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Of totems and poles, of Academiciens and Artists, of Pundits and Philosophers

Bucher Rebeyrolle, La vache rouge, 1998, small

Alain Finkielkraut, the French pundit who never seems to miss an opportunity to appropriate a philosophical precept for his own often neo-reactionary agenda, might want to stroll over from the august headquarters of the Académie Française on the Seine of which he’s ostensibly a member to the Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger on the rue de Seine in Saint-Germain-des-Près. On Saturday’s edition of his France Culture radio program “Replique,” theoretically consecrated to Albert Camus in this 60th anniversary year of the author’s accidental death, Finkielkraut feebly tried to subvert Camus’s well-known penchant for Nature, particularly present in the author’s luminous eloges to his native Algeria, to bolster his latest retrograde crusade, in which Finkielkraut has been lambasting ecologists for not mentioning enough that Nature is beautiful. (If my Frank Lloyd Wright house was going up in flames, I wouldn’t waste any time composing sonnets in its glory; I’d be too busy trying to put the fire out.) (And forget about Greta Thunberg, to whose Cassandra Finkielkraut has appointed himself Apollo. His argument: She’s too young and should leave saving the planet to the grown-ups. What’s the use of being bestowed with an academician’s sword if you reduce your arguments to just sticking your tongue out?) Paul Reybeyrolle’s 1998 “The Red Cow,” above, a 146 x 114 cm mixed-technique canvas — among the modern masterpieces the gallery has rolled out for its exhibition Animal Totem — manages to simultaneously extol Nature’s beauty and condemn its fragility in our hands. On view through March 14, the exhibition also includes work by Fermín Aguayo, Miguel Branco, Louis Marcoussis, André Masson, Hans Reichel, Noémie Sauve, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Yang Jiechang, and — for the first time at the gallery (!) — Saint-Germain-des-Près stalwart (and Michel Ragon  favorite) Jean-Michel Atlan. And if Finkielkraut still insists that it’s neither art nor ecologists (let alone lycéenne ecologists) but philosophers (or pundits who just play philosophers on the radio) who will save us, the exhibition press release offers this Nietzsche citation from — wait for it — “Thus spoke Zarathustra”: “Men are more dangerous than animals.” Photo © Jean-Louis Losi and courtesy Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris. — Paul Ben-Itzak