong & Co. (Champs-Élysées area) is dedicating a one-man show (shares, until 10 November) to Barthélémy Toguo, French-Cameroonian painter, sculptor, photographer and performance artist.
Toguo is also known for a number of performance calls "Transit" which were staged in places of transit such as airports, railway stations and means of transport. In one performance, he showed up at a flight check-in desk at Charles de Gaulle airport, wearing a candy-filled cartridge belt. In another, he sat in a train compartment in a garbage man's overalls, causing havoc among the passengers and causing the conductor to intervene.
In eight completely blue paintings, named Partages I-VIII, Toguo commemorates Egyptian-born poet and writer Edmond Jabès, who passed away 30 years ago. The paintings, which are evocations of genocide, uprooting and exile, draw a parallel between the writer and the Bamileke people of western Cameroon.
The exhibition also features an interactive installation: visitors can make a donation or send a paper or electronic message to the artist.
Flashback in the great Russian collecting
200 works, never seen outside Russia, belonging to what was once the Morozov Collection, have been reorganized and exhibited (until February 22, 2022) by Anne Baldassari - former director of the Picasso Museum in Paris - at the Fondation Louis Vuitton at the Bois de Boulogne in the futuristic “ship” designed by Frank Gehry.
The collection of the Morozov brothers, textile entrepreneurs in Tsarist Russia, brought together the works, also purchased during frequent business visits to Paris, of the French and Russian avant-garde of the time, made up of artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Bonnard, Denis, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Malevitch, Repin, Larionov, Sérov.
Confiscated by the October revolutionaries and dispersed among Russian museums, the collection was reassembled and arranged by Baldassari, like in a time machine, in a scenography that immerses the visitor in the original layout of the picture gallery created, at the time, by the Morozov brothers.
May 5, 1821, still devoid of so much breath
Could Napoleon have been missing in Paris exactly two hundred years after his death? Of course not! Here Paris, the city where history is the present, dedicates a historical memory to the small great avenue.
Certainly the British will not go to the Villette to visit the memorabilia of the "tyrant", but we Italians, who owe him a lot, should do so. In the Grande Halle de la Villette, until 19 December, moments from Napoleon's life pass by like in a costume film.
The props are 150 absolutely original pieces and furnishings, used by the general and the emperor (also from Elba) in his intimate and sentimental life, but also in his public life. These objects are arranged in a chronological and pedagogical itinerary divided into nine sections.
Here is the jeweled sword, the tricolor sash of ceremonies, the beds, the monogrammed throne and the original wooden cart that carried his body to his final resting place on the island of St. Helena.
Tadao Ando's top hat
Impossible to miss the minimalist intervention of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando at the Paris Stock Exchange where, from 22 May 2021, it is possible to visit the contemporary art collection of the luxury multibillionaire François Pinault (Gucci etc.). It is a unique collection made up of 10 works of art by 400 artists, collected over 40 years by the founder of Kering.
Ando has designed a concrete cylinder 29 meters in diameter, inserted like a matryoshka in the rounded space of the old and glorious building (formerly the home of Caterina de' Medici) which is kept in all its decorative splendor like a shell that incorporates the drum of a washing machine.
Past and present merged in the immanent. Superb!
The temple of the seventh art, invented in Paris
How not to go or come back to Bercy to stop for half a day in the futuristic cathedral of cinema, designed by Frank Gehry: the French Cinémathèque – Paris Cinema Museum. St
several years ago I rented a small hotel (an Ibis) 100 meters from the film library and for almost a week I saw all the screenings there. At the time there was a retrospective of the great Polish cinema (Wajda, Kieslowsky, Zanussi, the first Polansky etc.) with films (in Polish) debates and meetings (in French) at the highest level.
In the breaks between screenings (until late at night), I lingered in Bercy Park, where, after the Seine, the austere and somewhat heavy book-shaped building of the Bibliothèque nationale de France extends. Remarkable inside though.
At the Cinémathèque française until 6 January 2022 there is an exhibition that combines cinema and fashion: Cinémode par Jean Paul Gaultier.
Retrospectives of the month of November: Philip Noyce, John Sayles, Alain Renais, Jacques Rozers, Nicole Garcia, American Fringe, season 5.
What can you call the Cinémathèque française restaurant? Easy: The 400 shots.
Eldorado for cinema lovers. That is for everyone. THU to subscribe to the newsletter.
The thing to imagine
Christo!, he really did it
Unfortunately, since 3 October theArc de Triomphe empaqueté, the posthumous work (this one si éphémère) by Christo, the Bulgarian artist who owes a great deal to Paris, and by his life and art partner Jeanne Claude, the Casablanca artist who is also very close to Paris.
After 60 years from its conception, Christo's project seemed the icon of a utopia, when the French government unexpectedly gave permission for an obviously irreverent act, to cover the emblem of the greatness of the history of the France.
Undoubtedly there was something sacred rather than profane in this project by Christo which also constitutes his greatest artistic legacy. As in fact he had thought it, the polypropylene covering (25 sq km of material), transformed the inert stone of the pompous arch into a mana, giving it a lively, animated, sensual, panting state.
Christo himself had thought of it this way:
“It will be like a living object that will come alive in the wind and reflect light. The folds will move, the surface of the monument will become sensual. People will want to touch the Arc de Triomphe."
Dressed as a sidolizer (cf. Squid Games) which looms like Pasolini's crow (I stole his rag and bottle), I say that Paris is fine, but there is also Trier/Trier with its immense cathedral, the Basilica of Constantine, the Porta Nigra, the Roman baths, the mammoth monument to Marx, a “gift” hors gabarit of the Chinese, the birthplace of the philosopher and agitator, destination for visitors to the (new) celestial empire.
Above all, fantastic porcini mushrooms are harvested around Trier, and it's in season. And there are the stalls with Moselle wine, its "Sekte" and, a little further on, the Hunsrück, set di Home (now on Chile, €3,99 per episode) and, alongside, Luxembourg…
OK, you had fun. Now give me back the can of Sidol! Is Paris the centre, contemporaneity, animation, stimulus? Evabbwell. Trier on the other hand, let me tell you, is suburbanism, traditionalism, torpor, restraint.
See what happens to work in disguise? And now what are you doing? Are you feeding me to Totò?
