I fell in love again with Paris this fall, while attending Art Basel and skipping out after a cursory view of the show to imbibe the exhibitions and museum shows this city of art affords.
I spent days visiting private collectors’ art, seen through golden bubbles of champagne, to roaming the Louvre’s galleries, visiting Rembrandt’s and Vermeer’s, so many, taking me to a world where portraits portray sitter’s emotional state and the artist’s connection, an audience’s willing absorption into a different era and mindset, to the Louvre’s exhibition, Ful where I spent three hours absorbing Rabelais’s words to modern art about those labeling fools as a truthtellers.
The surrealism show at Centre Pompidou, subtitled Surrealism first and always, celebrating Andre Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism challenged prior artwork, while resonating today, reminding us what war has wrought, of what mankind is capable and the empty fields of bones that might and did ensue. A show of Arte Povera, a group that condemned art’s commercialization was held, satirically, in the Bourse de Commerce, the Paris Mint, a juxtaposition no doubt enjoyed by the French.
Pop Forever, featuring work by Tom Wesselman and his comrade, blurred boundaries between Art and reality, often commercial. A rendition of Monet’s Waterlilies showed magnificent, purples, rose pinks rising from cooler waters. The 18th arrondissement’s view of park and trees rivaled landscapes in the museums.
The built environment, medieval gargoyles on buildings, uniting form and function and carved grotesques, modern sculptures and wide boulevards, and always, the view upwards; the spires of Notre Dame, restored, or the hill of Montmartre, kept me oriented and prevented my ever getting lost. Circling the Arc d’ Triomphe twice, an impromptu band played. I’d abandoned the bureaucracy of the art fair for Paris itself, where art is everywhere, in everything, often free for the taking, where the air seems scented with art.
It is good that Art Basel has now opened an official fair in Paris. I saw here, differing from its emphasis on prospecting for art buyers an inclusion of art lovers. Administrators were kind, abandoning strict rules to help those needing rides, champagne, directions, hotels, restaurant recommendations, reminders that Paris takes it easy, late is ok. It is not northern Europe, and parted with Germany ages ago, let artists run their lives and careers collectively, letting those in those who truly love their art. Whether admitting black artists from America, who abandoned the US for Paris in the 1920s and 30s and after or setting up their own Salon des la Refusees, or hosting Spanish artists, Picasso, Dali, to paint truth and revolution, evolution, Paris finds its artists and its own way. Whether admitting those labeled fools are in fact speaking truth to power, Paris is unafraid. Rebuilding the spires of a cathedral that took hundreds of years to build the first time, in only five years as a communal effort with all of Paris donating, Paris leads the art world still.
I love Paris, for its people, its art, its history, its display and embrace of past, present and future worlds, all in one circular hug.