Dr. Barnes, Je presume: How a French critic managed to thwart the will of the Monstre Sacre of American Collectors

From the Arts Voyager Archives: Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839-1906, Aix-en-Provence), “The Card Players,” c. 1890-92. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 61.101.1. RP 707. 

by and copyright Michel Ragon
Translated by Paul Ben-Itzak

First published in the Jardin des Arts, November 1964. Michel Ragon turns 95 today. Also celebrating a birthday today is PB-I’s mother Eva Wise, to whom the translation is dedicated. To read more work by Michel Ragon, enter his name on the Arts Voyager search engine, or visit our sister site the Maison de Traduction. Like what you’re reading? Please make a donation today so that we can continue this work. You can designate your payment through PayPal in dollars or Euros to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check through the mail.

MERION, Pennsylvania — During my recent stay in the United States, I was able to obtain — via the State Department, of whom I was the guest — the authorization to visit the Barnes Collection.

I had to wait a month before being admitted, on a Friday, among the 200 visitors who, twice per week, are authorized by the descendants of Dr. Barnes to penetrate his house in Merion, outside Philadelphia.

The State Department must have emphasized my credentials as a novelist and not as an art critic because even today, 13 years after the death of the famous collector, his house is off-limits mainly to journalists and anyone else interested in artistic matters. Reportages on the collection — at least those offering a room-by-room analysis — are thus rare. They tend to focus rather on the works known to have been acquired by the doctor. The secrecy which surrounds the works, the quarantine of the foundation to specialists, the impossibility of reproducing the paintings because it’s also forbidden to photograph not only the interior of the museum, but even the exterior, has endowed the Barnes collection with the mystique of forbidden fruit.

Departing specially from New York for Philadelphia, to get to Merion I had to take a petit suburban train. If Merion is a suburb of Philadelphia, it’s a rural suburb. A miniscule train station, a road which winds along parks lead to the iron grill of the Barnes property. A uniformed police officer stationed in a large car bars the alley. After verifying that my name was indeed on the list, he authorized me to penetrate the park, dominated by a spacious demeure “à la française.” After this you still need to ford the gauntlet of uniformed guards, fork over the $1 entry fee as in any normal museum, and then you’re finally free to roam from one room of the apartments to the next, to regard the works as long as you like, and to take notes, without which this article would not have been possible. All this under the eyes of an army of stony-faced guardians.

But before describing the Barnes collection, it might be useful to recount its origins and, along the way, to sketch a portrait of its founder.

The “Argyrol” millionaire

Albert C. Barnes is the very model of the type of American collector of whom I’ve been able to view numerous contemporary counterparts. These ‘self-made men’ are a sort of Mr. Jourdain as likely to have brilliant streaks of inspiration as to fall prey to ludicrous infatuations. Millionaires subject to chaotic aesthetic impulses, they’re absolutely convinced of being the modern equivalent of the Renaissance art patron.

Born in Philadelphia on January 2, 1872, Barnes had a father who worked for the municipal abattoirs. Often unemployed, he was unable to support the elementary needs of the family. Dr. Barnes’s childhood thus took place in the slums of the fringes of the city. At 11 he started working, as a newsboy. But at 13, an unexpected scholarship enabled him to go to high school, where he cemented friendships with two boys who would go on to become the major American painters of the turn of the century, or at least valued as such in America, John Sloan and William J. Glackens.

John Sloan (1871 – 1951), “Six O’Clock, Winter, 1912.” Oil on canvas. ©2011 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Acquired 1922, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. . From the exhibition “To see as artists see: American Art from the Phillips Collection.”

The origins of Albert C. Barnes’s passion for painting date from these adolescent encounters. His classmates effectively opened up to him a world of art to which he was previously oblivious, with the initial reaction that he tried to become a painter himself. While he was studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania he even participated in some exhibitions. To his fellow students he declared, “I want to earn a lot of money as quick as possible so that I can be free to dedicate myself to the major interest of my life: Art.”

He found his method of making money in Heidelberg, in 1900, in the person of a fellow student, Herman Hille, in the process of preparing a chemistry thesis. Forging a friendship, the two young men conducted experiments together on silver vitellinate. Who should get the credit for what? It seems evident that Dr. Barnes could not have conducted the experiments without Dr. Hille because when he returned to the United States, he asked Hille to join him. Together they put the finishing touches, in 1902, on an anti-septic which they dubbed “Argyrol.” From the moment the product went on sale, success was immediate and Barnes set about eliminating his collaborator and friend. Eventually worn down, Hille sold his shares to Barnes for several hundred thousand dollars.

Barnes starts acquiring

Exclusive owner of Argyrol, Dr. Barnes, who refused to file a patent for his discovery so that the formula would remain secret, renounced his career as a painter to devote himself to the metier of collector.

From the Arts Voyager Archives: John Marin (1870-1953). “Tunk Mountains, Maine,” 1948. Oil on canvas. ©Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection of Louisiana Art & Science Museum, Baton Rouge. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

His initial purchases, in the galleries of New York and Philadelphia, focused on the painters of the Barbizon School, then in vogue among American collectors. When he hooked up again with Glackens, this last, dismayed, realized that his wealthy friend had become the easy target of art dealers of questionable honesty, who took advantage of him to liquidate their holdings of second-rate paintings. Glackens urged him to go to New York and see the modern work being showcased by Alfred Stieglitz. Sloan, also reunited with his former classmate, seconded this idea. Barnes thus gave himself over to acquiring the work of the American modern painters who formed, on the eve of World War I, the first American school of modern painting, known as the Ashcan School: Prendergast, Demuth, and John Marin. Interested via them in Modern Art, Barnes decided he wanted to know their French models. To this end, he sent Glackens to Paris in 1912, with a $20,000 budget, to sow the seeds of his collection. Glackens started out by buying, from Renoir, his “Young Girl Reading.” Next he acquired Van Gogh’s “Portrait of the postman Roulin”; in total 20 paintings, among them Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet, Seurat, Degas.

Confronted with this bounty, Barnes, completely stupefied, was convinced that the art dealers of Paris must have strung Glackens along like the art dealers of New York had strung him along. Glackens nevertheless urged him to live among these paintings for a while, and Barnes was rapidly conquered by Impressionism.

In January 1913, he in turn traveled to Paris, and the role that Glackens had played for him with Impressionism, Leo and Gertrude Stein performed with Cubism. It was in effect chez the Steins that Barnes discovered Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris, Léger, Braque. Before leaving he bought a new Renoir for $800 and a Matisse and a Picasso for $10. In this same year of 1913, he added 14 canvasses by Cezanne to the two he already possessed.

Sure of himself, Dr. Barnes started writing about art. His ideas began to earn him a reputation for extravagance. Without doubt many agreed with him when he argued that the cubist Picasso was making a fool of the public, but they were scandalized when he claimed that he’d never trade one of his Renoirs for a Raphael “Madonna.” Already, Barnes did not hold back or impose any restrictions on himself when it came to his paintings. Every year, on arriving in Paris he set aflutter the art dealers for whom he’d become “the uncle from America.” Paul Guillaume succeeded in retaining him and sold him numerous African sculptures as well as work by Segonzac, Marcoussis, Foujita, Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin, and Derain. Pascin introduced him to Lipchitz, whom he considered to be the most important contemporary sculptor, and from whom he commissioned an exterior decoration for his foundation.

Up to this point, as we’ve seen, Dr. Barnes’s choices had been singularly guided. But in January 1923 an event took place which would go on to make of Dr. Barnes the “collector-creator” that he dreamed of being. In Paul Guillaume’s vitrine he spotted a canvas by an unknown painter who set him off: Chaim Soutine’s “Petit Patissier.” (Little Baker.) He reproached Paul Guillaume, dumbfounded, for not having told him about such an ingenious painter. Paul Guillaume was not particularly interested in Soutine, but he was aware that a struggling dealer, Zborowski, was desperately trying to sell Soutine’s work. Barnes and Paul Guillaume therefore hurried over to Zborowski’s. Barnes bought his entire stock of Soutines, according to some accounts for 60,000 francs. (Less than $100.) But Barnes wanted to meet the artist, who he found in his reeking studio in La Ruche. (The Hive, a fulcrum for Montparnasse artists in the 1920s.) Without hesitating he bought, once more, every single painting or, with those acquired from Zborowsky, 100 in total.

The collection is put off limits

At this point Dr. Barnes found himself in possession of a collection so important that he decided, with good reason, to display it at the Fine Arts School of Pennsylvania. On April 11, 1923, he therefore let the public see his great treasures for the first time. The reaction in the press was unanimous. Some spoke of the art of madmen, others of garbage, and they all attacked Soutine, who in Barnes’s eyes was the great painter he’d been searching for for so long.

Devastated, Barnes decided to close the doors of his foundation to journalists. This foundation, reserved for students –among whom, recalling his own impoverished origins, Barnes made sure were included numerous Blacks and workers — opened in the Spring of 1924. As is the case today, it was open to the public just two days per week — with the proviso that every visitor had to be approved by Barnes, who minutely scrutinized the identities of those demanding permission. Thus it was that Le Corbusier was excluded and that Alfred H. Barr, celebrated curator of the Modern Art Museum, had to use a fake name and sneak in with a group of professors.

As he grew older, Dr. Barnes became impossible, getting into arguments with everybody, committing ill-considered acts during his changes of mood (as when he traded seven magnificent Cezannes for inferior 18th-century tableaux), engaged in polemics with the newspapers, and pursued his hatred against everyone connected, whether intimately or at a distance, with the art world. On July 24, 1951, speeding along at his customary 124 KM an hour, as if the road belonged to him, he hit a truck and died instantly.

Following several trials over the possibility of opening the collection to the broader public, a 1961 court decision ordered that the foundation allow it to be visited two days per week by a minimum of 200 people. But the foundation’s directors still select who can come in and who cannot, choosing among the requests addressed to them.

Paul Cézanne, (Aix-en-Provence, 1839-1906, Aix-en-Provence), “Bathers,” 1899-1904. Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 61.7 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Amy McCormick Memorial Collection, Chicago, inv. no. 1942.457. RP 859. Critiquing an earlier “Bathers” tableau included in the third Independent Impressionist exhibition mounted in April 1878 at 6, rue Le Peletier, the critic Georges Riviere wrote in “L’Impressioniste,” a journal launched expressly for the exhibition at Renoir’s suggestion, that Cézanne, “the artist who has been most subjected to attack and maltreatment during the last fifteen years by both press and public,” “belongs to the race of giants. Since he cannot be compared with anyone else, people find it easier to deny him his due. Yet he has his admired counterparts in the history of painting; and if the present does not render him justice, the future will class him with his peers, among the demi-gods of art.” (Cited by Henri Perruchot in “La Vie de Cézanne,” Hachette, 1958, published in English as “Cezanne,” World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, copyright Perpetua Limited, 1961. Perruchot was Ragon’s editor at the Jardin des Arts magazine.) Courtesy Budapest Museum of Fine Arts.

Thus it was that I found myself entering the first room, dominated by the large fresco of Matisse’s “Bathers,” executed by the artist at Barnes’s request in 1933 and of which an initial version can be seen at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris. One is initially astounded by the quantity of Renoirs and Cezannes. Notably the latter’s “Bathers” and “Card Players.” But among the 120 Renoirs that one finds from room to room, the worse are mixed in with the best. That is to say that there are Renoirs next to Maillols, but also a lot of Renoirs next to Boldinis.

This is for example the case in two small rooms, on the two sides of a larger one and where, next to Renoir, one finds accesorized very tiny works by Degas, Seurat, Rousseau, Van Gogh, and Daumier.

A Museum in Complete Disorder

Moving from room to room, one is stopped short by indisputable chefs-d’oeuvre, and surprised by the high number of mediocre works, all stacked together, all epics melanged, with absolutely no concern for museology. And there are almost as many Glackens as there are Renoirs.

Take Room III. You’ve got Puvis de Chavanne’s “Prometheus,” a small Titien, a large Renoir, two small, outrageously varnished Chardins, one Milton Avery (a second-tier American painter), a miniscule Bosch, “Christ outraged,” a small Greco, “Jesus before the Crucifixion,” and several small medieval masters.

In Room IV, more anonymous medievals, a small Lucas de Leyde triptyque, a Chinese portrait from the XIIIth century, a small Durer, next to a Lancret, a Rubens sketch, and a small icon.

Room V, a “Man in a Hat,” by Hals, hangs below a Watteau, right next to a wall of Renoirs. A decent little Bosch hangs above Cezanne’s “Small swimmers,” right next to a Rubens placed, of course, below a Renoir. A Seurat sea-scape. A nice Soutine portrait in red and a skinned lapin by the same author below a Demuth.

One can’t help being surprised by the sorry lot of Soutine’s paintings. Whereas Renoir is throughout accorded the place of honor, Soutine merits no better, more often than not, than being perched above the doors, where he’s hard to see. Did Barnes thus want to protect his favorite painter from potential assaults?

The pell-mell confusion of values, the senseless placement, is noticeable in every room. In Room VI, for example, there’s a large and beautiful Renoir swimmer in blouse, flanked by two small Corots, one Lotiron (sic), and a Goya portrait. Gauguin’s “Haere Pape” is smothered under a Renoir head, between two Prendergasts. A decent Manet (of fishermen tossing a boat into a fire) is next to a little “Annonciation” by Greco and a curious small Cezanne landscape, in full ink, next to Van Gogh. Two Chirico personages, from 1925, are placed under a Demuth.

In Room VII, between a Chardin “Still Life” and more Renoirs, there’s a surprising and indiscreet Courbet, “Woman putting on her stockings,” one of the most immodest canvasses possible. Miro is represented by a simple gouache, below a Gritchenko sold by Paul Guillaume.

Room XIV offers a magnificent surprise: Rousseau’s “Tiger Hunt.” A very good Soutine (above the door). Two monks à la death-head, by Greco; Redon, Daumier.

Room XVI, miniature Persians, Claude Lorrain, Chinoiseries, very fine Soutine “Flowers,” a Monticelli and numerous Gritchenkos. Room XVIII, some very little items certainly bought at a bargain, but which bear witness to the interest of Barnes even for the artists who began to reveal themselves just before his death because we see a small figurative painting by Geer Van Velde and four miniscule Wols. A postcard-sized Wols figures next to equally ‘modest’ work by Klee and Roualt.

