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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