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The societies of the Beisteguis

The Beisteguis, a Spanish Basque colonial family that made a vast fortune in the silver mines of Mexico, is a name that evokes the splendorous living and art collecting of the early and mid XX century.  Two of its members, uncle and nephew,  followed divergent paths to strengthen the prestige of the bloodline.  Both were passionate aesthetes and commited lovers of all things beautiful.

Carlos de Beistegui (the “de” was an ennobling prefix added by them to permit a better entry into the world of elites) was a 13 year-old Mexican boy when he arrived in France with his wealthy parents in 1876. As a youth, he pursued a career in painting under the guidance and friendship of the painter Léon Bonnat, who counted among his pupils Sargeant and Caillebotte. It soon became apparent that his creative aptitudes were limited and he could aspire to nothing more than being a “peintre de dimanche”, a derisive expression used by the French to designate somebody whose ambitions exceed his potential.  His artistic zeal turned then to collecting and he soon amassed a substantial collection of coins and medals, influenced no doubt by his predecessors mining activities and his father’s formal appointment as Director of the Mexican Mint. But it is his donation to the Louvre of an extraordinary collection of portraits that stands out as an example of patronage and taste. The works acquired over the years with the counsel of curators and art academics, include the elegant full length portrait of “La Marquesa de Solana” by Goya, the Death of Didion by Rubens and two Davids, all reflecting the exquisite discernement and predilections of the collector. A presiding portrait by Ignacio Zuloaga of Carlos de Bestegui exuding a solid but self-effacing bearing is the only XX century masterpiece of the ensemble. It is rumored that the Prado Museum was offered the collection before the Louvre but upon the insistence of the Spaniards that the portraits should be hung chronologically and by schools rather that grouped, he opted for the French museum.

When his nephew Carlos de Beistegui y De Iturbe was born the prefixes were firmly established in the family name. Charlie, as he was also known in the circles in which he moved, was the prototype of a certain Latin American only at ease in the company of real princesses. He boasted his friendship with King Alphonse XIII of Spain  and rolled the eyes when he showed his visitors the numerous portraits of the Duchess of Alba that populated his salons as if between them existed a degree of complicity that words should not express. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he proceeded to recreat around him  the style and possessions of those born to aristocracy and acquired in 1939 the Chateau de Groussay, where he indulged his passion for all things neoclassical. In 1948 he bought the Palazzo Labia in Venice for the modest sum to our eyes of 53.000 pounds sterling. The stage was set for unfolding a flamboyant and extravagant lifestyle and the admiration grew as fast as the comtempt many contemporaries felt about him. When he sold Palazzo Labia to the Italian broadcasting corporation, the RAI, it turned out that all the furniture and contents, except for the Tiepolo frescoes were fake. His final claim to fame came with Le Bal Oriental also known as Le Bal Beistegui a party extravaganza that he celebrated at Palazzo Labia in 1951. It was because of the list of the invitees and the lavish magnificence of the event that the party stands as a social record of a world and a class that have long disspeared. The party can also be viewed as the discovery by the mass media of the “beau monde” through the photo reportage of Cecil Beaton. Charlie pursued to his very last day in January 1970 his lifelong job of furnishing Groussay, the only decorative job of his life according to one of his contemporaries.  His reluctant heir and nephew Juan “Johnny” de Beistegui chose to auction the château and contents in 1999 ending the historic collection of the man who wanted to be someone that he wasn’t and was what he did not want to be: a fantasist in a world of blue bloods.

Digital merriment at La Gaîté Lyrique

This city is indefatigable in her marathon reputation for creative institutions and unique art centers.  Now, it is the turn of a location celebrating the brave new world of digital and electronic cultures which raises our technical fascination for gadgets to the honorable position of tools for imaginative and creative use.

La Gaîté Lyrique, a theatre whose present  form dates back to 1863 and witnessed the popularity of the operette and the world of the Belle Époque, fell into a sad and crumbling state after multiple vicissitudes during the XX century. The paladin of new cultural institutions, the city mayor, Bertrand Delanoë has come to the rescue of La Gaîté Lyrique and helped to transform this dying frog into a digital prince.