Room XVII: A Picasso from the Blue period, a Cezanne, a Renoir, a Pascin but also a Cross, a Per Krogh and a naif by a French artist unknown but not without charm, who signs a “View of Bordeaux in 1884,” resembling for that matter Venice: “Guiraud, Jean-Baptiste, born in Saint-Chinian, Herault.”

From the Arts Voyager Archives: Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954),”Luxe, calme, et volupté,” 1904. Oil on canvas, 38 3/4 x 46 5/8 in. (98.5 x 118.5 cm). Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Gift in lieu of estate taxes, 1982. On extended loan to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

To access the second floor, you need to mount a stairway ornamented with tapisseries by Roualt, Picasso, and Matisse. Room XIX, Matisse’s triptyque “Luxe, calme, et volupté,” Modigliani’s “Beatrice Hastings,” a small Wols gouache, a Picasso from the Blue period, a green Soutine, an Utrillo, a Rousseau. Room XX, drawings, African art and Lipchitz sculptures; fine Cezanne water-colors, lots of Pascin, a small Wols. Room XXI: Modigliani, Utrillo, African masks; a very handsome Soutine “Trees” practically invisible above the door, according to the rule. Room XXII, more African masks and two large Modigliani women; a small Klee above a work by the contemporary Italian painter Afro, and between a Lotiron and a Chirico. Room XXIII, a fantastic Henri Rousseau (a nude woman being attacked by a bear that a hunter kills with a rifle shot, or the theme of St. George and the Dragon “modernized,” as Rousseau put it); a large Renoir, work by Lurcat, Chirico, and a Vieira da Silva from 1947.

From the Arts Voyager Archives: Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839-1906, Aix-en-Provence), “Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine,” 1886-87. Oil on canvas, 59.6 x 72.3 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., inv. no. 0285. RP 598. If Paris provided him — notwithstanding his cantankerousness — with collegial support, or at least the feeling that he was not alone in attempting to extend his art — it was to his native Aix that Cézanne regularly returned, ever inspired by the bucolic surroundings in which he, Emile Zola, and Baptism Baille had often escaped as teenagers. Courtesy Budapest Museum of Fine Arts.

Citing everything would be too fastidious, but this elementary enumeration gives you an idea of the incoherencies of the accrochage. One also realizes that the Barnes collection is far from being exemplary, as is the case for example of the admirable Frick collection in New York. The Barnes collection reflects the tastes of an eccentric and despot who, on three and four levels, accumulates his treasures, without sorting them and without any apparent discernment. Admirable Rousseaus… and second-tier Rousseaus. Renoir and Glackens. Cezannes … and Jean Hugos. Drawings infantile, from folk art, of unknown naifs and, throughout on the walls, overloading them even more, between paintings already accumulated to the maximum, iron work. No titles on the frames. No dates. A fine portrait of Madame Cezanne, but also the worse Van Gogh that I’ve ever seen: a nude woman, with stockings, on a bed, in an oval frame. One gets the impression that many of these paintings were bought for their signature. If Seurat’s “Les Poseuses,” Cezanne’s “Mount St.-Victoire,” and Manet’s “Le Linge” are incontestable chefs-d’oeuvre worthy of the most important museums, the Barnes collection is above all a Renoir museum (Pierre Cabanne, in his “Novel of the Great Collectors,” estimates that Barnes has 120. But they seem like a thousand.) As far the 100 Cezannes, the 80 Matisses, and the 100 Soutines which Cabanne also cites, scattered from room to room they’re smothered among the Renoirs and the Glackens. 2000 paintings in the Barnes collection, in one incoherent museum. These painters, hidden, shielded from critics and specialists, have benefited in their ensemble from an exaggerated fame. When the Barnes collection is classed in a reasonable manner, we’ll perceive its lacunes, its weaknesses, but there remain nevertheless three or four rooms-full of chefs-d’oeuvre which will continue to make it one of the leading collections in the world

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Lutèce Diary, 36: The butcher, the baker, & the fromage maker or, Pearls before swine (w/apologies to Kurt Vonnegut Jr)

Marie Laurencin, “Les Biches,” image copyright Artcurial, from its recent Prints and Illustrated Books auction in Paris.

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

(The Lutèce Diaries are sponsored by, among others, Ed Winer, Eva Winer, Linda Ramey, Aaron Winer, Lewis Campbell, and Sharon Savage of the San Francisco Bay Area; H&R B. and CV of Paris and Saint-Cyprien and Belves (Dordogne), France; Chris Keel, Marty Sohl, and Suki John of Fort Worth, Texas; Don Singer of Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Nancy Reynolds and Matthew Brookoff of New York City; Martin Epstein of Hudson Valley, New York; Susan Kierr of New Orleans; Polly Hyslop of Fairbanks, Alaska; Marcello Angelini of Tulsa, Oklahoma; Freespace Dance in Montclair, New Jersey; and Slippery Rock University Dance. To join them, please make a donation through PayPal by designating your payment to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to find out how to donate by check sent through the mail.)

“I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
Singing don’t look back you can never look back.”

— Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer”

PARIS — I know I said I’d sworn off cemeteries, determined to spend more time with the living and less with my dead icons: Sarah Bernhardt (Pere Lachaise), François Truffaut (Cemetery Montmartre), Serge Gainsbourg and Alfred Dreyfus (Montparnasse; French state radio this morning shared a rare recording of Captain Dreyfus from March 27, 1912, proclaiming in a crystal-clear tenor, “It’s a question of justice and humanity.” The most sadly ironic aspect of the Dreyfus family tomb is that under “Alfred, died 1932” is the name of “Julie, deported 1942.” Justice and humanity are ephemeral. Among Dreyfus’s cemetery mates is the collaborationist Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, who no doubt signed his niece’s deportation order — Laval’s tomb, like Lee Harvey Oswald’s in the sprawling bone orchard of Handley, Texas, also known for its antique stores, wedding cake shops, and doll boutiques, is unmarked.) But could I help it if in late February I found myself standing on the sinking deck of a lavish condominium shoulder to shoulder with a two-ton bronze Buddha (“The movers finally agreed to try to lift it over the fence from the street with the understanding that they couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t drop it,” the condo’s sultry 62-year-old French owner told us.) looking out over the back, penumbrous, most sinister-looking gruesome end / wall of Pere Lachaise (if my cemetery memory serves me, and I think you know it does, on the other side of the  monument to the Resistants and up the hill from Apollinaire’s babe Marie Laurencin; to read the Surrealist poet’s art reviews of the time — I recently scored a compendium of them at a vide-grenier on the fringes of the Montparnasse cemetery — you’d think she was the most talented female artist in Paris of the epoch), floundering in a doomed relationship (Apollinaire did better) and smarting over the reception my date’s supposedly Leftist Israeli friend “Schmuel” had given my Poulet a la Palestinian? (“What is it with this ‘Palestinian’ Chicken? I’ve never heard of anything so absurd. There’s no such thing!”)

The female part of the doomed relationship — let’s call her Vanessa, since that’s what we called her in an earlier Lutèce Diary when she picked me up at a vernissage after I’d just had three teeth extracted and tried to read all the names of the children of Paris who gave their lives for the country in World War I on the new plaque in their memory posted on the front side of the cemetery, which no one but me seems to know about (cemeteries are my beat) — had been picking on me all night. Someone put ketchup out on the table to drown the Palestinian chicken with; it must have been me, the tooth-ugly American. (It was her allegedly Leftist Israeli pal; no Palestinian spiceyness for him, Bubalah.) When we entered, the first thing she told our hosts by way of introduction was “This is Paul, his teeth state is only temporary.” (Read: “Don’t think I’d ever go out with anyone who really had teeth this bad.”) When I challenged Vanessa on this a few minutes later, she insisted, “Well, c’est marquant!” (If I wasn’t so desperate to be in a relationship coute que coute I might have defended myself: “Personally, I think my trust and sensitivity and brains and writing are more marquant. Why didn’t you introduce me as a journalist or translator?” I say ‘desperate’ but in fact my brain with all its complexes — “This is the best I can do, I don’t deserve any better” — was lagging behind my heart; when Vanessa had invited me to follow her down to the master bedroom, supposedly to inspect our hosts’ record collection, I wasn’t even tempted to jump her bones, although this may have had something to do with the increased proximity of the bone orchard, given that the bedroom was in the basement. Or that she chose this moment to tell me about les ‘feux feuillets,’ the firefly-like lights that according to her rose above the graves, supposedly generated by the gas of the decomposing bodies, which reminded me of our rapidly decomposing relationship.) But the apex came after the cheese, which Vanessa said she’d scored at a new discovery, the Pere Lachaise Fromagerie, just across the street from the lip of the cemetery, and whose très elderly owner apparently had one foot in it. “The first thing she asked me when I walked into her boutique was, ‘Have you eaten yet?’, before bringing out a very limited tray of fromages.” Of course with this build-up, I had to try all three, and of course with all three in me, even if I didn’t quite have the lacto-intolerant attack Meg Ryan has on a southbound train in “French Kiss” (letting out a rail to rival her faux-orgasmic groaning in “When Harry Met Sally”), conveniently near where Frenchman Kevin Kline’s estranged family has its vineyards, I did nonetheless want to make sure the cheese had every opportunity to come out before the long walk back to the pré St.-Gervais, whence the two visits I made to the bathroom before we were all kicked out by the absentee American host (he’d drifted in and out of the party, according to his mood, most piquantly after chanelling McLuhan — one of the few celebrities who was *not* buried across the street — and declaring “The medium is the message”), “Alouicious” — I’d brought the chicken as my contribution to the moving day of these people I didn’t know, figuring it would at least give Vanessa an opportunity to see that I wasn’t intolerant of all her friends, just the Islamophobic ones I’d had to kick out of my place earlier in the month — which toilet pilgrimages prompted Vanessa to observe/ask/complain, “You sure do go to the bathroom a lot,” apparently forgetting one of the confessions I’d made before the first and last time we slept together, “The more someone observes that I go to the bathroom a lot, the more I think I need to go to the bathroom a lot.”

What’s brought the resurgence of this memory to a higher part of my body (in English this is known as ‘bass ackward thinking’) is the news that the octogenerian fromageriste of Pere Lachaise has just hung out her gone fishin’ permanently sign. I found this out by accident; trying to impress a Bellevilloise newbie with my Bellevilloise conaissance, after realizing I’d trumped myself about which side of the rue Menilmontant she lives on, the best I could do to recuperate was spout out three recommendations from that side: Where to find the best merguez sausage (home-made and relatively low grease, at the first butcher on the left as you head up Menilmon’; also my chicken source for the Poulet à la Palestinian, the Palestinian part coming from a traditional Palestinian spice mixture that I found in the pré St.-Gervais rental and that Vanessa’s allegedly Leftist Israeli friend has apparently never heard of, probably because it’s been many years since he passed his military service in Occupied Palestine), where to procure scrumptious Diplomates (like bread pudding, but better, packed with chocolate chips and pineapples) for 1 Euro and more generous than Jared Kushner is being with the Palestinians, although that’s not too hard (a corner bakery between the Metro Menilmontant and the cemetery, and whose happily scarf-wearing matron might have made Vanessa’s scarf-fearing friends — Vanessa herself once told me it was the first step to fascism — think twice and understand that it’s all right), and the famous fromageriste, who will hopefully have many years of fishin’ ahead of her before she returns to the neighborhood to install herself permanently across the street from her boutique.

When my correspondent reported back about the “gone fishin’ permanently” sign (I’m para-translating; it actually announced “Parti a le retraite”), my first instinct of course was regret (that I’d never seen the cheese shop nor met the fromagerista myself), until I remembered the negative associations from that night and indeed that relationship; this was the last time I saw Vanessa, which I guess I should have anticipated after I suggested we rdv at the Metro Pere Lachaise (“Never a good idea to set a romantic rdv at a cemetery,” a Chinese-American choreographer friend teaching Kung-Fu in Antwerp had once advised me when I’d set another with an American girl at the Cemetery Montmartre, before taking her to see Cocteau’s “Orpheus” at the cinema with the Cocteau-designed aluminum chandeliers where “Amelie” goes to the movies in “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulenc”; don’t look back). Given the way Vanessa had glared at me from the kitchen counter while I’d been explaining the lyrics of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” to her friend Annie (the one I’d been trying to pick up at the vernissage while Vanessa was trying to pick up me, ignoring at the time that Annie was already spoken for by “Schmuel”; Annie who earlier in the evening had found the nicest way I’ve ever encountered to ask me not to talk so loud: “I have very sensitive ears, they actually hurt easily”), I’d assumed that her doubts about her ‘adherence’ to our relationship couldn’t be that serious, or were just talk, if she could get so jealous at something there was nothing to be jealous about, but as we continued turning in circles (while holding hands) around the Place Gambetta trying to find the avenue Gambetta which would take her back to the Metro underneath the cemetery after we left the dinner party, without any prompting from me she kept up a one-way dialogue about why she was holding back (or having trouble ‘adhering’). “Is it the fact that you couldn’t” (wouldn’t) “get it up the first night we slept together?” (She’d initially told me sex wasn’t important to her, and that she agreed with me that it can’t be separated from love.) “The fact that you threw my” (Islamophobic) “friends out of your home?” (This was before she asked to spend the night.) N’empeche that when, after a serious French kissing bout that would have been right at home in “French Kiss” — we could have played the lovers making out in the background while Meg was having her lacto-intolerant attack and Kevin was assuring her, “Do not worry, we will get off here, it iz my family’s wine estate” — provoked me to ask, “Why don’t you come home with me?” she responded, “In principle I’m not against it.” It’s a far cry from “Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime” (not to mention “Tu vas et tu viens / entre mes reins”), but remember (as Vanessa kept reminding me and her friends) my teeth were still a work in progress and thus my expectations were low.

I could go on here with the climax but fortunately for you, Vanessa, and most of all for me, I’ve just read this Schiller citation in an 1857 edition of the complete poems of Alfred de Musset that a reader/friend gave me: “Madame, I’d rather throw the pearl that is my heart back into the Ocean than make a bad deal for it.” Or as Bob de Dylan wrote about 100 years later: “It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, Babe, iffin’ you don’t know by now…. /When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I’ll be gone, / You’re the reason I’m a travelin’ on. But don’t think twice it’s all right…. / I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind, /You could have done better but I don’t mind. You just kinda wasted my precious time…. ” I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul.