After eight years of redevelopment the building reopened in March 2011, offering a showcase of temporary exhibitions, music concerts, interactive experiences and a digital library. The space redesigned by the  French architect Manuelle Gautrand shares with the “104”, the other pet project of Delanoë, a firm belief in the fluid nature of public spaces.  Gautrand herself  thinks that the space is best defined as a “magnificent toolbox”. As technologies blend and its uses expand, the stage is set for the new generations to play, invent and create within the modular nature of this novel environment.

The present interactive exhibition “2062 aller-retour vers le futur” embodies this philosophy through cutting edge  proposals: a hypnosis session in a soundproof box, video art and a robot displaying the operations of the financial markets are some of the exhibits that move us fast to a future that is almost now.

http://www.gaite-lyrique.net/

Natalie Clifford Barney: Women on the edge

“Paris as a magnet: female expatriates and the Left Bank 1900-1940” is not the name of a forthcoming exhibition but it is the title I fancy for a multidisciplinary pageant involving all the municipal as well as French national museums and cultural centers to take place over several months across the city. It would honor the wealth of remarkable female artists who chose this place as the receptacle of their creative ambitions, using it to explore and express what was contained in their minds. The city has been generous over the years with these uncommon individuals mounting exhibitions and recalling their trail-blazing trajectories. The Grand Palais is honoring these days the Stein family and their intense involvement with the avant-garde artists and intellectuals of the early part of the XX century. The Saint-Laurent Pierre Bergé Foundation is showing the work of the photographer Gisele Freund, author of notable portraits of literary figures.

Behind the names that marked a period and left a deep imprint in both the arts and the collective imagination, there shimmers another band of pioneers, ardorous and vital, to whom posterity has not allocated a front seat in the pantheon but who are a feverish part of that ecosystem of free-spirits and bohemians. One such is Natalie Clifford Barney, an American heiress who had more than one thing in common with a member of the Stein family, Gertrude, no doubt the best known of them. Both sapphic writers, they also each held famous weekly salons. Nathalie’s was frequented by all the famed and fashonable elites, individuals such as André Gide, Marcel Proust, T.S. Elliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Rhys, Adrienne Monnier and Nancy Cunard as well as “ladies with high collars and monocles” as Sylvia Beach would describe some of them.  Natalie wrote and loved incessantly. She  was also gifted with wealth and health to no end and her long life (she died in 1972 at the age of 96) afforded her the ability to associate with a high number of legendary characters, an astonishing ghota of talents, artistic and intellectual.

It seems the work of destiny the fact that she met Oscar Wilde on one of his trips to the United States when she was still a young girl and she ended up not only having a rare affair with Sir Alfred Douglas, the passion and downfall of Wilde, but also becoming an epigrammatist like the famous Englishman who accidentally crossed   her life.

She was also fortunate to have found an original abode in number 20, rue Jacob in the heart of the 6^th arrondissement, tucked away from the street and at the back of an enchanting garden. Next to her maisonette stood a doric tempietto of unknown origins that she renamed le Temple de l’Amitié, the Temple of Friendship. It still stands, as in the times of Natalie hidden to prying eyes but keeping, in spite of certain neglect, the magic that so beguiled all the visitors to her salon.

There cannot possibly be many lives as romanticized as the life of Natalie, viewed at least from our contemporary perspective. She stands according to Shari Benstock, the author of a book on women on the Left Bank 1900-1940, as the “type” for the expatriate female Modernist: intellectual, sexually independent and financially secured. There could not be a better place for such an individul than the Paris of the time. 

Dead painter’s society

The enchanting and minuscule Place de Furstenberg was the location chosen by Eugene Delacroix for his abode and studio just five years before his death in 1873. Among chic French textile stores and expensive antique dealers, the spot exudes an air of coziness and prosperity as befits the area between the rue Jacob and the boulevard St. Germain. It is here that the museum carrying his name was created in 1971 after the crusading efforts of the Société des Amis d’Eugène Delacroix that until then kept the flame –and the premises-alive.