Lutèce Diary, 35: A Dreamcatcher meets the White Pimple on the Ile St.-Louis

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

(The Lutèce Diaries are sponsored by, among others, Ed Winer, Eva Winer, Linda Ramey, Aaron Winer, Lewis Campbell, and Sharon Savage of the San Francisco Bay Area; H&R B. and CV of Paris and Saint-Cyprien (Dordogne), France; Chris Keel, Marty Sohl, and Suki John of Fort Worth, Texas; Don Singer of Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Nancy Reynolds of New York City; Martin Epstein of Hudson Valley, New York; Susan Kierr of New Orleans; Polly Hyslop of Fairbanks, Alaska; Marcello Angelini of Tulsa, Oklahoma; Freespace Dance in Montclair, New Jersey; and Slippery Rock University Dance. To join them, please make a donation through PayPal by designating your payment to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to find out how to donate by check sent through the mail.)

When I passed into the valley of Ti-n-tamat, I said in my interior to [my wife] The-anegh:
The night is coming; I’m going to look for the camels.
The-anegh, sleep will not come to me [because the thought of you is ever-present].

— Elkhasen agg Ikki des Kel Amedjid (1830 – 1894), Touareg poet, translated into French by Charles de Foucauld, as cited by Amalia Dragani and published by the journal Africa of the University of Cambridge in PB-I’s translation of her article

Lay down my child
and rest your head
Gonna hang the dreamcatcher
Right over your bed.
Lay down, lay down
My baby
Don’t be afraid
Dreamcatcher’s watching
Gonna chase the bad dreams away.

— Donna Summer, “Dreamcatcher”

I fall in love too easily.

— Frank Sinatra

PARIS — Absent the red wine, I had to look for my sparkle elsewhere, and soon found it in the violette-maned, bespectacled young woman sitting 20 feet away from me dangling her fuchsia-stockinged legs over the tip of the Ile St.-Louis facing a Notre-Dame somewhat the worse for wear after 800 years. Moi, with my shining new teeth I wasn’t quite so decrepit as the church, at least on the outside. On the inside, I was still smarting from my failure the previous week-end to offer to share my clear plastic umbrella with the Paris skyline with the lissome young woman in jeans and hooded white North Face jacket standing next to me on the corner of the rue Marie & Louise waiting for a stoplight to change so that we could march under a torrential rain from the Canal St.-Martin to the boulevard Belleville. “I was afraid she’d think I was some kind of weirdo trying to ‘drague’ her,” I’d explained later to my longtime friend Anatole in his electrician’s shop while he tinkered over a silver stand-up neon-tube lamp from the 1960s. “What does that say about what I think of myself?” “You think too much is what it says,” Anatole had answered without looking up from the tangle of wires upon which he was working his magic. Then, plugging the brown chord into a multi-prise outlet which fed an amber light into the neon bar, he’d concluded: “You just need to act.”

So once the violette-haired fuchsia-stockinged nana in the school-girl style skirt had smiled at me from under her librarian-style glasses on the Ile St.-Louis — home-field advantage — I knew I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t venture something. After we’d toasted each other — “Tchin!” “Tchin!” — over, respectively, my cup of thermos tea and her plastic water bottle, the best I could come up with (as Cary Grant, who, indicating the couples making out on benches on the Right Bank of the Seine as he stood watching from the deck of a bateau mouche with Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donen’s “Charade” had boasted “I taught them everything they know” — blanched in embarrassment at how I was botching his legacy), was:

“Vous-etes Parisienne?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and my French isn’t very good.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“Which part of America?”

“Actually I’m English.”

“I’m part English.”

“Actually I’m from Germany.”

“Where in Germany?”

At this point (perhaps realizing I wasn’t hearing a word she was saying, even though we were now shouting at each other over a gay male couple trying to make out… as Cary had taught them) she picked up her bottle, scooped up her skirt, approached the spot where my legs were perched on a set of stairs leading down to the river, and delicately sat down next to me, as a barge bearing 10 tons of sand and 10 centuries of history passed under the bridge connecting the Ile de Cité to the Ile St.-Louis.

“Dortmund.”

“Dortmund, Dortmund. I think there’s a good dance company there.”

“I design children’s books.”

“I once wrote a children’s book.”

“Oh, you did?” she beamed (I’ve avoided using this très inexact stand-in for ‘said’ for 40 years, but it fits here to describe the delight that lit up her eyes and cheeks and also sets up the comparison between Parisian and foreign women that’s right around the corner; be thankful that I’ve not yet told you her name, thus saving you from the facile alliteration which would ensue were I to replace ‘she’ with ‘Betty’), wide-eyed with marvel.

“Actually, it’s a group of children’s stories with the umbrella title ‘The Story the Sea-Shell Told.’ They’re stories a father tells to his daughter as they wait for the mother to come home from a late Christmas Eve errand.”

“‘The Story the Sea-Shell Told’?” she encouraged me, the eyes now so wide they illuminated the delicate magenta freckles on her dimpled cheeks like Gatsby’s green light beckoning from the other side of the Sound with its dreams of some kind of epic grandeur.

“Yes, you know, that large shell, in English it’s called a conch shell” — at this point I cupped the imaginary crustacean over my ear — “where if you listen you can hear the sea?” (Years ago, after reading about a conch excursion off New York Harbor in Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel,” I’d spent an evening scouring all of Little Italy for a restaurant still serving scungilli, and finally found one down the street from my pad on W. 8th Street next to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady studio.)

“Yes yes, in Bremen they say that you can hear the Brothers Grimm. Why did you decide to write children’s stories?”

“Actually they wrote themselves. I was going through a break-up and at the same time I was baby-sitting. I couldn’t very well sob my heart out to the seven-year-old, so I made up stories for her that at the same time served as parables to help me process what I was going through.” (It had begun innocently enough, with the woman, 12 years my senior — the perfect 36 — beaming at me across a dinner table in a Pacific Heights mansion converted into a restaurant and exclaiming “You’re so nubile!”)

“Such as?”

“Such as the story of ‘The White Pimple.'”

“‘The White Pimple!'” she said, clapping her hands together as if clamoring to hear the story as that girl had done in the Parnassus street bedroom of a San Francisco Edwardian 33 years ago. “It’s about a monster pimple?”

“No, it’s about a beautiful princess who wakes up one morning to find a white pimple on her face. She demands that her father the king do something, he engages a series of magicians who each in turn produce increasingly disastrous results: The pimple multiplies, the pimple is joined by warts, the pimples and warts turn multiple colors. Each one she kicks out the window of her room in the tower — kind of like that princess in the Tower of Nesle over there on the other side of the Seine who stuffed her dead lover into a burlap sack and tossed it to servants waiting on the sidewalk below so they could dump his body in the river — and he tumbles to his death.”

“Hah hah hah!”

“…until the last one, who takes one look at the pimple and faints. The princess rushes to his side and asks, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong, is it my pimple?’ ‘Yes, it’s your pimple. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ From that day on, every morning when she wakes up the princess still rushes to her mirror, only now it’s not to see if the pimple has disappeared but to assure herself that ‘it’s still there. My BEAUTIFUL white pimple is still there.'”

“That’s the problem today,” the young woman assented (she’d stopped beaming). “The ads on the television and in the magazines are telling all the girls they have to be skinny and have a certain look.”

“Yes, it’s really sick when nine-year-olds are going on diets.”

“And the social networks make it worse, like Instagram.”

“I don’t know Instagram.”

“It lets you doctor your pictures, so they’re not really you.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to doctor this girl’s picture. (And now I can’t imagine why I didn’t tell her this at the time. That’s me, ‘toujours en retard’ ((always late)) Ben-Itzak. Ou en bon française: ‘Lentement sur le pick-up.’)

“My name’s Paul.”

“Betty.”

“Enchanté…. Is it ‘Bette’ or ‘Betty’?”

“Betty.” Given that recently I’d been spending more of my Paris evenings watching re-runs of Mad Men than offering my umbrella to lissome Parisiennes, it was inevitable that the first girl I would meet on a rare night out would be named Betty. (And in her doll-like egg-shaped visage, look like a sort of post-modern 2019 European update of Betty Draper Francis.)

“And you design children’s books?”

“Well, that’s just one of my jobs. I also design hard rock albums. And you’re a writer!” The way she said it made it sound like I was on my way to the other side of the Seine to join Zola in the Pantheon.

“Yes.”

“This is my tenth time in Paris. I have to go back tomorrow,” we were Thursday, “and Saturday I’ll be back at my desk in Dortmund!”

Our conversation shifted to the topic of dreams after she asked about the furry white ring onto which the stumps of turquoise and orange feathers were fastened by yellow pipe-cleaners, with a red bead stringed to a sort of cat’s cradle plastic arrangement in the middle, le tout tied to my red bandana by a red ribbon. “It’s a dreamcatcher I found on the sidewalk just after crossing the frontier to Paris on my birthday,” I explained. “It’s for catching nightmares.”

“Maybe you could lend it to me. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately.”

“Why?”

“I keep having these nightmares.”

“What kind of nightmares?”

“I’m entering an… how do you say… elevator?”

“Like the ones in ‘Elevator for the Scaffold,’ with the Miles Davis soundtrack, where the guy gets stuck on an elevator all night after murdering his lover Jeanne Moreau’s husband.” (You’re doing fine, PB-I; a girl with fuchsia stockings who’s just come over to you on the Ile St. Louis as the Sun setting over the Seine and Notre-Dame supplies all the AT-MO-SPHERE you need starts talking elevators and instead of making like Eddie Money and proposing to share your two tickets to Paradise, you continue talking murder.)

“Well, in my dreams the elevator has no floor and I keep falling.”

“You know, in the southern Algerian Touareg dialect of ‘Tamahaq'” — on my way to this rendez-vous, a frantic bouquiniste had tried to sell me a copy of the first Touareg-French dictionary, produced in the early 20th century by the French missionary Charles de Foucauld while he was charting 2,000 kilometers of Touareg territory, that I’d been casually examining by lowering the price — “the word for dream, ‘tahârgit’ or ‘tergit,’ also means ‘nocturnal pollution.'” (This detail had been unearthed by Amalia Dragani, an Italian researcher whose paper on the dreams of the Touaregs I’d once translated for the journal Africa of the University of Cambridge.) “Myself, I seem to dream a lot about looking down at my feet and discovering I’ve lost my shoes. Or going back to school and signing up for all these classes I really want to take and then missing them.”

“Well Paul, I have to go now.” (I’m misplacing this announcement, so you shouldn’t necessarily connect it to the dreams.) The Sun was just setting over the Seine.

“Here’s my card.”

“Oh, you have a card!” Betty declared as if I’d just handed her my Legion of Honor pin instead of a very home-made looking brown business card. “I’ll look at your sites. And I’ll write you.”

Of course, me being me, afterwards I reproached myself for not telling Betty about the Open Studios of Belleville starting the next day and suggesting she delay her departure so that I could show her around ‘my’ ‘hood. (Now that I think about this logically, having been shuffled around to four different stations by the French train company to change one ticket, I understand that this might have been problematic.) When I recounted my victory — over my own inhibitions — to Anatole on Saturday, he was proud of me and agreed that just in itself, the moment was worth savoring, like a brief encounter he’d had recently with a Turkish woman on the boulevard Magenta, after which he’d told me, “Note that she was foreign. Couldn’t have happened with a French girl.” So he was not surprised when I told him Betty was German. “Foreigners just seem to be more open, less fearful,” he pointed out, than French women, an assessment I agreed with. “Yes, I remember once several years ago” — 15 actually — “I had an intern here from California. We were walking in the 16th arrondissement when we stopped for a toilet break. When I emerged a French guy was chatting Nicole up. Later she explained to me that after driving past her on his motorcycle, he’d screeched to a halt, circled back, and asked her, “You’re not French, are you?” “How did you know that?” “You’re smiling. French girls never smile.”

I know what you’re thinking: If French girls are so closed, what am I doing in France, where the odds would seem to be stacked against me, trouver l’ame-soeur-wise? But a ready smile can also be vacuous and remember, you’re talking to a guy who isn’t quick enough to offer to share his clear plastic umbrella with a damsel in distress being doused on an afternoon when “it’s raining like a cow pissing,” to cop a French metaphor. (Maybe I’ll try that line the next time: “Madame, may I shelter you from the cow piss?,” although if she’s French this may just prompt her to invert my invitation to “May I piss on you?”) But the middle passage — after the initial suspicion and before the final curdling of a wound I have no idea how I inflicted — between me and French women is usually pretty magical, or at least sympathetic. We connect, and often around subjects on which we share the same perspective.

On the first night of the cat-sitting gig up top Belleville near the Place des Fetes which had made it possible for me to be there on the Ile St.-Louis to encounter Betty that evening, I’d discovered that my client and I were in complete synchronicity on the ludicrousness of the latest fashion trend which has half the women of Paris trying to dress like Sid Vicious, with pre-fabricated holes and slices in various parts of their jeans. (“Coming over here from the Metro,” I’d told the client whom we’ll call Sylvie for now as the verdict on our future is still out, “I crossed a woman on the Place des Fetes who had so many holes in and strips of rented clothing hanging from her jeans I was tempted to ask, “Mais Madame, qu’est que vous etes arrivé?” Nodding vigorously, ‘Sylvie’ had informed me with pride (by way of affirming that she didn’t follow mode), “All my clothes are second-hand. It’s just not that important.” It was at about this moment, looking over at her from my too-wide grey Marseille jeans, third-hand striped pink short sleeve shirt, and found class project dreamcatcher attached to Texas bandana (another good omen was that she had a genuine one hanging over the bed in which I’d be sleeping while she was away), as the argyle salve ‘Sylvie”d given me continued to heal the five-inch finger wound I’d inflected on myself by reaching into my back-pack to search for my reading glasses at the Place d’Italie Metro so I could decipher the map and forgetting about the unprotected razors I’d hastily stashed there, that I’d started to fall in love with her.

Le Feuilleton (the serial), 3: “Trompe-l’œil,” Michel Ragon’s groundbreaking 1956 satire of the contemporary art market (in French and English), Part Three

By and copyright Michel Ragon
Translation copyright Paul Ben-Itzak

(Original French version follows English translation.)

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Manhès lived in an atelier behind the Montparnasse train station, on a narrow street as muddy in the winter as the Lithuanian ghetto back alley where he was raised. Between the train tracks and the bustling neighborhood around the avenue Maine subsisted a practically rural little island, where automobile and even foot traffic was rare. Little by little this island was being devoured by the expanding dependences of the train station. All that remained were a few hovels, several rows of dilapidated ateliers in which a handful of artists lived in constant fear of expropriation.

Manhès’s atelier, like those of his neighbors, consisted of an entry level with a dirt floor. A dressing-room served as a bedroom. With a very high ceiling that made it impossible to heat during the winter, this room looked more like a storage space than a lodging. The only modern comfort was electric lighting. No water, no gas. A pump in the street provided for all the residents’ needs.

Forty-two years old, Manhès had lived in Paris for 20 years. The war had interrupted his career just at the moment where he was beginning to find his own personal style. From 1940 to 1944 he fought with the Maquis in the forests around Limoges, finishing his service in Germany with General Lattre after receiving three minor wounds. When he returned to Paris, the galleries were already full up and all the comfortable artists’ ateliers had been swept up by the nouvelle riche bourgeoisie.

Before the war, Manhès knew Klee in Germany as well as Kandinsky, whom he frequented when the great abstract art theorist took refuge in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, where he died. He came under their influence at first and then, slowly, developed his own style. From the moment he resumed working in 1945, in this sordid atelier where he continued to live, he produced Manhès, that is to say a type of painting which didn’t resemble any other and which, from this very fact, shocked everyone.

The figurative painters and the fans of traditional painting accused him of being abstract, while the abstract painters, as well as their supporters à la Charles Roy, accused him of clinging to an outmoded style of figurative painting. Because a strange form of poetry emanated from Manhès’s art, he was also subject to the dismissive epithet of being “literary.” Numerous younger artists formed a real cult around him, falling under his sway. Bolstered by this following, he could have easily founded his own school, as did Matisse and Léger, but he liked to say that art could not be taught, that the only thing one could pass on to others was cooking recipes; he preferred consecrating his time entirely to his work, which had finally arrived at a level of authority acknowledged by the majority of art aficionados.

Manhès was no longer poor. His contract with Laivit-Canne assured him a very honorable monthly stipend and on top of this, he was allowed to sell on his own whatever paintings his gallery didn’t take. He fantasized about soon being able to buy a decent studio. Acquired by the most important collectors, recognized as one of the leaders of the prevailing art current, he seemed to have finally arrived when his altercation with Laivit-Canne arrived to throw everything up in the air.

Manhès wasn’t particularly worried about the rupture in the contract, but the vexing words of his dealer weighed heavily on his heart. Ancelin, loyal Ancelin, whom he favored among all his disciples and who had become his intimate friend even though ten years separated them, followed him to his studio. It was Manhès who persuaded Laivit-Canne to offer Ancelin a contract. It was in the art dealer’s best interests to support his stars by simultaneously promoting younger painters who’d fallen under their influence.

Invited to Monsieur Mumfy’s soirée, Manhès and Ancelin preferred going to the Sélect on the boulevard Montparnasse, a café which drew the majority of the quartier’s artists, rather than dealing with the uproar in the artistic milieu that Laivit-Canne would surely provoke this evening.

The two friends presented a surprising contrast. Manhès was small and stocky, brunette, with frizzy black hair. A typical bohemian, he wore clothes which always seemed to be second-hand, even if he didn’t lack for money. Ancelin, by contrast, was the typical young man issued from a good French family. Tall, svelte, always wearing an immaculately tailored suit, he also displayed an outgoing, polished, and distinguished visage, whereas Manhès always seemed tense and gruff.

Sitting on the terrace of the Sélect, they were recognized at most of the tables and made a round of handshakes. A young man hailed them from inside the café: Their inseparable companion, the poet and art critic Fontenoy.

Manhès and Ancelin precipitated themselves on him to break the news:

“Guess what? I got into an argument with Lévy. (Manhès always de-Frenchified the name of the dealer in pronouncing it.) He threw me out on the street, but he’ll be sorry. Now I can sell all my own works. I’ll make more than when I was under contract.”

“But what happened?”

“He accused me of not evolving, of making ‘Jewish paintings’ at a time when, according to him, traditional French painting is once again à la mode. What a bunch of bullshit! It’s like those who accuse me of literary painting! I don’t try to make Jewish paintings, or literary paintings, or abstract, or figurative. I paint what I feel, what I am… Anyway I lost it. I shouted back at him that I didn’t want to be a fake, camouflaging my painting like he camouflages his name, and that I don’t like self-hating Jews.

“You know that horrible voice he has,
like an impotent screeching. He started stamping and yelping. His employees came running. In that nasal voice he has he demanded: “Bring me this imbecile’s contract so I can tear it up! I’ll make him croak from hunger!” Poor Lévy, in letting me go he also lets go of a good opportunity to not die of hunger himself! I can live without a dealer, but the dealers can’t live without us.”

“The problem,” said Ancelin, “is that I also have a contract with the dwarf. This puts me in a delicate position.”

“Not at all,” Manhès protested. “Just make out like you’re not au courant. Agree with him if you have to. This doesn’t keep us from being pals. You’re still young. You need him.”

“I must write about this tomorrow in my rag,” Fontenoy piped in.

Fontenoy was an editor at L’artiste, the only newspaper devoted to the fine arts with a considerable readership. He was 30 years old, like Ancelin, but was first and foremost Manhès’s friend. This poet from the Loire Valley had been smitten with Manhès’s painting like one might fall for a girl. He readily proclaimed: “I’ve experienced two great shocks in my life: The first when I discovered at the age of 18 the poetry of Blaise Cendrars, the second at 24 standing in front of the tableaux of Manhès.” He’d tried to capture in his poetry the violent and chaotic art of his great painter, but sifted through his sensibility, Manhès’s images took on another light. They became tame, ordered. It was a miracle that he was able to understand at all the Judeo-Slavic genius of Manhès, so different from his own talent. And yet Fontenoy had written the best studies on Manhès. For that matter he was often accused of being a one-trick pony, only able to talk about Manhès and his followers. Those who gave no credit to the art of Manhès, like Charles Roy, even claimed that Fontenoy was incapable of writing about abstract art. Fontenoy liked to retort with illustrated examples: “Baudelaire really only understood Delacroix, Zola Manet…. Critics who know how to talk about anything and everything are not creators. They write catalogs — useful, no doubt, but never risking their name in championing one over the other. The only time they declare someone a genius is after he’s dead.”

Fontenoy was a petit blonde man, skinny, with blue eyes. He lived in extreme austerity in a furnished hotel room in Montparnasse, his revenue being limited to his articles in L’artiste and several other newspapers and revues, as well as translating and rewriting work when he could get it. All of this was low-paid, for the simple reason that newspaper owners were accustomed to the fact that art critics were corrupted.

When Fontenoy became an editor at L’artiste, the owner told him:

“I can only pay you 1000 francs* for each major article, but by being associated with our newspaper you should be able to quintuple your freelance work. For that matter, I shouldn’t even be paying you at all!”

All too happy to be hired by the major art newspaper, Fontenoy did not protest and did not even ask the owner to elaborate on how exactly he might be able to quintuple his freelance assignments. He simply assumed that the notoriety his collaboration with L’artiste would give him would get him work writing texts for art books and other revenue sources whose existence he did not even suspect. But this work never came and Manhès had to demonstrate to him how naive he was. Just as history loses many of its enigmas when one studies, in parallel, political economy, the rivalries and affinities in the arts world stopped being complex for Fontenoy the day Manhès revealed to him the economic mechanism of the art market.

“How do you think your colleagues manage to eke out a living?” Manhès asked rhetorically. “It’s quite simple: At the end of the week they go by the galleries they champion to pick up a little envelope … which is not always turned over to them that discretely. Some dealers like to ostensibly mount that they pay off their critics, treating them with airs like a boss treats his servant. And the critics dutifully kow-tow to them. When the dealers refuse to give them money, they wheedle out a drawing, a lithograph, which they then go on to sell. I can even cite for you certain critics who are veritable flacks, only writing about the painters they sell. This quasi-generalized corruption perverts all the relationships between painters, art critics, and dealers.”

Following this little talk, Fontenoy became so touchy about the principle of the disinterestedness of the critic that Manhès didn’t dare aid his friend: When he offered him a painting one day, Fontenoy turned beet-red and became extremely uncomfortable:

“Yes, I’d love it… for my room… But then people would say that you’d bought me off. I just can’t.”

Then he tried to make light of it, with a voice that trembled a little all the same:

“Bah! I’d never consider putting a Paolo Ucello in my room! When I want to see his ‘Battle’ again, I just go to the Louvre. When I want to see some Manhès I’ll just go over to his place!”

* * *

Manhès, Ancelin and Fontenoy were talking in hushed tones, in the depths of the Sélect, their elbows flattened out on the table so that their faces drew nearer to each other.

“Isabelle’s going to be worried again,” Manhès said. “She was so happy with this contract. It was almost as if I’d become a civil servant.”

“When does she come back from the country?”

“Tomorrow night. It seems that Moussia has big rosy cheeks.”

During the war, in Limoges, Manhès had married a country girl. This Isabelle was 10 years his junior. With her allure that of a robust country woman, she’d brought a much needed equilibrium into the life of Manhès, who was constantly worrying and fretting. Two years ago they’d had a daughter: Moussia.

Manhès seemed obsessed by his painting. And yet to this passion he’d added, he’d even enveloped into, Isabelle and Moussia. His wife and daughter had become indispensable to his art. Ever since they’d been taking the air of Spring in the country, Manhès hadn’t touched a single paintbrush. In general sober, he drank when his wife was away, felt lost, abandoned. In fact he’d been a little drunk when he’d had his altercation with Laivit-Canne.

“I want them to be there,” Manhès said. “I should have gone with them. But the countryside bores me to death.”

“And yet it would do you some good, the country,” Ancelin suggested. “The only time you leave your studio is to bunker down in a café, a movie theater, a galerie. You end up completely intoxicating yourself.”

Manhès began fidgeting.

“I don’t need to paint from nature. Nature has nothing to teach me. I transport my world with me wherever I am. If I’d remained holed up in a cave my whole life, I’d still paint what I paint.”

“We’re not talking about your painting,” Fontenoy joined in, “but your health. You’re getting anemic from staying locked up in one locale or another, always under electric lighting. Look at yourself in a mirror… you’re so white!”

Manhès lifted his head towards the café’s wall mirror. He got worried seeing his visage:

“It’s true that I am looking rather pale at that!”

Then he laughed.

“In the beginning of the Occupation, the Germans organized an anti-Semitic exhibition. I went to check it out incognito. Among the multiple pieces of evidence was a photograph of the ugliest Jew in the world. I recognized myself.”

Ancelin and Fontenoy weren’t crazy to hear Manhès joking about this subject. Ever since the German Occupation, like all anti-racists, they got embarrassed whenever the subject of Jews came up. The word itself was difficult to say. All it took was a slight alteration in intonation to make “Jew” sound like an insult. Some people didn’t even dare employ the term, substituting the word “Israélite.” But Jews never referred to themselves as “Israelites,” except for self-hating Jews like Laivit-Canne. A gentile who used the term “Israélite” seemed to have a guilty conscience.

The more it made his friends uncomfortable, the more Manhès fell back with a certain sadism on this brand of Jewish humor which delighted in making fun of itself.

Ancelin changed the subject back to painting:

“It appears that old man Mumfy bought three Wols and two Reichels?”

“Not that surprising,” Fontenoy explained, “they resemble Klee. Klee, forever Klee, he can’t see anything outside of Klee!”

Manhès appeared disgruntled.

“He’s all the same given me my own wall. And he’s also bought an Ancelin.”

“Yes yes,” resumed Fontenoy. “Because he doesn’t want to miss out on what might be the next best thing. But he’d betray you in an instant for some Vieira da Silvas.”

Manhès called out to a diminutive Mediterranean character who’d just peeked into the café:

“Hey, Atlan!”

Atlan joined them at their table. He was a night owl, like all of them, but he broke all the records. He emerged to make his rounds at the very hour the cafés started closing, latched on to some stragglers, and didn’t return to his studio until three or four in the morning. A member of the tribe with Manhès, only Algerian rather than Slavic, he was the only painter of his generation that Manhès held in high esteem. Not because of their shared origins, but because their pictorial explorations were oriented in the same direction. Atlan was just as inclassable as Manhès, with an equally independent spirit. A non-figurative painter, he was influenced by Africa in the same way Manhès was influenced by Slavic folklore. Fontenoy had an equal passion for the art of Atlan. But Ancelin didn’t share his two friends’ opinion. His problem with Atlan was his “recipe,” that is to say that he mixed oil with pastel and crayon.

“That’s ridiculous,” Fontenoy told him. “Do you blame the primitives for having used plaster to set the aureoles of their saints in relief, or for encasing precious stones in their kings’ crowns? Do you blame Degas for having — he as well — mixed pastel with his oils, or Braque for having sprinkled sand in some of his paintings?”

Ancelin became obstinate:

“Yes in fact, I’m against all of that.”

When it came to Atlan, Ancelin was biased, to such a degree that he resembled Charles Roy. During the whole time that Atlan remained at their table, the young painter didn’t utter a word. Manhès told Atlan about his adventure with Laivit-Canne.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Atlan assured him. “Ever since I ended my contract with Maeght, my position has only solidified. You’ll see, the art aficionados will start rolling into your atelier.”

Atlan precipitously took off so he could catch up with the playwright Arthur Adamov, who was passing by on the boulevard. Shortly afterwards, the Sélect manager came to tell them that he needed to close.

They continued talking late into the night, pacing back and forth on the boulevard Montparnasse. The milkmen’s vans and the trucks from Les Halles wholesale market drove past in a thundering of iron. They finally separated regretfully, their heads heavy and their eyes brilliant.

*The equivalent of 10 “new francs” or, in 1956, about $2.

Version originale
par et copyright Michel Ragon

Manhès habitait un atelier derrière la gare Montparnasse, dans une ruelle aussi boueuse l’hiver que la venelle du ghetto lithuanien où il était né. Entre les lignes de chemin de fer et le quartier mouvementé en lisière de l’avenue Maine, se trouvait un petit ilot presque champêtre, en dehors du circuit habituel des voitures, où personne ne passait. Cet ilot était dévoré peu à peu par les agrandissements des dépendances de la gare. Il ne restait plus que quelques masures, quelques rangées d’ateliers en ruines, dans lesquels quelques artistes vivaient dans la crainte de l’expropriation.

L’atelier de Manhès, comme celui de ses voisins, consistait en un rez-de-chaussée au sol de terre battue. Une loggia servait de chambre à coucher. Très haute de plafond, donc presque impossible à chauffer l’hiver, cette pièce ressemblait plus à un débaras qu’à un logement. Le seul confort tenait dans l’éclairage électrique. Ni eau, ni gaz. Dans la ruelle, une pompe servait pour la collectivité.