The present exhibition centers around a canvass on loan from the Musée d’Orsay and painted by Fantin-Latour in 1864 a year after the artist's death and entitled: “Hommage à Delacroix”.  Superbly composed and probably inspired by the Regents’ paintings of Frans Hals that Fantin-Latour was then discovering, its irresistible seduction remains unabated. An internal energy seems to emanate from each of the ten artists and writers that fill the canvas on both sides of a portrait of the master in spite of their solemnity and dignified allure. “Hommage” may well be, as some critics and the title of the canvas indicates, but the honored guests were far from sharing any ideological and aesthetic convictions. Champfleury and Duranty, champions of realism appear next to Whistler and Manet who could not care less about it and to Baudelaire who simply considered the word an abomination. They all came together to protest at the manner in which the authorities of the time handled the demise of the artist. The interpersonal dynamics of the characters in view and those invited that fail to appear are woven in the narrative of the exhibition through letters, invitations and press cuttings. The sketches and proofs of Fantin’s previous attempts to compose his homage illustrate the creative rearrangements that the project underwent. With some extra knowledge of the oeuvre of those involved, the viewer can understand the dramatic significance that the true homage represents: a profound turn in the manner of painting, the admiration by a new generation of artists of a pioneering precursor and the divergent paths followed by those looking at the viewer from the painting.

As might be expected both Delacroix and Fantin-Latour remain secondary actors in the historic vortex that the exhibition so adeptly illuminates.  It is a forgivable shortcoming but it is particularly deplored on the side of Fantin-Latour whose creativity oscillated between his dreams of the ideal and the more austere and rigorous view of reality that was at the bottom of his personality. He deserves a reexamination.

http://www.musee-delacroix.fr/

Liberté, Égalité and the 104

104, or Le Centquatre in its verbal designation, is the center for arts and creativity run by the City of Paris in the northeastern neighborhood of Aubervilliers. An urban-industrial complex, edgy and multifaceted, it aims at mirroring the multiracial and exuberant life on the surrounding streets. This brainchild of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, crystallizes the strong ideological spectrum of art as a democratic enterprise and follows in the French tradition of public commitment to arts management.

Its 39.000 square meters of frantic activity are housed in the former site of the City Morgue that used to give shelter to different trades busying themselves in the death industry.  These grim origins have been wiped out in the new conversion and its warehouse dimensions are opened to the sky through its glass ceilings. It functions as a symbol for the regeneration of the arts and the surrounding community.

In its anti-elitist insistence, the center is open as much to the visual as to the performing arts with offerings of plays, circus performances and musical events. Beyond professional creations, it exhorts the occupation of the agora by organic markets, urban rappers and Qi Gong practitioners. Local amateurs of all artistic hues are invited to hire the ateliers for temporary exhibits or performances. It is this effervescent nature that delights and confuses the visitor in equal parts as a disorienting but tasty banquet of riches.

Centquatre-Paris (c) Bâtiment L. Erlich

The current exhibits of Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich illustrate the hybrid nature of this collective undertaking. Of ambitious dimensions, his creations straddle the architectural and the trompe l’oeil where reality is a matter of perception and surprise and the spectator is invited to participate and complete the piece. The work called “Bâtiment” acts as a metaphor for the 104. As its current Director José Manuel Gonçalves puts it: “ Imagine a space more than a monument that creates its identity on the continuing research of new functionalities”.

The persistent atmosphere is one of playfulness where art is interpreted as a party activity. This party, however, is costing 12 million euros a year to run of which 8 millions are contributed by the City coffers. In the current climate of budgetary constraints, the political guillotine menaces to release its heavy blade on a project  whose compass is still trying to find the Northern Lights.

www.104.fr

Paris when it's cooking

In the cultural American tradition, Paris is still the mecca of many good things in life. Over the last years, a new trend has taken root and begun its ascent to the more visible spots of popularity: the presence of expatriates in the Parisian cooking scene. Blogging and internet have given wings to explorers and reviewers of French cuisine. If you type in the beloved Google search box something like “best recommendations for bistros in Paris”, the logarithm at work will return you the chilling number  24,400,000 results.  Well, even if you sift through some, you will be spending valuable time comparing and preparing your eating out plans. This is one of the prices you pay to give your taste buds an invigorating culinary adventure in the city.

So, these days, besides the explosive growth of professional guides to what is being cooked in Paris, more adventuresome mavens have chosen to set up shop offering their cooking to enlightened customers. And praise be given, some are not only excellent but deservingly successful. Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian have made of Verjus one of the hottest spots in the city where you can either have a long restaurant meal or a combination of small plates at the wine bar. Daniel Rose at Spring is already an institution, having won the praises of the New York Times and  turning the place into location where awe is the reigning mood.  

This flourishing trend has continued with the arrival of Kevin O’Donnell and Michael Lombardi at the helm of the French owned L’Office. Since October 2011, they have been gaining a reputation as their cuisine twists classic French themes and invents new ones all based in the freshest ingredients.

Only two blocks north of L’Office a newcomer has made an entrance with a bang: Albion, run by Matt Ong and Hayden Clout and just opened in November 2011. It offers nouveau comfort food fare with a British accent.

But this is not a post for foodies so I cannot recommend to you which one to select and which one to ignore and I do not have the eloquence to describe the fine delights that await you in these eateries. However, yes, I am partial to good food and better design and I’d rather comment on the latter. I can’t therefore but incline my heart to the gloriously simple, Albion in the desultory Rue du Faubourg Poissoniere. I enjoyed my meal in its balanced interior where the silver sage painted walls adeptly match the textured wooden floors. The deep and wide single space is cleverly allocated to wine shelves on the left of the entrance and a large zinc and wooden bar on the right leaving the back of the room for the guests tables. The effective and low key space is a winner and many restaurant designers could take from Albion some inspiration.

Portrait of De Chirico as an older man

In October 2011, the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico donated to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris a total of 61 pieces comprising paintings, sculptures and graphic work produced by the artist late in his life. Upon entering the Palais de Tokyo there was no sign of the event. After asking three museum guides for directions to the exhibit rooms, I found them buried next to the Surrealists and the German Neue Sachlikheit paintings with no more than a brief reference to the new arrivals on the left wall of the first room. Has De Chirico become untrendy? ?  I would have to reply in the affirmative, given the display offered by the museum curators to George Baselitz’s current sculpture exhibition. One of his standing pieces presides over the lobby, a colossal wooden figure. The public is asked to pay to visit the Baselitz show. The De Chirico exhibition as the rest of the museum is free.

I always had a weakness for De Chirico. To me, he was one of the most recognizable painters during my growing years and that fact filled me with self-importance. Later, his dreamscape resonated with my adolescent moods and I somehow felt that his canvasses were always talking to me and showing me the way of my emotions as I struggled to make sense of the world.  The way I responded to De Chirico’s aesthetic insinuations changed as I became an adult and what these days remains in memory is an exquisite melancholy, a puzzled symbolism (always on the edge of identification) and a classical form both simple and clear. His metaphysics and writings (he wrote a surrealist novel called Hebdomeros) are just dense complements to his visual force.

At the exhibition, I remained intrigued by his self-portrait with his wife. While she stares defiantly at the viewer in a reddish glow as mistress of her own universe, he seems desolate and worried, prepared to step out of the painting and tell us about his weariness. De Chirico always suffered from poor digestion and who knows if this added to his intellectual melancholy and angst.

Later in the museum library I enquired about any publication commemorating this bequest. The lady in charge gave me a puzzled look as if I had asked to see Napoleon coming out of the shower (a suggestion that no doubt De Chirico would have seized upon).

Belleville and me

What makes the rue de Belleville such a stimulating environment? I cannot count the number of times that upon returning home from Belleville I feel dizzy with colors and images. The shock of Belleville is not just how much exoticism there is in one small terrain but how deep it gets buried into your senses. Let me put it this way: from one block to the next I walked past a halal butcher, a Pakistani cash and carry, a Chinese takeaway and perhaps a branch of Monoprix to remind me of where I was. Globalization is to Belleville what a fish is to the water. The gradual transformation of the neighborhood has taken place in different waves from the not so remote days where Belleville was still a village attached to Paris attracting mostly artists and bohemians until the present day. During the XX century, Jewish immigrants from Germany and Spaniards fleeing the civil war settled in the neighborhood.  As if mysteriously destined to be layered by myriad cultures, it continued to absorb the new North African and Asian arrivals, stacking up their dreams of a better life and shelter in a foreign country.

Underlying all this local whirlwind, a very intense working class feeling preserves the original spirit of the place. It is here that the last barricade of the Commune of 1879 endured the attacks of the government troops. And it is here that Edith Piaf was born at number 72 the Rue de Beleville. Her pathos did not originate in the search of a personal style but from her biography and family. And from the place where she was born.  The legend of Casque d’Or, a feuilleton of blood and passion, unfolded in the neighborhood.  Amelie Hélie, her true name, and a girl of, so called at the time, loose morals, is the lover of a local mafioso, Joseph Manda. She wants to become an artist under the name of Casque d’Or. Her dream takes a different turn when she meets Leca, a Corsican and rival of  Manda with whom she falls madly in love.  The ensuing revenge and tragedy captured the imagination of the Parisians of the period. As one of the chroniclers put it: “elle avait le diable au corps”. In 1952 Jacques Becker made  the eponymous film with Simone Signoret in the role of Amelie.