Manhès, âgé de quarante ans, était Parisien depuis vingt ans. La guerre interrompit sa carrière de peintre au moment où il commençait à trouver son style. De 1940 à 1944, il servit dans les maquis du Limousin et termina son équipée en Allemagne, dans l’armée de Lattre, avec trois blessures sans gravité. Lorsqu’il revint à Paris, les galeries avaient fait leur plein de peintres et les ateliers d’artistes confortables étaient tous habités par des bourgeois nouveaux riches.

Avant la guerre, Manhès connut Klee in Allemagne, ainsi que Kandinsky qu’il fréquenta lorsque le grand théoricien de l’art abstrait vint se refugier et mourir à Neuilly. Il subit leur influence puis, lentement, dégagea son style propre. Dès qu’il se remit au travail, en 45, dans cet atelier sordide qu’il habitait toujours, il fit du Manhès, c’est-a-dire une peinture qui ne ressemblait à nulle autre et qui, de ce fait, choqua tout le monde.

Les peintres figuratifs et les amateurs de peinture traditionnelle lui reprochaient d’être abstrait et les peintres abstraits, ainsi que leurs supporters du genre Charles Roy, l’accusaient de se raccrocher à une figuration désuète. Comme une étrange poésie irradiait de l’art de Manhès, on lui accolait aussi l’épithète dédaigneuse de « littéraire ».

Quoi qu’il en soit, l’art de Manhès était trop personnel, trop nouveau aussi, pour passer inaperçu. De nombreux jeunes artistes lui vouaient un véritable culte et subissaient son influence. Il eût pu, en leur compagnie, fonder une Ecole, comme le firent Matisse ou Léger, mais il avait l’habitude de dire que l’art ne s’enseigne pas, au l’on ne peut donner aux autres que des recettes de cuisine; Il préférait se consacrer entièrement à son oeuvre, arrivée actuellement à une maturité que la plupart des amateurs lui reconnaissaient.

Manhès n’était plus pauvre. Son contrat avec Laivit-Canne lui assurait une mensualité très honorable et il avait, de plus, la faculté de vendre par lui-même les peintures que sa galerie ne lui prenait pas en premier choix. Il songeait à acheter bientôt un atelier confortable. Entré dans les meilleures collections, reconnu comme l’un des chefs de file de l’art actuel, il semblait avoir gagné la partie quand son altercation avec Laivit-Canne remit tout en question.

Manhès ne s’inquiétait pas de cette rupture de contrat, mais les paroles vexantes de son marchand lui restaient sur le coeur. Ancelin, son fidèle Ancelin, celui qu’il préférait parmi ses disciples et qui était devenu son ami intime bien que dix ans les séparaient, l’avait suivit à son atelier. C’était Manhès qui avait fait prendre Ancelin sous contrat par Laivit-Canne. Celui-ci avait d’ailleurs intérêt à soutenir ses vedettes en montrant des jeunes peintres qui subissaient leur influence.

Invités à la soirée de Monsieur Michaud, Manhès et Ancelin préférèrent aller au Sélect, boulevard Montparnasse, un café où se retrouvaient la plupart des artistes du quartier, plutôt que d’affronter la meute du milieu artistique que Laivit-Canne allait exciter dès ce soir.

Les deux amis formaient un contraste étonnant. Manhès était petit, trapu, brun, avec des cheveux noirs frisés. Très bohème, il portait des vêtements qui paraissaient toujours misérables bien qu’il ne manquait pas d’argent. Par contre, Ancelin était le type même du jeune homme de bonne famille française. Grand, svelte, toujours vêtu de complete de bonne coupe, il montrait aussi un visage avenant, poli et distingué, alors que Manhès paraissait toujours crispé et bourru.

A la terrasse du Sélect, ils furent reconnus à la plupart des tables et firent une tournée de poignées de mains. Un jeune homme les appela de l’intérieur du café : C’était leur inséparable compagnon, un poète et critique d’art : Fontenoy.

Manhès et Ancelin se précipitèrent pour lui raconter la nouvelle :

— Tu sais, je me suis engueulé avec Lévy. (Manhès défrancisait le nom du marchand en le prononçant.) Il m’a fichu à la porte, mais il le regrettera. Je vais disposer de toute ma production. Je gagnerai plus qu’avec son contrat.

— Mais qu’est-ce qui s’est passé ?

— Il me reprochait de ne pas évoluer, de faire une peinture juive alors que, paraît-il, la mode revient à une peinture de tradition française. Des conneries ! C’est comme ceux qui me reprochent de faire une peinture littéraire ! Est-ce que je cherche à peindre juif, ou littéraire, ou abstrait, ou figuratif ? Je peins ce que je sens, ce que je suis…. Alors je me suis emporté. Je lui ai lancé en pleine figure que je ne voulais pas être un faussaire, camoufler ma peinture comme il camouflait son nom et que je n’aimais pas les juifs honteux….

« Tu connais son horrible voix grêle d’impuissant ! Il s’est mis à trépigner, à glapir. Ses employés sont accourus. Il nasillait : apportez-moi le contrat de cet imbécile que je le déchire ! Je le ferai crever de faim ! Pauvre Lévy, en lâchant ma peinture, il lâche une bonne occasion de ne pas crever de faim ! Moi je peux vivre sans marchand, mais les marchands ne peuvent pas vivre sans nous. »

— Ce qui m’embête, dit Ancelin, c’est que j’ai un contrat chez le nabot. Ça me met dans une situation délicate.

— Mais non, protesta Manhès, fait celui qui n’est au courant de rien, approuve Lévy s’il le faut. Ça ne nous empéche pas d’être copains. Toi tu es encore jeune. Tu as besoin de lui.

— Il faudra que je parle de ça demain dans le canard, dit Fontenoy.

Fontenoy était rédacteur à L’Artiste, le seul journal consacré aux beaux-arts qui atteignait un assez vaste public. Il avait trente ans, comme Ancelin, mais il était surtout l’ami de Manhès. Ce poète du Val-de-Loire s’était épris de la peinture de Manhès de la même manière qu’il eût pu s’amouracher d’une fille. Il disait volontiers : « J’ai ressenti deux grands chocs, dans ma vie : le premier en découvrant à dix-huit ans la poésie de Cendrars, le second à vingt-quatre ans devant les tableaux de Manhès. » Il avait essayé de traduire en poésie l’art violent et chaotique de son grand peintre, mais passées à travers lui, les images de Manhès prenaient un autre éclairage. Elles s’adoucissaient, s’ordonnaient. C’était miracle qu’il pût comprendre le génie judéo-slave de Manhès, si éloigné de son talent. Pourtant, Fontenoy avait écrit les meilleures études sur Manhès. On lui reprochait souvent, d’ailleurs, d’être un critique d’art trop limité et de ne savoir parler que de Manhès et de ses suiveurs. Ceux qui n’accordaient aucun crédit à l’art de Manhès, comme Charles Roy, disaient même que Fontenoy était incapable d’écrire sur l’art abstrait. Fontenoy s’en défendait par des exemples illustres : « Baudelaire n’a vraiment bien compris que Delacroix, Zola n’a vraiment bien compris que Manet… Les critiques qui savent parler de tout et de rien ne sont pas des créateurs. Ils établissent des catalogues, utiles sans doute, mais ne risquent jamais leur nom en optant pour quelques-uns. Ils ne donnent du génie qu’aux morts. »

Fontenoy était un petit blond, mince, aux yeux bleus. Il vivait très pauvrement dans une chambre d’hôtel meublé de Montparnasse, n’ayant pour tout revenu que ses articles à L’Artiste et dans quelques autres journaux et revues, ainsi que des travaux de traduction et de rewriting. Tout cela mal payé, pour la raison fort simple que les directeurs de journaux étaient habitués à ce que les critiques d’art fussent corrompus.

Lorsque Fontenoy devint rédacteur à L’Artiste, le directeur lui dit :

— Je ne peux vous payer chaque article important que mille francs, mais vous devez, en étant attaché au journal, quintupler vos piges. Je devrais même ne pas vous payer du tout !

Trop heureux d’être accueilli dans le grand journal des arts, Fontenoy ne protesta pas et ne demanda même aucun éclaircissement sur la manière de quintupler ses appointements. Il pensa simplement que la notoriété qui lui serait donnée par sa collaboration à L’Artiste lui apporterait des commandes de textes pour des livres d’art et d’autres sources de revenus dont il ne soupçonnait pas l’existence. Mais ces commandes ne vinrent jamais et Manhès lui démontra à quel point il était naïf. Tout comme l’Histoire perd beaucoup de ses énigmes lorsque l’on étudie parallèlement à elle l’économie politique, les rivalités et les affinités dans le monde des arts cessèrent d’être complexes pour Fontenoy le jour où Manhès lui révéla le mécanisme économique du marché de la peinture.

Comment vivent tes collègues, lui dit Manhès ? Mais ils passent tout bonnement à la fin de chaque semaine, dans les galeries qu’ils soutiennent, chercher une enveloppe qui ne leur est pas toujours remise très discrètement. Certains marchands montrent ostensiblement qu’ils payent leurs critiques, traitant ceux-ci de haut, de patron à domestique. Et les critiques baissent l’échine. Lorsqu’on leur refuse de l’argent, ils mendigotent un dessin, un litho, qu’ils revendent ensuite. Je pourrais même te citer des critiques qui sont de véritables agents de publicité, n’écrivant que sur les peintres qu’ils vendent. Cette corruption quasi généralisée fausse tous les rapports entre peintres, critique d’art et marchands.

A la suite de cette conversation, Fontenoy devint si chatouilleux sur le principe du désintéressement du critique que Manhès n’osait aider son ami: Lui ayant offert un jour une peinture, Fontenoy avait rougi, s’était troublé :

— Oui, j’aimerais beaucoup… pour ma chambre… Mais alors on dira que tu m’achètes… Je ne peux pas.

Puis il s’était mis à plaisanter, avec une voix qui tremblait un peu :

— Bah ! Il ne me viendrait pas à l’idée de désirer mettre dans ma chambre un Paolo Uccello ! Lorsque j’ai envie de revoir sa Bataille, je vais au Louvre. Lorsque j’ai envie de voir des Manhès je vais chez lui !

* * *

Manhès, Ancelin et Fontenoy discutaient à mi-voix, au fond du Sélect, les coudes à plat sur la table pour mieux rapprocher leurs visages.

— Isabelle va encore s’inquiéter, dit Manhès. Elle qui était si heureuse de ce contrat. C’st un peu comme si j’était devenu fonctionnaire.

— Quand revient-elle de la campagne ?

— Demain soir. Il paraît que Moussia a de grosses joues roses.

Manhès avait épousé pendant la guerre, en Limousin, une fille du pays. Cette Isabelle comptait dix ans de moins que son mari. Avec son allure de robuste paysanne, elle aidait beaucoup à l’équilibre de Manhès, toujours inquiet, angoissé. Depuis deux ans ils avaient une fille : Moussia.

Manhès semblait dévoré par sa peinture. Pourtant, à cette passion il ajoutait, il englobait même, Isabelle et Moussia. Sa femme et sa fille étaient devenues indispensables pour sa peinture. Depuis qu’elles prenaient l’air du printemps à la campagne, Manhès n’avait pas touché un pinceau. En général sobre, il buvait lorsque sa femme s’absentait, se sentant perdu, abandonné. Il était d’ailleurs sans doute un peu ivre lorsqu’il eut son altercation avec Laivit-Canne.

— Je voudrais qu’elles soient là, dit Manhès. J’aurais dû les accompagner. Mais la campagne m’ennuie.

— Ça te ferait pourtant du bien, la campagne, dit Ancelin. Tu ne sors de ton atelier que pour t’enfermer dans un café, dans un cinéma, dans une galerie. Tu arrives à t’intoxiquer complétement.

Manhès eut un geste d’agacement :

— Je n’ai pas besoin d’aller sur le motif. La nature ne m’apprend rien. Je transporte partout mon monde avec moi. SI j’étais resté toute ma vie enfermé dans une cave, je peindrais ce que je peins.

— Ce n’est pas pour ta peinture, que nous parlons, essaya de le raisonner Fontenoy, mais pour ta santé. Tu t’anémies à rester enfermé d’un local dans un autre, toujours à la lumière électrique. Regarde-toi dans la glace… tu es d’une pâleur !

Manhès haussa la tête vers la glace murale du café. Il devint soucieux en voyant son visage :

— C’est vrai que j’ai une sale gueule !

Puis il se mit à rire :

— Au début de l’Occupation, les Allemands organisèrent une exposition antisémite. J’y suis allé incognito. Parmi de multiples pièces à conviction, il y avait une photo du Juif le plus laid du monde. Je me suis reconnu.

Ancelin et Fontenoy n’aimaient guère que Manhès plaisantât sur ce sujet. Depuis l’Occupation allemande, comme tous les antiracistes, ils éprouvaient une gêne lorsqu’il était question des Juifs. Ce mot lui-même était difficile à prononcer. Il suffisait d’une toute petite intonation pour qu’il parût injurieux. Certains n’osaient même pas le dire et employaient à la place le mot Israélite. Mais les Juifs ne s’appellent jamais Israélites entre eux, à l’exception des Juifs honteux comme Laivit-Canne. Un Aryen qui dit Israélite n’a pas l’air d’avoir bonne conscience.

Autant ses amis semblaient gênés, autant Manhès appuyait avec un certain sadisme sur cet humour juif qui se rit de lui-même.

Ancelin détourna la conversation en revenant à la peinture :

— Il paraît que le père Michaud a acheté trois Wols et deux Reichel ?

— Pas étonnant, dit Fontenoy, ça ressemble à Klee. Klee, toujours Klee, il ne voit rien en dehors de ça !

Manhès parut mécontent :

— Il m’a quand même donné un mur. Et il a aussi acheté un Ancelin.

— Oui, oui, reprit Fontenoy…. Parce qu’il a peur de manquer une affaire. Mais il vous trahirait sans hésiter pour des Vieira da Silva.

Manhès appela un petit homme de type méditerranéen qui jetait un coup d’oeil dans le café :

— Hé ! Atlan !