This is not a beautified spot of Paris gradually dominated by the uncontrollable forces of the trendy and artsy. Some will be inclined to disagree and perhaps there is some presence of those urban clans . Where would you not find them in Paris? They are the contemporary version of the body snatchers. They steal the soul of the place. However their occupation of Belleville has not succeeded in rooting out that spellbinding personality that dominates the quartier from its shops and markets to the turbulent life one encounters in the streets. If Nino Rota had walked the streets of Belleville he would have given us the same generous music he has given Fellini for his most touching films.

Belleville is today a laboratory where Parisians measure the chances that divergent cultures and social classes may live together. 

Around St. Gervais

What a generous location this church enjoys! Narrowly escaping the bustling traffic surrounding Hotel de Ville and just a few feet away from the Seine, its baroque façade contrasts awkwardly with the rest of its body. The combination shuns harmony in favor of seductiveness. An imposing and tall classical front hides from view a structure of joyful gothic style. The present church, built on the site of the first parish on the right bank of the Seine, was started in 1594 century and concluded late in the XVII century. I specially enjoy its south-east flank magnificently in view as one crosses the Pont Louis Philippe into Le Marais and climbs the medieval cobblestones of the Rue des Barres to step down at the other end on to the rue François Miron.

On Wednesdays afternoon and Saturday mornings, a local market comes to life in the Place Baudoyer located to the west of the church. Fishmongers from Normandy, Vietnamese greengrocers and Moroccan and Italian food stands fill  the square breaking the stony monotony of the rectangular space. The market does not have the high reputation of other more established food markets but it has a refreshing unpretentiousness that appeals to me. Further along on the rue François Miron, at number 30, the spicemonger Izrael deploys a full attack on our senses. It is barely possible to move as floors are taken by bags brimming with Tuscan fresh almonds or Turkish pistachios. The shelves collapse under the weight of all corners of the world spices and food ingredients in containers, boxes or bottles. The eye has to zoom in all those detailed objects as the intoxicating aromas of saffron, cinnamon and cardamom fill the air.

    

  










 Not far from this exotic grotto, the Hotel de Beauvais hides behind his unimposing facade a truly stunning work of XVII century town house design. Luckily restored in 2004 after years of neglect (the vicissitudes of the Parisian hotel particuliers through the ages make for good drama), it now houses the Administrative Appeals Court of Paris. Its sumptuous anatomy and layout and are still the object of study in architectural treaties and a glimpse from the street of its unique oval courtyard is worth an expedition from any corner of Paris. Its wooden doors are part of the original construction and the elaborate carvings in the upper section remind us of the truly elevated craftsmanship of the period.

Yet, the deep-seated flavor surrounding St Gervais is entirely medieval. From the rue de Brosse to the rue de Barres and along the rue François Miron, this section of the city is nothing but a whispering memory of its early history.

La Butte aux Cailles

There is a distinctive perfume to this neighborhood. On the face of it, la Butte aux Cailles has no monuments, historic landmarks or the typical Parisian charm that seduces so much. It does not offer any significant ethnic flavor to compensate for the modesty of its appearance. Yet there is a deeper magnetism to these humble streets that soon captures you and stays with you. The name of la rue des Cinq Diamants evokes the romance and adventure of a Jules Verne short story while la rue de la Butte aux Cailles recalls its past, a modest hillock outside Paris purchased by a Pierre Caille in the XVI century

The poetic ring of those names creates already a slice of mystique for a place buried in the midst of a neutral arrondisement of Paris, the 13^th.  And the seduction deepens as you walk these long and narrow streets where you do not have to gaze up to high concrete walls of cement or stone. Housing is no more than one or two story-high, humble and discreet facades are the uniform look of the streets. Bars and small bistrots abound as if the area was teeming with revelers and tourists yet the quietness and reduced human presence add on more seductive contrast to the spirit of the place.

I confess an attraction to those urban enclaves in old and historic cities that seem to be magically cut off from the rest of its organic structure, not so much because of its architectural or historic imprints but rather because they possess an intangible and abstract melancholy that like a magnet feeds more emotions into the soul.