Atlan vint s’asseoir à leur table. C’était un noctambule, comme eux tous, mais lui battait les records. Il sortait faire un tour à l’heure où les cafés fermaient, s’accrochait à quelques retardataires et ne retournait dans son atelier que vers trois ou quatre heures du matin. Coreligionnaire de Manhès, mais Algérien et non pas Slave, il était le seul peintre de sa génération que Manhès tint en haute estime. Non pas à cause de leurs origines communes, mais parce qu’ils orientaient leurs recherches picturales dans un même sens. Atlan était aussi inclassable que Manhès et d’un esprit aussi indépendant. Peintre non-figuratif, l’Afrique influençait son art comme le folklore slave celui de Manhès. Fontenoy aimait également l’art d’Atlan. Mais Ancelin ne partageait pas l’opinion de ses deux amis: Il reprochait à Atlan sa « cuisine », c’est-à-dire de mélanger à l’huile du pastel et de la craie.

— C’est ridicule, lui disait Fontenoy. Est-ce que tu blâmes les primitifs d’avoir utilisé le plâtre pour donner du relief aux auréoles de leurs saints, ou d’avoir enchâssé des pierres précieuses dans les couronnes de leurs rois ? Est-ce que tu blâme Degas d’avoir, lui aussi, mélangé du pastel à ses huiles ou Braque d’avoir saupoudré de sable certaines de ses peintures.

Ancelin s’obstinait :

— Oui, oui, je suis contre tout ça.

Lorsqu’il était question d’Atlan, Ancelin devenait de parti pris, à un tel point qu’il rappelait alors Charles Roy. Pendant tout le temps qu’Atlan resta à leur table, le jeune peintre ne dit pas un mot. Manhès raconta à Atlan son aventure avec Laivit-Canne.

— Estime-toi heureux, lui dit Atlan. Depuis que, moi aussi, j’ai rompu mon contrat avec Maeght, ma position n’a fait que s’affirmir. Tu vas voir, les amateurs vont rappliquer chez toi.

Atlan les quitta précipitamment pour rattraper le dramaturge Arthur Adamov qui passait sur le boulevard. Peu après, le gérant du Sélect vint les avertir qu’il se voyait dans l’obligation de fermer.

Ils continuèrent encore à discuter, en faisant les cent pas sur le boulevard Montparnasse. Les voitures des laitiers et les camions des halles passaient dans un vacarme de ferraille. Ils se séparèrent à regret, la tête lourde et les yeux brilliant.
Excerpted from “Trompe-l’œil,” by Michel Ragon, published in 1956 by Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, and copyright Michel Ragon.

Lutèce Diary, 30: Hop to it or, the Universe in a Grain of Lapin

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Like this article? Cet article vous plait? Please make a donation today so we can continue covering the Paris arts world / Penser à faire un don aujourd’hui alors qu’on peut continuer d’ecrire sur le monde de l’art a Paris in Dollars or Euros by designating your payment through PayPal to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check. Paul is also looking for a sous-location ou échange de bons procédés (logement contre travail, garde de chat, etc. — plus ici sur ses talents) en région Parisienne a partir du 25 mai, Le contacter à artsvoyager@gmail.com.)

PARIS — At a vernissage in a store-front gallery on the rue Cascades last night I received a graphic proposition with reproductive implications: 46 variations contained in (or slightly spilling over from) a single rabbit’s profile, sometimes reversed (from right-leaning to left-leaning) and revealing the infinite possibilities if not for skinning a rabbit than for being creative in and around its skin, at least when your name is Kristin Meller, who seems to thrive on setting rules (or limitations) when she’s making art, here in the sense that the universe for this ongoing series is circumscribed by the exoskeleton of Peter (or Pam) Cottontail. And Beatrix Potter has nothing on Kristin Meller.

I’m in a quandary because the minute I start attaching words to what Meller’s going for here — I almost said “has achieved” but her universe isn’t finite like that, and she explains that this is an ongoing series (divided into six sub-series: Cosmic, Bush, Blood, Space, Dreams, and Dust, as in Decay) — I’m imposing on her art a language that isn’t hers. In fact, in creating now 60 linotypes and resultant linographs (in French, linogravures) with the rabbit as a starting point, theoretically associated with themes related to dreams, death, and blood, Meller told me last night, she didn’t think, at least not with her brain. “It was a graphic proposition.” Or as I observed to her after she told me this, “I see so many artists these days who *start* with a cute concept that’s immediately obvious, and here you’ve done the inverse.” There’s nothing cloying about Meller or her work. (Neither can one describe it as ‘naive’; she’s too politically engaged and technically sophisticated for that.) If the rabbits do suggest stories, I have the feeling that these narratives, or personages, came afterwards, following the artistic impulse. Which is not to say they’re ho-hum, or limited: Where I saw a peacock in the layers of multi-colored plumage covering one rabbit’s body, Meller described a fish, referring to its shape. And it helped me find a more global idea — and that conforms with Meller’s political  societal concerns — to hear her explain that in four linographs grouped together on the wall near the window facing a newly liberated green space across the narrow winding street high atop Belleville, one suggested a Japanese person zooming along on a scooter trailing exhaust; the other a Mexican vomiting (although Meller might have put it this way: “That one’s Mexico, and that one’s Japan” — the colors of the former did indeed mimic those of the Mexican flag) ; another a balloon at the heart of which floated, somewhat tenuously, a vaporous, fragile, surrounded planet, which balloon a spike threatened to pop (“When I see a balloon, I want to pop it” Meller told me gleefully); and another the earth bursting. In other words — Meller confirmed this to me — the climate crisis. The statement was much stronger than the hashtag for the French Green party in the upcoming May 26 European Parliament elections: “Votez climate.” How can one ‘vote’ for the climate? The problem isn’t the climate, but that — as the British might put it — it’s hotting up.

Speaking of getting fried, another series posted near the door opening to the stairway leading down to the courtyard outside the atelier Meller’s shared for more than 25 years with her partner Raul Velasco — who had cooked up a batch of his patented beans and avocado-infused pico de gallo for the vernissage — featured rabbits who, like transparent electric fish, all seemed to be electrified in their reddened veins within as if they’d received a sudden shock. “It’s blood,” Meller enlightened me.

Another pair resembled amoeba, two more opposed an interior vagina and a wheel whose spokes were comprised of multiplying male sex organs (maybe) and my favorite a pair of rabbits coupling but so elegantly that ‘fusing’ is a better term.

Here’s to more fusion and less frisson for all of us.

PS: If we’ve not illustrated this article — you can check the exhibition poster published earlier this week here if you like — it’s because Meller rightly says she doesn’t want people looking at her work online, she wants them to come to the gallery. Which you can do if you’re in Paris through May 28, perhaps making a Bellevilloise day of it during the week-end of May 24 – 26, when the neighborhood celebrates its artists with the Portes Ouvertes de Belleville.

Lutèce Diary, 29: For sale, Lutèce or, They took Paradise (and San Francisco, and Brooklyn) and put up one large bistro

Not just a lot of hot air: Residents of Paris’s historic Belleville district, seen here protesting on a recent Sunday up top the parc  Belleville outside the shuttered Maison d’Air, are worried that the mayor of Paris wants to sell the space to a private concessionaire who will turn it into another BoBo bistro. Images courtesy Collectif for the Maison d’Air for Residents.

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

PARIS — Yesterday afternoon in a courtyard atelier on the rue Tourtille — not far from where on May 28, 1871 the Paris Commune made its last stand and where at 3 a.m. on November 14, 2015, when I was living in the same building, a distant car alarm awoke me to the news of the massacres — a group of artists and activists was busy making signs for an ambulatory protest Sunday against the ongoing privatization of Belleville, specifically talk of plans by the mayor of Paris to sell off the closed site of the Maison de l’air up top the parc Belleville just below the belvedere (offering one of the most spectacular views of the city, including the Eiffel tower) to a private concessionaire who will no doubt lease it to yet another restaurant (because G-d knows if there’s one thing we need in Belleville, it’s more restaurants). Or, as the collective “Convergence Belleville” put it when news of the mayor’s intentions first surfaced in 2017, ‘Yet another BoBo bar-resto in a working-class neighborhood where the residents have other needs,” one of the group’s recent suggestions being to make the site into a municipal museum for the 20th arrondissement. The arrondissment’s longtime Socialist party mayor, Frédérique Calandra, has countered — in a 2017 interview with the Parisian newspaper — that rehabilitating the building, in particular getting rid of the asbestos, would not be “cost-effective” for the municipality to undertake and that “the creation of a new place of activity in upper-Belleville will also allow us to re-enforce security in the sector,” which she said is mined by drug trafficking, begging the question of why retaining the site as a public forum (say, for activities serving the young people the drug dealers prey on) would not do this better than a privately held restaurant in a public space where you have to pay to enter. And Danielle Simonnet, Calandra’s opponent from the France Insoumis party in the last municipal elections, insisted, in an interview with the same newspaper, that “this project will only re-enforce the ongoing gentrification of the neighborhood.” Or, as another artist-activist and long-time Belleville resident put it to me recently, “They want to turn Paris into one big restaurant.”

Poster for the ongoing opposition to possible plans by the City of Paris to sell the space now occupied by the Maison d’Air up top the parc de Belleville to a private concessionaire, who residents fear would turn the now public space into a private restaurant. 

I’ve seen this happen before first-hand, in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and in San Francisco’s Mission District. First the Yuppies / BoBos/”Hipsters” are content to just alight in the neighborhood to eat, then they want to live there (which drives housing prices up and indigenous artist and ethnic populations out), then, as opposed to the truly ethnic restaurants and foodstuffs stores (Latino in the Mission, Polish in Greenpoint, Chinese and Algerian or Moroccan in Belleville), the generic BoBo / Yuppie / Hipster-geared restaurants move in, with their faux-hip (or faux-ethnic, in other words ethnic food made by white people) menus, often interchangeable. The restaurant “Thank God for broccoli” — that’s not my translation, it’s in English on the marquee — might sound to you like it should be in Brooklyn but in fact it sprouted up on the rue Piat down the street from the belvedere of the parc Belleville.

If rising housing prices not just in Belleville but across Eastern Paris indicate that it’s already too late, Versailles — er, the BoBos — has won (Bellevilloise artist friends tell me that a 60 square meter apartment off the rue Cascades recently sold for over 700,000 Euros or $820,00), in my own ramble late yesterday afternoon up the rue Fontaine du roi terminating on the Boulevard Belleville, before heading up the rue Belleville to Tourtille I found signs that food may actually save the neighborhood…. as well as the exact corner where, according to lettering on a bench outside the “Cantine de Babelville” situated there, the marriage between Belleville, then the second largest community outside Paris, and Lutèce was consummated in 1860. Although “consummated” is probably gilding the lilly. As Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère observed, in “The ‘annexation’ as seen by Eastern Paris: Worries, hopes, and dissatisfactions” (Editions de la Sorbonne), reflecting community unease — including fear that food prices would go up! — with the planned annexation, the municipal council of Belleville actually voted against it in 1859, an expression of popular will the city of Paris promptly ignored, not only gobbling up the neighborhood but dividing it.

If the bad news is that like the rues Jean-Pierre Timbaud and Oberkampf which lead up to the boulevard Belleville before turning into the rues Couronnes and Menilmentont, the rue Fontaine du roi is littered with still more faux ethnic restaurants, crowned by a meta-bar / resto / “hostel” whose title is the only thing about it exclusively in French (the menu being dominated by Yankee English), the good news late yesterday afternoon, food and working-class ethnic populations-wise, came first in the Algerian and Moroccan French restaurants and bakeries setting their cakes, omelettes, savory and honey-sticky pastries, olives, and various peppery salads and condiments out on the sidewalks for the end-of-day Ramadan break-fast, and then at “The Paris Store,” my source for all num-nums Chinese and where, browsing the Ramen noodles racks for dinner (I’d walked all the way from the Meridian on the Left Bank after a long pause in front of the Fountain of the Four Corners of the World and was too tired to cook), I noted that certain flavors, predominantly fish and crustacean, had been highlighted with “Good for Hallal” signs…. Meaning the Chinese grocery store wasn’t marketing just to its own, but was taking into account the religious/dietary needs of its French Arab clientel for Ramadan. (I’d later pour my soup over day-old “Viking Bread” — I wanted to test out the fortitude of the new choppers — from the bakery at the corner of Tourtille and the rue Belleville which sells both Arab and non-Arab French breads and pastries.)

In other words, what may save Belleville is that more than I’ve seen in Greenpoint and the other ethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn and even in San Francisco’s Mission District, these communities aren’t just catering to their own (and to the BoBos) but to each other. There’s not the inter-ethnic strife I’ve seen or heard of in other cities, e.g. between the Korean- and Black-Americans in South Central Los Angeles or even Greenwich Village. And the mayor should get some credit for this: When French Chinese commerce threatened to encroach on French Arab groceries, boulangeries, restaurants and butchers several years ago, she put a stop to it, in the name of preserving the neighborhood’s diversity.

This is also what I love about the twice-weekly outdoor market on the Boulevard Belleville: Squeezing through the crowds of French Arabs, French Africans, French Asians, and even a few BoBos, 99 percent of the time politely moving forward despite the crush, negotiating with the largely French-Arab fruit, vegetable, olive, date, pepper-filled crepes, cheese, fish, fresh mint, and merguez vendors — okay, le bouffe est aussi pour quelque-chose, the food may have something to do with it.

And it’s for the Maison d’Air site’s potential as a place of more inter-community exchanges — not another bistro — that the various militant organizations will be de-ambulating throughout the streets of Belleville and Menilmontant Sunday, beginning at 4 p.m. on the Place Gambetta. Or, as the Collectif for the Maison d’Air  for residents puts it on its manifesto (see above): “We dreamed of this place, and we will not renounce… we will not abandon our dreams. We want this place to be a place of sharing, of invention, of culture, of invention, of debates and fetes for the quartier.”

 

Lutèce Diaries, 28: Welcome to the Monkey House, or, Headless Body found in Waterless Arena

Jean Fouquet, “The Right Hand of God Protecting the Faithful against the Demons,” circa 1452–1460. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. For more information on the tableau, click here.

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Like this article? Cet article vous plait? Please make a donation today so we can continue covering the Paris arts world / Penser à faire un don aujourd’hui alors qu’on peut continuer d’ecrire sur le monde de l’art a Paris in Dollars or Euros by designating your payment through PayPal to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check. Paul is also looking for a sous-location ou échange de bons procédés (logement contre travail) en région Parisienne a partir du 11 mai et surtout un logement / location pour le 13 mai. Le contacter à artsvoyager@gmail.com.)

“My desire will be happy to learn
what fate awaits me:
Expected arrow don’t hit me so hard.”

— Danté (Paradise, song 17, pages 25-27)

“Well, you know that I love to live with you
But you make me forget so very much
I forget to pray for the angels
And then the angels forget to pray for us.”

— Leonard Cohen, “So long Marianne,” being sung by a busker behind Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, 2019

PARIS — Here are some of my memories associated with Notre-Dame: Being shocked to learn, from a sign posted on the church’s gates in 2005, that among those who would be choosing the successor to Pope John-Paul was the disgraced Boston cardinal Bernard Law.… Stiffing a French girl I was dating in 2002 to go to an improvisation match between the N-D organ and a tuba, which cued our final rupture…. Crossing the short bridge (its brown iron railings recently replaced with love-lock proof glass) over the Seine in the shadow of the church on which Charles Boyer held a clandestine RDV with Ingrid Thulin in occupied Paris in Vincente Minelli’s 1962 “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (and above where Gene Kelly waltzed Leslie Caron in Minelli’s 1951 “An American in Paris”) in 2006 with a girl named Charlotte Lejeune who made my heart feel jeune again after seeing Katherine Dunham and Lena Horne in “Stormy Weather” at a cinema on the rue Christine near where Miles had wooed Greco at the Club Taboo and dining on buckwheat crepes and hard cider on the rue Mouffetard, and hearing her declare upon beholding Notre-Dame, “Elle est BELLE!” My initial reaction to the news was that it’s just a thing — no one died in the fire which tore the roof off the 900-year-old sucker last month — and whose significance, like most of the things in Paris, derives not just from the architecture (in N-D’s case, a pell-mell melange of epochs; the same architect whose spire everyone’s now lamenting has been maligned for centuries for turning the towers of Carcassonne into epoch-inconsistent coneheads), historical context, and personal memories but from the allure with which artists have invested them over time. (Following the catastrophe, Victor Hugo’s “Notre-Dame de Paris” soared back to the top of the best-seller lists.) After all, who would give a second thought to Winesburg, Ohio, if Sherwood Anderson hadn’t made it the setting for the first American psychological novel? What made a floating laundry basin — the Bateau Lavoir — the fulcrum of Cubism and the birthplace of Surrealism, if not the alchemy of Picasso, Braque, and Max Jacob that it spawned? Why did this fulcrum migrate from Montmartre to Montparnasse in the 1920s, if not for the ateliers the city set up around the train station and the artists and writers who installed themselves there? What made the Haute Provence so special if not Jean Giono’s lyrical rhapsodies? And the filthiest street in the world a hallowed terrain for urban adventurers if not the imagination and knack for capturing the local lingo of Damon Runyon?

To try to augment my empathy for the Parisians, French, and foreigners who have taken the fire and gutting of much of Notre-Dame’s roof more deeply to heart than I have — “With that woodwork, it was like you could touch history; now that’s gone forever,” one particularly anti-clerical friend confided in me — I’ve imagined what I might feel like if one of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge suddenly fell off. I’ve also reminded myself that I’m not just the Joe Biden of columnists, so mesmerized by the sound of his own voice that he doesn’t seem to care about the readers who get lost in the parentheses within parentheses never to be heard from again, but a reporter, and that this is my beat. (Or as I reflected on a recent late afternoon while sipping the last of my hot thermos mint tea on a bridge over the Canal St.-Martin where the volunteers of “Une Chorba Pour Tous” — a pirate operation judging by the way they quickly packed up their van and took off afterwards — had just dispensed hot soup and baguettes to the black and brown masses who continue to huddle under the tracks at La Chapelle no matter how many times the authorities clear them out: “Paris. It was his city.”) So on Easter Sunday, after the usual round of skirt-chasing (actually they’re not wearing skirts this season, but high-wasted pants with the ever-present pre-fabricated holes — if Malcolm McLaren were to return to Paris today, he’d find the girls all dressing like his prodigy Sid Vicious and stroking tiny screens instead of live mice — and short shirts or sweaters) and book-hunting and quixotic Dulcinella ping-pong partner courting and having my thermos tea with Delacroix at his fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens (he’s another one: Most of the tourists who pause to take their pictures in front of the fountain have no idea who he was; if I didn’t, would I be quite as inspired every time I sit there looking up at the master of color’s Byronic bust and his Muse’s naked torso supplicating him below it?), I descended to the Seine to assess the damage.

From the recent exhibition at the Metropoloitan Museum of Art and the Louvre: Eugène Delacroix, “Self-Portrait in Green Vest.” Oil on canvas, circa 1937. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Copyright RMN – Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Michel Urtado.

But first, by way of prelude: If I’ve scrapped the political commentary in earlier versions of this piece as it ultimately didn’t seem appropriate to use this catastrophe as a soap-box (even for expounding on pertinent and larger related issues, e.g. as an indication of a generalized lack of official concern for the country’s patrimony which pre-dates this administration, with Nicolas Sarkozy as the exception, his Socialist successor scrapping Sarkozy’s plans for a museum of the history of France), I still think it’s legitimate to cite two issues which have arisen in the debate — and it is a debate — over the appropriate measures to take for the church’s reconstruction.

“It’s a building — We’re human beings. What about us?” This is how one Gilet Jaune or “Yellow Vest” interviewed on French public radio reacted to the news that two of France’s richest families had donated a combined 330 million Euros to repair the church within 24 hours of the fire. Because another fixture that has been eroding in France in recent years, according to many, is the social ‘welfare’ state erected by the National Council of Resistance after the War, the question is entirely pertinent. Or, as the Gilets Jaunes of the Paris suburb of Pantin, right next to mine, expressed their demands in a flyer distributed at a recent Saturday market outside the Church of Pantin, they seek:

** “A minimum wage of 12 Euros an hour.” (Less than the $15/hour minimum many American states have recently adopted.)

** “The means for our schools, smaller class size.” (To which was added the complaint that their children are being oriented less and less towards college and more and more towards brief professional formations.)

** “Health care for all; free care (notably dental care).” (Contrary to what you may have heard, health care isn’t free for everyone here, and most French have to subsidize their public plan with private insurance.)

** “Construction and maintenance of affordable housing.”

The second pertinent issue was raised by numerous preseveration specialists, including state functionaries, alarmed by a measure adopted by Parliament May 2 which includes a provision that would allow the government to over-ride existing ecological and preservation regulations during the reconstruction, in the interests of fast-tracking the repairs so that they can be finished in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

My own view is that the country’s real monument is its artistic and literary canon. (Although an argument could be made that as architecture and art repository Notre-Dame falls into this category.)

Johan Barthold Jongkind (Dutch, 1819–1891), “The Pont Neuf,” 1849–50. Oil on canvas, 21 1/2 x 32 1/8 in. (54.6 x 81.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Mendelsohn, 1980. Both this tableau and that of Fouquet, above, have recently been showcased at the Met as a gesture of solidarity with those affected by the Notre-Dame fire.

It was my ongoing quest for both of these — as well as the perennial cherche pour l’ame-soeur (soul-mate) — that found me on Easter Sunday morning exiting the Denfert Rochereau Metro station across the street from the Catacombs (some of whose residents have been there as long as Notre-Dame), and heading down the avenue Denfert Rochereau (toujours fixé a le Meridian moi) for the sprawling headquarters of the benevolent association “Big Neighbors,” a sort of Jewish Community Center for recent immigrants, except that unlike the JCC most of its activities are free. The occasion was a crafts — crafts fabricated by the migrants — and vide-grenier sale. The last time I was here — the event is held every month if you want to check it out — I’d scored, for a combined 2 Euros, paperback editions of two books I’d actually been looking for — Céline’s “Voyage to the end of night” and Zola’s “L’oeuvre,” a thinly veiled biography of Cézanne or Monet or both — as well as Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” and tried to score with a woman who was selling hand-lithographed “Les Ping-Pongeurs” tee-shirts, which she explained celebrated the association’s ping-pong table, which had become a kind of community fireside for the migrants, a lieu for exchanging their own stories. Partly to prolong the contact but also for a future Lutèce Diary, I’d given the woman my card and asked her to e-mail me images of the tee-shirt’s design as soon as she had them. She’d given me hers too but as there was no e-mail address, I’d resorted to trying to “friend” her on Facebook, after also noting that we had similar musical tastes and being impressed with the number and type of other associations she volunteered for or “liked,” notably the Palestinian Film Festival.

This time around in the book department I scored once again and for the same bargain rate, the price dropping from 2 Euros to 1 between the time I asked the woman guarding two large bins of them how much they were (“2 Euros”) and the moment I started looking elsewhere (“actually, they’re all 1 Euro”). I found a limited edition copy of a lavishly illustrated history of Modern Art from the ’50s (the best era for color reproduction) I’d used to own but lost, a hefty hardcover “Dictionary of Synonymes” (useful for translating), and, the real coupe, a copy of Victor Serge’s “Les années sans pardon.” Serge being one of the real-life heroes of one of my translating projects, Michel Ragon’s novel “La mémoire des vaincus.” In what I assume to be a thinly fictionalized telling of his own story — Serge was a non-violent anarchist publisher who became a disillusioned ally of the Bolsheviks, unsuccessfully trying to get the French Communist Party to acknowledge Soviet crimes — the book, published in 1947, recounts the Communists’ tracking of one of its Paris leaders after he quits the party, even though he promises to beat a gentle retreat to Mexico (where Serge would die that same year).

(I forgot to mention, important because it comes up later, that at a real gauntlet of a vide-grenier near the la Villette basin on the other side of the Seine earlier that morning, whose sublime and free highlight was observing Paris come to life while having my thermos tea perched on the Crimée pedestrian bridge over the Ourcq Canal and watching the drawbridge go up and then back down for no apparent reason as there was no boat traffic, and that was really more of a brocante — junk — sale, I’d spent all of 1 Euro on a “Dictionary of Symbols,” a gift for a witch I know. (You know which witch you are.) And scored some bargain stomach sustenance: A canned roast chicken salad for a Euro, a pound of dry rice for 50 cents, and a can of duck mousse for the same, the idea being it will give me something local to eat my first night back in the Dordogne, a.k.a. duck country.) (Lest you think I just eat them as this is the second Lutèce Diary in a row in which I’ve mentioned my predilection for this Dordogne staple, I recently had the opportunity to give back, lunching with one famished female canard with a bald-spot on her head on the lip of the pond of the parc George Brassens, calmly gray and sparsely populated on a drizzly Sunday. We dined on left-over Texas-style cornbread and peas, my new friend making duck eyes at me every time she came up from fishing the crumbs out of the muddy shallows.)

Next (we’re back at the vide-grenier in one of the courtyards of les Big Neighbors) I landed a telling item for this column, when a particularly ugly American demanded, in English, of the woman selling next to the bookstand, “I don’t speak French, can you tell her” — her being an older woman with stringy gray hair within hearing distance who’d just set down a tattered box against a nearby column — “that she doesn’t have the right to that space, my friend paid for it and she didn’t pay,” which request he repeated insistently again and again until the seller reluctantly ceded. I guess the young man, unshaven and clad in dirty jeans — who, once the FRENCH woman who UNLIKE HIM HAD THE RIGHT TO BE SELLING AT A FRENCH VIDE-GRENIER sadly walked away, threw down what looked like over-sized tinker-toy wheels on the pavement — wasn’t aware that the reason his friend had had to pay for him was that he has no standing here. Talk about ugly Americans: This loser couldn’t even communicate “I don’t speak French” correctly.

Having surpassed my quota of ugly Americans for the day and my book budget as well, I continued searching for the Ping-Pongeuse who was the real object of my visit through the alleys and across the several courtyards of the Big Neighbors complex, weaving among handmade crafts and clothing and over-priced ash-trays and carafes — the association even offers a restaurant and a bench-lined roof terrace over the entrance where you can take your coffee looking out on the tree-lined avenue, surveilling this stretch of the Meridian. Finally spotting her behind dark sun-glasses (“Quick, that Facebook weirdo is coming over here, hand me those shades!”) wearing a large white sweatshirt which showed off her sliver-brunette bangs and deftly rolling an orange ping-pong ball between my nimble if shaking fingers — the paddles were stashed away in my “Re-Nais – Sance” bag — I stepped up to the Ping-Pongeurs table and, while she stared blankly back at me behind the sun-glasses not changing her expression, sputtered, “I’m the guy who asked you for art of your Ping-Pongeurs tee-shirt for my magazine last month.”

“I remember.” (I’m on to you, Buster, with your vintage 1973 paddles and orange ball, if orange balls tickled my fancy I’d stay at home watching re-runs of “The Prisoner.”)

“I’m still interested.”

“I know, I still have your card.” (Buried in my ‘non-recyclable’ pile.) “But we haven’t been able to take any pictures, what with the Sun coming out and all.” (She didn’t phrase it exactly that way, but I’m channeling Carson McCullers. She comes up later.)

My witch not being available to inform my Ping-Pongeuse that despite the missing teeth I really was a frog waiting to be turned into a prince I decided to take my witch gift “Dictionary of Symbols” further down the Meridian to the Fountain of the Four Parts of the World in the Explorers Garden which abuts the Luxembourg, where at least the four maidens carrying the whole world in their hands wouldn’t glare back at me for ogling their bare bronze chests. I’d read on Wikipedia that one of these ladies, designed by Carpeaux, was supposed to be an American Indian and, besides that she was the least demeure of the bronze babes, bending forward into the wind at the haunches instead of remaining loftily above it like her European sister, she was also recognizable by the (stereotypical) braid…. mirrored in the braided manes of the two horse-mermaids rearing their heads below her. Opening the dictionary while trying to protect it from the errant spray of the water fight going on between the bronze turtles on the first level and the fish below the horse-mermaids, I looked up ‘turtle’ first and was tempted to bang my head on the nearest ping-pong table because as I already should have known, having jogged in a colorful “Turtle Island Marathon” tee-shirt for years back in San Francisco, this is the most obvious, four-parts-of-the-world symbolism of the turtle — the American Indian maiden should have clued me in: They hold the whole world on their shells. And if we keep pissing off the noble turtle, or tortoise, he’s going to retreat into his shell and leave us to our own wiles. (According to the dictionary, whose sources are a bit obscure, the turtle is also apparently both phallic and vaginal, making a strong case for augmenting the already onerous acronym LGBQT to LGBQTET, for eunuch turtles.)

Before heading over to and down the Boul’Mich to Notre-Dame to do my nominal reporter’s job, I decided to look up “arrow,” hoping to find a literary significance for Viollet le Duc’s “fleche de Notre-Dame” going up in flames. Besides being about getting closer to Heaven and giving Cupid a helping hand, the book informed me, the arrow also represents destiny, or as Al Dante quipped about the time Notre-Dame was going up (Paradise, song 17, pages 25-27):

“My desire will be happy to learn
what fate awaits me:
Expected arrow don’t hit me so hard.”

I was hit harder by the disaster zone that greeted me from the Ile de Cité than I’d expected to be when I was finally able to forge my way through the somber Easter Sunday crowd congesting the widened sidewalk — the pedestrians spilling over to the bicycle lane — along the Quay Tournelle facing the church across the water, more hushed than usual; even the ten gendarme vans that sped by with blue lights flashing while I was slowly threading my way through the throng, all of our heads askance to look up and over the river at the church, had respectfully silenced their sirens.

Eugène Atget, “Au Tambourg 63 quai de Tournelle,” 1908.

I’d heard that the twin towers themselves had been spared, but their innards are toast, charred to carbon. Literally, this is all you see through the windows, carbon black. Between the twin towers the roof has effectively been torn off, its curved rim warped on the edge facing the Ile St. Louis, as is the scaffolding which once surrounded the arrow, the fire melting even part of the metal. Two alabaster bishops remain perched high atop the outer ledge of the roof, saluting the Paris skyline from their posts after having been powerless to protect their earthly fiefdom, but the windows below them are also blackened. (This could be from drawn curtains.) When you look at the structure from the Ile St. Louis, which I eventually reached after about half an hour, one of the bishops appears to be turned away from you, his crowned head inclined in mourning.

The real miracle — besides that anything at all is still standing (I’ve seen fires reduce medieval stone houses in my Dordogne village to a pile of rubble in 10 minutes) — is that the ring of gargoyles high up towards where the roof once was (and thus closer than you and me to Heaven) is intact. I know from gargoyles, my first story for the New York Times having been on the gargoyles of Princeton, about which a colleague, Laurel Cantor, had written a precise and elegant book. My favorite was a monkey with a camera peering down from an arch across the street from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs who appeared to be taking pictures of those looking up at him as they passed under the arch. (As I write this I’m realizing that gothic buildings have another resonance with me, evoking the surroundings that welcomed me in September 1979 to grounds that otherwise looked like a hurricane had swept through them, because one had, me arriving in Princeton the morning after Hurricane Frederick. It’s really something to live in the garret of one of those buildings, as I did, wondering if you’re big enough to walk in their shoes, but Fitzgerald’s fit mine perfectly, as far as our Princeton expiration date went anyway. We both lasted longer than Eugene O’Neill, Class of ’10, although he and I ran into the same obstacle at PU: “It’s tradition-bound.” Those gargoyles were the beginning of my end at Princeton, the Times wanting more stories from me after that one, written in the Summer of 1983 while I was covering for the regular stringer as a member of the University Press Club, whose other members ordered me to stop writing for the Times when he came back in September. Both me and my editor convinced there was enough to go around, I refused, was kicked out of the club, the bottom fell out of my social life, I stopped going to class, when I sought help, explaining the various stressors, from the dean of the college she scolded me, “Other students are able to have personal problems without letting them get in the way of their studies,” miserable and telling myself I was already doing what I wanted to do anyway, writing for the Times, I left Princeton but it never left me.)

Who’s zooming who? Gargoyle from the campus of Princeton University. Photo courtesy Princeton University.

Beholding those gargoyles of Notre-Dame unscathed by the flames made me think of that monkey, and, later, seeing the way they seemed to be gawking back across the Seine at the tourist gawkers, of the apes on Monkey Island at the San Francisco Zoo, who used to throw their caca at visitors. (I know this from warning the kids I’d take on field trips there not to stand too close to the monkeys, which of course had the opposite effect.) As the Notre-Dame gargoyles stared back down at us staring up at them, I found myself hoping they’d come to life and start heaving fossilized merde at the tourists. (Why such hostility? I guess this is the other reason I’d put off coming down to Notre-Dame to check out the fire damage. I didn’t want to watch the tragedy turn into yet another photo opportunity for tourists, like the Place de la Republique became after the November 13, 2015 massacres: We are not your “I was here” photo moment, tourist-fuckers. We hurt. Now that I start tearing up at writing that it occurs to me that maybe this inability to feel anything about the fire has just been denial. All the things I love about Paris and France are disappearing. Valuable old books are sold for less than fish-wrap (Le Monde costs 1.25), and the social model that used to make France different and unique and the anti (dote) American is also eroding. In my village the post-man, or woman, used to stop and chat with the elders living alone, sometimes bringing them their paper or baguette or having a petite gout of eau de vie with the retired farmer. Now if you want the mailman/woman to spend more than 30 seconds with your 90-year-old grandmother you have to pay the post office for the service…. (Which post-office also eliminated, under  Emmanuel Macron’s Socialist predecessor, the special book rate for sending the country’s literature abroad; so much for exporting French culture.) And Notre-Dame is not just a marketing opportunity to be superficially prettied up in time for the Olympics. It needs to be made whole again.

Ah yes, the books. I was also upset because at least for the first few blocks, the crowd moving along the quay to get a better look at the damaged church across the river was completely ignoring the bookstalls past which this brought them. And yet these bouquinistes, whose lives are not easy — a former friend of mine in the trade worked winters as a museum security guard to support his book-selling habit — are the real guardians of the most valuable monument France has given the world, its literature. This is why on his first morning in Paris, where he’d been sent to fetch the scion of a wealthy Boston family from the clutches of a scheming older Frenchwoman (the Henries seem to have something against this breed, the only thing not quiet in Miller’s “Quiet Days in Clichy” being a Frenchie his hero hooks up with), before he even saw about the boy Henry James’s Lambert Strether (in “The Ambassadors”) headed straight to the quays to search for and procure a complete set of the works of Victor Hugo. At a recent vide-grenier high up on the Meridian — near the Cité Universitaire — I scored a complete volume of the Great Man’s plays that might have been sitting right next to the set Strether bought, given that it was published in the 1880s, for 1 Euro. I’m happy for my library but dismayed about what this says about the value contemporary society attaches to the product of my endangered trade and species. (Further down the quays I joined two older French gentlemen scouring through bins where everything was for sale at 2 Euros, high for vide-greniers but low for bouquinistes. I passed on a volume of the essays, reviews, and other rarely collecting writings of Carson McCullers because it was in French and I was still scarred by an experience with a translation of “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” which had the Black characters speaking a kind of plantation dialect that made Ebonics seem like Latin by comparison.)

Speaking of dead poets, while the church plaza was cordoned off, its back-side outside the fence and leading to the bridge to the Ile St. Louis — right across the street from the stairs descending to the Holocaust Memorial in what resembles a prison, except instead of Kilroy the graffiti is signed “Albert Camus” — was open. (From my favorite bench on the Ile St-Louis en face you can see the bars of the memorial’s triangular corner room.) The crowd here was more subdued, lulled in part by a long-grey-haired man reprising Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne,” whose theme — gracefully accepting change — was just right for the occasion:

“So long, Marianne, it’s time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”

When the singer shifted to a more obvious choice (I’m not being more specific because it would leave you singing the song all day, which would still be more dulcet than the middle-aged Danish woman who walked by at that moment doing so.) (Oops, now I realize I left out the sample of Danish pastry a comely boulangerista handed me as I was heading away from the Catacombs towards my rendez-vous with the Ping-Pongeuse, which reminded me of another comely boulangerista at the same bakery at the entrance to the rue Daguerre who I tried to court 18 years ago by handing her a sunflower — during the epoch this is what I was packing, the idea being that I would spontaneously give my tournesol to whatever woman sparked my fancy — only to overhear her afterwards flirting on a bench outside the Catacombs with one very living beau. If this digression annoys you, just be thankful I’m sparing you the two-page entry for “Tournesol” in “The Dictionary of Symbols,” although my witch, who’s also a gardener and almost as much of a sunflower fanatic as me, will appreciate it.)

Still hoping to make myself cry (unfortunately I’d forgotten how Spencer Tracy achieves this to win an argument with Katherine Hepburn — I can’t even remember the name of the film) or at least feel something besides the urge to will the gargoyles to life so that they could start hurling their caca at the tourists, I crossed to the Ile St.-Louis and descended to my favorite bench, once again miraculously free, and from which perspective in 16 years of pique-niquing I’ve been looking across the water at Notre-Dame. At least this is how I remembered it, but when I got to the bench, I realized that what I’ve actually been looking at is that barred prison cell in the caverns of the Holocaust Memorial, with Camus lurking somewhere on its walls waiting to tell us that prison is just a state of mind.

As for the Ile itself, as with Montmartre for me on this trip, during which I’ve been trying not to just resurrect my previous nostalgia for epics I never lived but pay attention to whether they evoke anything for me now, thanks to the assholes who think they can play their annoying music and subject everyone else to it — there used to be a common understanding among We the People of the Ile that this was a music-free-zone — that magic was stifled, at least on this visit.

Recently fixed up thanks to a public subscription campaign, the loriette atop the Jardin des Plantes is the oldest iron structure in Paris.

Fearing a similar letdown at the loriette above the nearby Jardin des Plantes — the oldest iron structure in Paris, recently restored thanks to a public inscription campaign — I crossed to the Left Bank and tiredly made my way through the outdoor sculpture garden, stopping only long enough to pee into a metal trough of stagnant amber liquid above which was the inevitable sign from the Mayor: “Paris is clean!” No wonder that when I got there another man was emerging from behind the urinal, where it was no doubt more clean. (Further along in the sculpture garden I found a sort of one-unit “Paris is pissing to fertilize” pissoir with plants in the basin whose complete exposure to the foot traffic makes me wonder what libertine of a deputy mayor dreamed this particular Eco-idea up, although the Serge book informs me that even the Grands Boulevards used to be littered with pissoirs “from which one can see only the cuffs and the shoes” of the piseurs, pissing away the excesses of Capitalism.)

After climbing up to the loriette, where the only free thin metal bench was directly facing the bright 6 p.m. Sun over the green tiles of the Mosque of Paris (the main journalistic justification for this effort was that I wanted to compare religious monuments. Speaking of mosques, maybe the Notre-Dame renovation fund could give, I dunno, 200,000 of that 330 million to the fellows down the street form me here in the prè-St. Gervais, who do their worshiping in a storefront the only religious indication of which is the “Vigi-Pirate” sign on the frosted glass door and the sandals on the ledge outside the mosque on Fridays), I decided I had to say coucou to the Kangaroos (I call them that, but I think they’re actually wallabies), another effort to tap into an early Paris sentimental sensation, when I first discovered them in 2000 and liked to sip my cider leaning up against a bullet-ridden concrete wall facing the pen the kangaroos shared with a pair of black swans. That makeshift terrace has now been walled in as part of a restaurant; paying customers only, please.) I was rewarded with a close-up view, through a fence, of a baby kangaroo milking at his mama’s breast before pitching itself into her pouch, and mama hopping away. A three-year-old boy to whom a papa had been pointing out all these marvels shrieked, “Look Papa, pigeons!” “I point out something really special and you talk to me about pigeons.”

After Mama bounded off, baby in pouch, Dad (I’m talking about the kangaroo) stepped forward to grab a very large slice of raw eggplant from where it had been strewn about with tomatoes and leeks — ratatouille! — neatly nibbling everything away but the black skin before tossing it. That did it. Feeling weak having imbibed nothing but mint tea for six hours I decided to open the can of chicken-vegetable salad — tant pis if it might had fallen off a truck of botchulated foodstuffs on their way back to the factory.

I was about to crawl down into the mouth of the Jusseau metro — I knew there was a toilet on the Place Jusseau; all that mint tea — when I looked across the street and realized it was the “Street of the Arenes.” Yes, I was a traffic light away from THE 2000 year-old arenas of Lutèce, the ancient name for Paris and the more recent name of this column. Another landmark — or rather Paul nostalgia point — that I could cross off my bucket list with just a quick detour.

Ignoring a man strumming his guitar on the first level of the park below the arenas (Oops, the musical reference reminds me that I left out the tango party on the Tino Rossi Square below the Sculpture Garden set against the Seine and beyond that Notre-Dame to which none of the tango dancers who packed the square listening to recorded Carlos Gardel numbers were paying any attention, and where seeing three guys pushing 70 dancing with three girls who won’t be pushing 30 for at least five years told me I should have kept up with those Fort Worth tango lessons and brought my new tango boots instead of my 47-year-old ping-pong paddles to Paris), I continued up the stairs to the concrete lodges flanking one side of the arena from which the Emperor once sat looking down on the gladiators and across at the people in the bleachers, Emperor and subjects drooling over the slaves being tossed out of the cages to the lions, and sat sipping my tea on the bench carved into the lodge before noticing that below that, on the roof of one of the cages, a niche had been carved into the stone big enough for a small emperor to squeeze into, which I did, only instead of a slave being chased by a lion a young woman in a short jeans skirt and white blouse came running towards me chasing a metal ball, which is all they’re chasing these days in the 2000-year-old Arenes de Lutèce.

Heading back where I came from after drinking more tea and emptying it in the appropriate place, then sitting down to enjoy the guitar player before leaving Lutèce, not far from the exit I noticed, in an alcove behind a fenced-in lawn on the other side of which was the arena, a naked alabaster maiden with no head reclining on a body-length stone shelf above an empty basin and cuddling an urn-like object in the crook of her arm. In front of the locked fence protecting the lawn between the fence and the maiden was a stationary sign announcing “Pesticide-free rye and poppies coming soon, thanks to the Friends of the Poppies.” Then I noticed the Don’t drink the water symbol (a faucet with a cross through it) above the alabaster lady and, sure enough, looking closer recognized the three rectangular water outlets below her.

In other words, I’d discovered yet another dry, poorly maintained fountain in Paris, whose administration hasn’t yet figured out that, respiration-wise, a flowing fountain would be a lot more reassuring then poppies and rye. (And I say this as someone of Jewish heritage, whose natural inclinations lean more towards poppies and rye than Gallo-Roman idols.) (I know what you’re thinking: If they’d just put up “Pissoir Ici” signs on all the dry fountains around Paris this would solve two problems. Don’t tempt me.)

This is when I had the revolutionary — for a guy who’s always come to Paris, like Malcolm McLaren, to live yesterday today — revelation: This is what is supposed to happen to decrepit monuments. Their heads fall off. This is what happened to Notre Dame: It’s head fell off. Now, if something happened to that Delacroix fountain, I might be singing a different story….